Case Study at a Glance
- Client: National freight carrier
- Industry: Transportation
- Size: Corporate with more than 10,000 employees
- Main Digital Services: Robotics Process Automation
- Summary: Leaders of a national, private freight carrier desired to use automation to keep track of their fleet of shipping vehicles and equipment.
Overview
A national, private freight carrier found their fleet of shipping equipment was not being tracked accurately. Main Digital’s robotic process automation (RPA) experts were brought in to design an RPA application to address this need by retrieving real-time tracking data and updating their system of record, greatly improving the client’s operational efficiency.
Opportunity
A national, private freight carrier moves thousands of orders daily. As this freight is moved around the country with a fleet of equipment, it is imperative that they maintain a reliable record system to track the locations of this equipment.
The client found their system of record, indicating the known location of all equipment, regularly contained various inaccuracies. The client utilizes a tracking system from an external vendor to get real-time location data, but the task of reconciling the two sources manually and maintaining it consistently would be monumental. The client asked Main Digital for help solving this problem with robotic process automation. The solution would leverage the tracking data to perform daily reconciliation with the system of record.
Main Digital Solution
The Approach
Equipment tracking data would be provided to an automated process, which would then translate the real-time GPS coordinates of the equipment into a known location at a client site and update the source of truth indicating the current terminal where the equipment resides. Given that this equipment is constantly in motion, this process would be highly time-sensitive. The data and automation scheduling would have to be tightly synchronized to ensure the integrity of the actions.
The Process
Main Digital’s expert team met with the client’s team of subject matter experts to review the available equipment tracking data and formulate a plan to reconcile it and translate it into known terminal locations. Once these decisions were made by the automations logic engine, it would then log into the system of record and update the equipment location. Together, both teams designed a hierarchical set of logic rules to dictate which assets would be updated in the system.
One challenge presented was the efficient sourcing of tracking data from the vendor. While a pull method would guarantee that the automation is fetching accurate real-time data, there was no direct method in place for the automation to extract the data. Building that into the automation was an option, but the project team ultimately decided against it as it would introduce another level of complexity.
Instead, the decision was to schedule reports from the system, which would be in the form of emails with a CSV attachment of the tracking data. The automation would turn on at intervals scheduled to synchronize with the email reports. To account for inconsistencies in email delivery times and maintain efficiency, the automation was built to turn on and listen for emails, discarding anything sent more than an hour previous.
With all this data sourcing in place, Main Digital’s team automated the steps of logging in to the system of record and updating equipment locations. As the automation was moved to the production environment and run, the team and the stakeholders met regularly to review and validate its updates. Where caveats to the update logic were identified, the automation was fine-tuned to reflect it, ensuring final data integrity.
The Outcome
Upon completion, the automation is now scheduled to run three times daily, with those times carefully selected to optimize the tracking of movements to when they are most needed. The stability of the update process allows for a perfect success rate on all update attempts.
Also, the rate of updates the automation has been asked to make has declined steadily since it went live. The initial run updated the location of roughly 20% of the eligible fleet. Subsequent daily activity yielded approximately a 5% update rate, which has continued to fall to 4% over the lifetime of the automation. This indicates that the location data in the system of record continues to increase in accuracy over time. The automation’s contribution to data integrity reduces errors in the system which helps to isolate outliers that can then be reconciled by humans.
Lastly, this is a process that was designed with the capability to address the enterprise’s entire fleet of equipment. It is currently operating on only a subset defined in the logic engine, but the modular design of the engine allows it to be opened to perform much more work in the future. Main Digital’s continuous engagement with the client means that these improvements are always evolving and leading to new ways to improve their business.