INTRODUCTION
CN is the only railroad in North America to cross the continent east - west and north – south, serving ports on the Atlantic, Pacific and Gulf coasts. Through marketing alliances with other railroads, CN customers have access to all three NAFTA nations.
CN’s revenues are derived from transporting a wide variety of freight commodities such as petrochemicals, grain, fertilizers, coal, metals, minerals, as well as forest and automotive products. Over the years the number of shipments has grown, as had the amounts of paper documentation related to invoicing and payments.
BUSINESS CHALLENGES
CN’s revenue management and technical teams needed to offer a web based integrated document image retrieval system for Chargeable Service invoices for customers and employees. The main challenge faced by Microdea was integrating Synergize to the CN mainframe and the DB2 infrastructure used for the eBill website.
SOLUTION
After a competitive analysis, CN chose Synergize, Microdea’s state of the art document management solution, as a cost-effective way to achieve their objectives.
Microdea’s team worked closely with CN from conception to completion, participating in planning, design process mapping, testing, training and the live rollout. Ongoing communication, ability to make changes and enhancements as required was key to the success of the project. Microdea successfully met the tight timeline of the eBill Chargeable Services “go live” date.
CN’s eBill and Synergize created an integrated document image retrieval system for Chargeable Service invoices. Customers have the option of quickly viewing invoices and related documentation for services such as demurrage and detention, prior to selecting the online payment options. Authorized customers can also easily log on to the CN website to enter, review or track their shipments to destination.
RESULTS
On a daily basis invoices and backup documents are uploaded and indexed into a Synergize repository, which in turn provides customers and employees with an effortless document retrieval option.
Due to eBill’s Synergize component, customers can now go directly to the website and see their invoices along with any backup documentation which may be required to process payments.
Two cost saving measures quickly became apparent: there were fewer customer inquiry calls and quicker payment processing. CN employees also save valuable time not having to wait for overnight document prints or spend time manually faxing invoices to customers. Instead with Synergize, the documents are just a “click” away.
“Revenue Management and Chargeable Services employees really enjoy working with Synergize. It is fast, reliable and easy to learn. The windows GUI based retrieval screens practically have no learning curve,” says C. Anderson, Officer of Development for the Business Integration Department.
NEXT STEPS
Two departments within CN are currently using Synergize. Due to its success, and the positive feedback from the end user community, other CN departments are also reviewing the benefits of implementing Synergize for documentation management and handling.