Global Logistics and Supply Chain Strategies - July 2008 - (Page 8)

Service Is ‘Sterling’ and Costs Are Lower at Crowley Maritime Editorial Director Jean V. Murphy A conversation with Tom Sheridan, manager of information technology at Crowley Maritime, Jacksonville, Fla. Cr owley Maritime Corp. is a family- and employee-owned company that provides diversified transportation, logistics and emergency response services in domestic and international markets. To better manage its six divisions and automate business-to-business communications, the company recently implemented the Gentran Integration Suite (GIS) from Sterling Commerce, a division of AT&T based in Columbus, Ohio. Q: How did you become involved with this software implementation project at Crowley? Sheridan: I joined Crowley in the early ‘90s as a pricing analyst. I had been recruited after Crowley purchased a solution from my previous employer, a company called DXI, which had developed software to automate tariff filings in the shipping industry. DXI had a contract with the Federal Maritime Commission and also developed a product for the commercial market, for which Crowley was the first customer. When I joined the company, I helped move all of the old, voluminous paper tariffs that outlined all the rates and commodities that were shipped onto an electronic database. After that, I worked as a pricing analyst for about six years. Then I became manager of tariff publishing, where I managed all the filing of contracts and open tariffs, which are rates that apply to anyone that doesn’t have a contract. In 2000 I moved into the IT department to manage application services, pretty much dedicated to the DXI software and Crowley’s mainframe. Since then I have managed application development internally, mostly for our mainframe system but including some Windowsbased applications. We probably have about 100 different applications internally to support transactions. These range from major applications, like our reservations system for all of our bookings, to little niche applications that are only used by one or two people in the company to do a specific job. So I naturally was involved when we decided to implement the Gentran Integration Suite. Q: What were the “pain points” that drove the decision to acquire GIS? Sheridan: Over the last 10 years, Crowley has seen a large increase in EDI [electronic data interchange] traffic with our customers and, in some cases, our vendors. From 2000 to 2005, we tripled or quadrupled our EDI volume. Since most of that traffic went through a value-added network or VAN, our EDI-related costs also tripled or quadrupled. So one of our objectives was to communicate directly with our customers without going through the VAN service. GIS allowed us to do that, which was a big thing. In fact, by connecting directly with our top 10 partners in terms of volume, we were able to save $15,000 to $16,000 a month in VAN costs alone. So our big push initially was to get some of the big railroads and other big customers, which together represented a lot of EDI traffic, off of the mainframe so we could route messages directly to them instead of going through the VAN. We had been using the Gentran EDI translator from Sterling Commerce internally, but it was totally a mainframe-based product. It worked great for mainframe applications. But then we started bringing in applications like DXI, which is Unixbased, and other applications that ran on non-mainframe platforms. The question became, in these cases, what do we use as an EDI translator? Did we really want to take these applications to the mainframe just to translate and send out EDI? Also, there was a move by our management around that time to get rid of the mainframe altogether, which presented another dilemma since the mainframe was our only translator for moving EDI data. In the end, we felt that we needed a solution that was independent of all platforms and that would allow all different platforms to send data to a centralized system, where we could standardize our data archives and data history. That also would enable us to track our EDI documents a lot better. We looked at several different solutions and 10 JULY 2008

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Global Logistics and Supply Chain Strategies - July 2008 Contents Editorial GL&SCS Exclusive Fastforward Up Front Introduction Menlo Worldwide & Electrolux PathGuide Technologies & Tile City Servigistics & Juniper Networks Transplace & Rock-Tenn ClearOrbit & Blue Bell Creameries Cadec Global & Northwest Food Products Transportation CaseStack & Greystar Products NGC & Parigi Group Supply Chain Consultants & Constar TransGroup Worldwide & Surgiquip Terra Technology & Campbell Soup Baxter Planning Systems & SGI Cadre Technologies & Kansas City SmartPort TransportGistics & FMC Technologies DSC Logistics & Tree of Life FORTE & Vera Bradley Penske Logistics & Eaton Cardinal Logistics & Weyerhaeuser JPMorgan & Black & Decker Opinion Opinion Industry Voices

Global Logistics and Supply Chain Strategies - July 2008

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