IBM i application development, support and maintenance

How we’ve worked with DB Schenker to support their IBM i applications

• Long standing relationship developing, supporting and maintaining business-critical IBM i applications for DB Schenker
• Applications processing millions of transport orders per year internationally
• Integrations with numerous third-party applications.

As one of the world’s largest transportation and logistics service providers, travel anywhere and you are bound to see a truck, trailer, or container bearing the DB Schenker name.

DB Schenker has over 91,000 employees in 2,000 offices in 130 countries and manages all the DB Group’s transport and logistics activities.

It has over 720 locations across 36 countries in Europe alone. Their extensive transportation network guarantees daily departures to and from Europe for in excess of 95 million shipments per year.

Proximity has had a long standing, close working relationship over many years with DB Schenker.

A team with extensive experience of logistics has been providing development, support and maintenance services to their European land transport operations. The team collaborates with DB Schenker to design, develop and maintain a number of core business-critical applications.

These applications all have the primary aim of:

• Optimising operations across the business
• Improving efficiency to reduce costs and maximise profits
• Providing value added services for their customers, many of which are web-based and provide access on PC, tablet or smartphone
• Integrating with third-party systems, including customs clearance applications, iDevio Maps, DPS
• RouteLogix, Paragon Routing and SAP enterprise resource planning (ERP) system for financial and logistics management.

International transport management system (ITMS)

Focused on transport management across Europe, DB Schenker’s International Transport Management System covers equipment and freight management via rail, road and ferries.

A central system, iTMS is fed from multiple transport management systems and deals with over four and a half million transport orders per year. Amongst other sophisticated, feature-rich functionality, iTMS provides graphical load planning, route planning and interfaces with a smartphone driver app.

This particular application was recently awarded DB Schenker’s internal ‘European Innovation Award’ which is an annual design competition that aims to drive improvements in processes and products.

CIEL transport & warehouse management system

A multi-faceted platform, CIEL is used by DB Schenker to plan and manage transportation and warehousing within its contract logistics operations across Europe.

With over 3,500 DB Schenker users, the application handles in excess of four million shipments per year.

e Services for European land transport

Proximity has collaborated with DB Schenker to design and develop a host of customer and internal portals and tools as part of a Europe-wide consignment track and trace data warehouse. These projects provide customers with the opportunity to access, monitor and manage various aspects of their own operations with DB Schenker bringing a greater level of transparency and control. Internal teams are able to monitor performance of cross-border and domestic business in all countries.

• Single sign on portal for customers and internal team members to access all European land transport eService tools
• Approximately 35,000 DB Schenker customers have access to European land transport eService tools
• Customers are able to follow the entire transport chain from start to final electronic proof of delivery. Track and trace capabilities for over 340,000 consignments per day for the entire European land transport operation
• European equipment database which enables access to information at unit, truck, trip and order level
• Emissions monitoring and management to minimise the impact of DB Schenker operations on the environment
• eBooking deals with hundreds of thousands of customer orders per year
• Linehaul scheduling portal to manage movement of cargo between different DB Schenker terminals
• Individual KPI delivery performance reporting and monitoring
• Alerts sent to customers and internal teams of delays, missing events and associated reasons
• A number of these customer and internal portals and tools run on IBM WebSphere application servers hosted on UNIX.

Business Intelligence

With global operations of the size of DB Schenker it is perhaps unsurprising that this produces a vast quantity of data. Proximity manages the storage of data from a diverse range of sources and platforms including Windows, Citrix, VMWare, Oracle, and various UNIX/Linux-based systems.

In order to interrogate and analyse information from across DB Schenker, Proximity applications facilitate the extraction of data that is fed into business intelligence (BI) tool, QlikView.

QlikView then gives users and decision makers instant access to relevant information, without needing to involve that country’s IT department in producing reports.