Union Pacific Railroad USA Business Analysis
Mission:
To be the largest railroad network in the entire United States.
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Pacific Union is confident to be a company where: our customers want our services, our employees are proud to work, and shareholder value is created.
Values:
• Quality.
• Service.
• New.
• Distribution network.
• Technology.
goals
• Achieve growth in the United States of the transportation network.
• Satisfy our consumers by providing high quality services and responsibility.
• Obtain a satisfactory profit margin and be a profitable company.
• Having a reliable network to meet the needs of our clients in a timely manner.
• Possess a standard technological platform in all its divisions, branches and departments.
• Decentralize its technological systems.
External factors
1. Economic characteristics of the industry?
Union Pacific Corporation is one of the leading transportation companies in America. Its main operating company, Union pacific railroad, is the largest railroad in North America, covering 23 states across two-thirds of the United States. Covering the entire west coast and the gulf coast, it provides service east through its four major entrances in Chicago, St. Louis, Memphis, and New Orleans. In addition, the Pacific Union is the only railroad to serve the six entrances of Mexico.
Between 1984 and 1993, it had 21,000 employees, 20,000 rail miles, 3,000 locomotives and was considered one of the leading industries in the use and development of information technology.
The railroad industry is characterized by a large number of business mergers, bankruptcies, and large investments of money. It was also considered in the 69's as one of the pillars of the American economy.
2. Driving Forces
• The niche to be exploited should target the general population.
• The consumer's taste is variable and the characteristics by which a client requests the services of one company instead of another are basically aimed at quality of service and punctuality rather than price.
• The advancement of new transportation technologies, an example of this was the fact that after the Second World War, when large investments in highways began, the development and commercialization of automobiles increased and the airline industry lowered its prices. costs; A clear decline was observed in the railroad industry, denoting that the golden age of trains had ended, mergers increased and the market diversified in other areas.
• The size of the company and the extensive geographical area that it encompasses.
• The advancement of new information technologies, and their impact on the business process of railway companies.
3. Competitive Forces
Four. Competitors
Atchison Topeka & Santa Fe, Canadian Pacific Ltd, Norfolk Southerm Corporation, Burlington Northem Inc, Conrail Inc, Santa Fe Pacific Corporation, Canadian National Railway Co, CSX Corporation, Southerm Pacific Transportation.
5. Critical Success Factors
• Quality Performance: Basically linked to key aspects of security and punctuality.
• Reputation and image: it is a recognized brand, having a history of over 100 years of acceptance in its field.
• Technological Skills: its economic activity requires precise monitoring of its routes, finances and marketing, using electronic information systems for data collection.
• Distribution Network: it has a high penetration capacity in the Market, as we find 20,000 miles of rails, stations and branches throughout the length and breadth of the country.
• Capacity for Innovation: due to the close relationship that exists with consumers, tastes and preferences are known, in order to specify the product with suppliers.
• Customer Services: High attention based on esteem and trust with the consumer through employees and punctuality philosophies.
SWOT Internal Factors
One of the triggering points of all this great process of technological transformation of the UPRR, was the merger between the UP and the Missouri Pacific in 1982, all this significantly increased the UP's information systems. Because the Missouri Pacific since 1961 was the first company in the industry to acquire a solid base of computers and information processing, it also had one of the most advanced operations control systems in the industry called TCS "Transportation Control System ”Which by 1969 was working on a mainframe-based system and was in charge of monitoring the railways, where they were and where they were going; in this way the UP had to adapt in some way to the way of doing things in the Missouri Pacific.
There were three groups of information technology, Information Systems: It was responsible for the development and maintenance of the financial and administrative systems. Data Centers Group: it was the group responsible for the management and maintenance of data, both administrative and support, and was responsible for keeping the systems online 24 hours a day, this group not only managed the data of the UP but also of other subsidiaries.. And the Telecommunications group: Responsible for all the telecommunications of the corporation, included microwave links, radio, communications between railways, fiber optic network, etc.
The formation of the Union Pacific Technologies (UPT) in 1987, had the purpose of providing IT services for the Union Pacific Corporation as the number of subsidiaries grew, especially in cases like these where the possibility of economies of scale allowed everything related to IT research and development. The main point taken in mind was the growth and profitability of the company. There were several parallel businesses, as was the case of lending data management to other smaller railroad branches with TCS running on UPRR mainframes. And a very particular case was the translation of the TCS into Spanish when access to the border with Mexico was obtained. From this initiative came a system called "WatchDog" that sought monitoring but in this almost of packages, parcels and other similar.
The largest departments of the UPRR were Operating, Marketing & Sales and Finance; each of these departments owned small IT units, and had independent application developers for each of them; the biggest development tool was a fourth generation language called FOCUS; the Operations department were the ones with the largest IT investment; They had advanced applications; they had their own locomotive management system with operating agendas for each of the 3,000 of them; the engineering manager “Perhaps” developed a series of applications for all maintenance of the railway infrastructure assisted by UPT, one of them was to capture the entire train network in a DB2 database and periodically updated;likewise through a graphic application in Omaha it was possible to visualize where the railroads were. This department invested quite a bit of money in local area networks and OS / 2 based workstations.
