VIA Rail Canada Streamlines Operations With FOCUS

Snapshot

Organization VIA Rail Canada

Profile Passenger transportation

Headquarters Montreal, Quebec, Canada

The Challenge To improve the accuracy and efficiency of the processes for tracking and reporting on fuel consumption

Results A tracking and reporting system that monitors fuel consumption and analyzes historical data to devise scenarios to reduce fuel use

Information Builders Solution FOCUS for MVS (FOCUS for S/390), Mainframe FOCUS database

VIA Rail Canada, an independent Crown Corporation headquartered in Montreal, boasts one of the best-managed, best-performing passenger railroads in North America. With the help of information technology, the transportation company has condensed administration and management staff by 60 percent, reduced annual operating expenses by $100 million, and increased annual revenues by $35 million – without cutting a single service.

 

It all began in 1992, when the passenger rail service faced tough cuts in government funding. This led corporate officers to renew their efforts to deliver cost-effective, responsible service to the public. FOCUS served as the technology platform for creating a system that improves the collection, coordination, and reporting of data on the vast quantities of fuel used by VIA Rail locomotives.

 

Tracking Fuel Consumption

With nearly 3,000 employees, VIA Rail runs 430 trains per week, carrying 3.8 million passengers over 14,000 kilometers of track each year. The railroad serves some 450 Canadian communities, constituting a network stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and from the Great Lakes to Hudson Bay. "Fuel consumption is naturally a major expense of our railroad operations," says Frank Ramundo, director of technical services for VIA Rail. "The need for accurate and timely reporting on fuel usage is extremely important to us."

 

Fuel consumption is based on the number of cars pulled and the tonnage hauled, multiplied by the distance traveled. The amount of fuel in every locomotive is measured before each departure and upon each arrival. The difference is tabulated and recorded as the amount of fuel used. Statistics are generated as the historical data is compiled, and deviations from this data for a given amount of traffic are flagged and reported to managers and operators.

 

In the past, the railroad relied on a manual process of collecting and entering fuel data. Hard-copy reports were gathered from all the different regions and the pertinent information was then manually entered into spreadsheets. "It was a very loose system, prone to many discrepancies in the reporting process," Ramundo recalls. "We were only able to get fuel usage reports once a year, and these often showed inaccuracies between the price we owed for fuel compared with the fuel we had actually used."

 

In addition, the outmoded system – called FUEL – employed nine full-time people just to coordinate, collect, and enter the data, Ramundo says. "We needed a better, faster, and more automated way to manage the whole fuel-usage system. And we had to construct it using our prevailing IT environment."

 

A Higher-Octane FUEL

VIA Rail, is a longtime user of Information Builders' products. So when the company's operations people in Montreal asked analysts in the IT group how to create a more effective fuel-usage system, they recommended FOCUS for the job. "I knew FOCUS could give them a faster, more responsive system without having to add costly technology," says Jacques D'Amours, a systems analyst in the IT Group. "I suggested a mainframe-based FOCUS database from which they could extract many types of reports on fuel usage, in any form they wished."

 

Because of necessary budget constraints, IT managers at VIA Rail were tasked with maintaining existing technology while improving information processing efficiency – all with less resources and an increased workload. D'Amours set about building a FOCUS database from ASCII, dBASE, and Lotus spreadsheet data. His aim was to centralize the collection and storage of fuel data into a FOCUS database so that IT staff throughout the enterprise could quickly and easily create ad hoc reports. "This capability was, in itself, a giant step forward in efficiency," says D'Amours. "In the past, merely generating reports was a monumental task, heavily taxing IT resources while providing only partial information to those who needed it."

 

In addition, the new FOCUS-based system gave managers and operators a new way of keeping track of the money due to suppliers, via Electronic Data Interchange (EDI). "Because FOCUS allows for multiple criteria selection, reporting from a FOCUS application for billing purposes was easy to accomplish," relates Philippe Girard, VIA Rail's EDI specialist. "Virtually all transactions with fuel suppliers are now done electronically."

 

Fuel information comes into the Montreal data center directly across fiber-optic lines from the three main fuel reservoirs located in Toronto, Winnipeg, and Montreal. Data on fuel deliveries, whether from the reservoirs or directly from suppliers, is captured through EDI and loaded directly into FOCUS tables, so that fuel usage and price can be immediately tabulated and compared. Invoices from seven different suppliers are transferred directly to the Accounts Payable department for immediate payment.

 

"The FUEL system is now doing what it was meant to do all along," says Ramundo. "In fact, I can't remember a single call coming in on some big issue relating to fuel. Users now have access to all the information they need on a daily basis. The whole operation is far more responsive than it was in the past. We have created a very stable system."

 

Protecting the Environment

Because the new FUEL system is so highly responsive and allows monitoring of fuel consumption on a daily basis, VIA Rail can detect fuel leaks at reservoirs by the simple method of noting variances in fuel levels compared with fuel used. "We can make our reports to the government's environmental agency with a great deal more confidence now," Ramundo comments. "Detecting a leak physically might be problematic because it could be hidden, but any substantial drop in fuel levels not accounted for in fuel taken from a reservoir could signal a leak, or perhaps a theft. In either case, with the new FUEL system, we'll know about it right away."

 

Of course, the new FOCUS-based FUEL system allows for more than just monitoring fuel consumption. It also gives VIA Rail a basis for proactive testing of best-practice fuel conservation methods that directly impact its operations. With an accurate method for monitoring fuel consumption, VIA Rail can formulate scenarios that can actually save fuel. For example, analysts can use FOCUS to generate reports comparing whether one or two locomotives would be more efficient for a particular run. "This was an unexpected value of the new system," Ramundo says. "Our operations people are ecstatic about it. With FOCUS, we can not only monitor fuel consumption, but analyze historical data to better understand how we can reduce fuel use."

 

For Ramundo, FOCUS has not only met the need for a more efficient system, but also made the whole monitoring process far less expensive. "We no longer need to have even a single person dedicated to tracking fuel consumption," he declares. "The only staff involvement now is in creating special reports on statistical information and running fuel consumption test scenarios. FOCUS has made the whole process automatic."