The Marketing and Sales department worked to capture electronic data, to attract new customers, more than all focused on price data to make day-to-day decisions, the use of technology was extensive, and updating the data was a mainstay. Jim Shattuck commented on the need for a decision support system; they had a lot of data but do not have enough personnel in the IT department to analyze it, they have used FOCUS for years but consider that this whole process can be simpler.
The Finance department, worked with a system developed in the mid-80s, had a small IT development department which provided tools to extract and remove reports on everything related to finance from the IMS-based Server (Information Management System).) using FOCUS. This application allowed them to interact with the predefined requirements in the menus.
The factors that motivated the strategy to be followed by UPRR in terms of its T & SI's, was basically to define the needs of the railroads information systems and the methods to carry them out. It was determined that there were too structured applications, each functional area had information systems adjusted to serve their own needs, there was a considerable difference to the data that each user needed. This project was called TCS 2000.
There were two essential elements that can be classified as general objectives of said strategy: The adoption of standard systems on the one hand, the adoption of methodologies to centralize the applications developed. And likewise, the second objective was to move from a system based on a centralized mainframe to client-server platforms.
As the TCS 2000 project was carried out, a new number of applications were emerging, the Marketing department focused on capturing information to establish the ticket prices; On the other hand, the engineering department was implementing the LANs with OS / 2 workstations operating systems to provide access to the mainframe databases. UPT began developing a series of applications under the client-server platform in the first step with OS / 2 and DB2 as the server database. On the other hand, the "WatchDog" system also migrated, it ran on a UNCR-based NCR server and DOS and Windows workstations, this system was the first Windows / UNIX application.
The decision to go to the client server was controversial within the organization: while proponents noted that the rapid proliferation of development software use in the client-server world, the scalability of new architectures, and favorable price trends and perfonmance. There were cons accentuated the lack of standards, the lack of people with experience and not understanding new technologies - both inside and outside the organization - and the persistent difficulty in measuring the advantages of a more flexible architecture. A manager put it this way: The lack of justification for this thing offends me. I am the one who has had to use almost any kind of equipment, and we are going to continue and we are spending many millions, changing environments not due to access to information,but because it is a competitive direction and due to the tools of productivity. It is essentially a leap of faith.
When Joyce Wrenn when she took over as CIO, she reviewed the budgets and the first thing she did was reduce investment in mainframe architecture; in the same way I address the lack of standards DOS / Windows was established as the standards with UNIX as the server platform, the people in the department did not understand why such an expensive platform had to be used to maintain office applications; At this point it is evident that organizational culture from a technological point of view is a fundamental pillar in the company's transition to a client-server platform. Joyce Wrenn's decision was correct under the ideals he was working on, however, and as I mentioned earlier, the technological culture barrier was not easy to overcome;In this sense, the largest investment that should have been made is in a communication strategy for all the personnel of the corporation, where the advantages of a client-server transition are denoted. Likewise, an initial information gathering regarding the preparation of the personnel, future needs (after the transition), and the sufficiency of personnel to carry out the transition would have been ideal to be taken into account.and sufficiency of personnel to carry out the transition would have been ideal to be taken into account.and sufficiency of personnel to carry out the transition would have been ideal to be taken into account.
In any organization, communication is even more important when the vertebra of the business is being touched, as is the technological platform that is the sustenance of all UP operations; if you intend to implement a transition of this type overnight without considering personnel; perhaps it can be achieved but risking implementation time that would later translate into money.
Once the client-server transition is established; the operations department did not appreciate switching to a DOS and Windows platform, as a result they continued to work on OS / 2 platforms; This conflict was basically resolved by demonstrating the potential of standardized development tools through the hiring of some programmers, who designed applications and allowed staff to learn a little about the programming of graphical interfaces. An example of this was the EADS application that allowed data to be downloaded from the servers and the route maps of each railway to be displayed directly, the maintenance activities and individual reports of each supervisor could be observed.
Marketing and Sales, I work with Metaphor, a commercial tool that allowed the analysis of the data that ran on UNIX and OS / 2; likewise, vendors' workstations ran this application, including small offices connected via satellite, which considerably increased the sales process.
An architecture and a type of client application remote data management server were observed, since the client was practically based on running an application to capture the data and its corresponding screen presentation. This application was mostly programmed in Visual Basic on the client; unlike the type of architecture and applications that existed before the migration to the client server, which basically consisted of running an application programmed mostly in fourth generation language called FOCUS on the mainframe, which managed the data and where the workstation It was practically limited to being the window where the requested information was displayed.
Basically Joyce Wrenn's strategy was based on a little faith and giving workers a little independence; integration has a cost and must be assumed; the benefits will not be seen if one does not take risks, and when taking risks one encounters various obstacles that previously seemed invisible but are solvable and are part of the learning and barriers that one encounters in life, in the same way I consider that the fact that Joyce Wrenn came from a similar process in American Airlines, it could also be a trigger for the decisions made, also that this new platform was prevailing as a fashion within the technological structure and as it happens with management models, it also happens in the technological models,But one thing you can be sure of is that the client server base will persist for several more years, which can attest that it was a decision that had to be made at some point. As in any transformation process, there are always discomforts, but the important thing is to know how to handle and handle such situations.
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