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Greyhound Lines POS Manual Agent Xpiration (MAX)

Greyhound Lines POS Manual Agent Xpiration (MAX). Wade Rugenstein, Director ITS (Greyhound) Steve Brewer, Senior Manager NonStop & DB (Greyhound) John Johansen, Founding Partner (Agile Technologies). Agenda. Introduction Greyhound Business Overview MAX Solution (Business)

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Greyhound Lines POS Manual Agent Xpiration (MAX)

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  1. Greyhound Lines POSManual Agent Xpiration (MAX) Wade Rugenstein, Director ITS (Greyhound) Steve Brewer, Senior Manager NonStop & DB (Greyhound) John Johansen, Founding Partner (Agile Technologies)

  2. Agenda • Introduction • Greyhound Business Overview • MAX Solution (Business) • Greyhound Technology Environment • MAX Solution (Technical) • MAX Demo • Greyhound Tandem Strategy • Lessons Learned • Q&A

  3. Business Overview • Founded in 1914, Greyhound Lines is the largest provider of intercity bus transportation, serving more than 3,100 destinations with 16,000 daily departures across North America moving over 22 million passengers a year. • Greyhound PackageXpress offers same-day and early-next-day package delivery to thousands of destinations. www.greyhound.com www.shipgreyhound.com

  4. Business Overview • Greyhound has changed a lot in the past five years. • Route Restructure “Stop Less Go More” • “Elevate Everything” – Buses, Customer Service, Internet in terminal (Chicago, Milwaukee, Minneapolis) • Technology is key to our future success. • Kiosks • Internet • IVR • Bus Side Scanning

  5. Business Problem • Only 86% of the Greyhound ticket network was online or automated which leads to high back office costs. • Training around a legacy system was difficult and expensive. • The 14% of the manual tickets sold were by agencies that had high employee turnover. • Fraud is high in manual tickets and pricing is not accurate. • Legacy system is somewhat difficult to use and “clunky” with use of function keys and shortcuts

  6. Business Solution • Create a web based Point of Sale to support manual agents. • Simplify the screen flow of Legacy system (TRIPS). • Make it easy to sell tickets to customers requiring little to no training. • Let agents use their own PCs and internet connection. Manual Agent Xpiration (MAX) is BORN!

  7. MAX • Released on 02/01/05. • Uses screen scraping via the CAIL XML Adapter. • Written in Java. • Greyhound brought in Agile Technologies to do the development of the solution based on their experience in Tandem and system solutions.

  8. Technical Environment • Three S74000 servers • 4GB Memory per Processor (1970-D) • U.S. Production (\PRD1) - 6 Processors • Canadian Production (\PRD2) - 4 Processors • Development (\DEV) - 2 Processors • Operating System - G06.21 • Application - Pathway • Database - Enscribe, SQL/MP & RDF • JRE - NSJ 4

  9. HTTP/J2EE Environment HTTP • Operating System – IBM AIX 5.2 • Application – IBM HTTP • Database - None J2EE • Operating System - IBM AIX 5.2 • Application - IBM WebSphere Application Server • Database - None

  10. Technical Architecture – Design Goals • Simple, functional presentation layer • Extensible TRIPS communication layer • Loose coupling between the presentation layer and the TRIPS communication layer • Minimal new or duplicated business logic in the web application

  11. Technical Architecture – Logical Layers

  12. Technical Architecture – Technologies • J2EE platform using Servlets and JSPs • The presentation tier uses the open source MVC framework Struts. • Deployed to Greyhound’s production WebSphere application servers on AIX.

  13. Technical Architecture – XML Driven State Machine • Communication with TRIPS is managed by an XML-driven state machine which keeps track of where in the TRIPS application the system is at any point in time. • For each screen navigated by MAX, the XML file records the unique pieces of text that allow the state machine to identify the screen, the list of screens which can be accessed from this one, the error messages that may appear on this screen, and the keystrokes required to submit the information entered on this screen or to “back up” to the previous screen. • TRIPS error messages are detected by the comm library and thrown to the presentation layer as standard Java exceptions.

  14. MAX Today • Supports well over 150 agents with multi-million dollars in tickets sales… • Rel 2.0 09/01/05 with new functionality.. • GLI continues to leverage the MAX library (CAIL XML) to handle connections to TRIPS. • 98% Automated as of 12/01/05… • DEMO

  15. GLI Nonstop Strategy MAX • Migrate from WebSphere to WebLogic • Migrate from AIX to Linux or OSS General • More Java, less COBOL, some C, no TAL • More SQL/MX • Evaluate JBOSS on OSS • Evaluate Apache on OSS • Have one way to get at the Tandem vs. ten ways

  16. Lessons Learned • Screen Scraping through CAIL/Java performs!! Screen transitions from 1 to 3 seconds (scraping up to ten screens). • Agile Technologies and CAIL were strong partners which allowed us to go to production in less than six months. • Technical solution continues to be sound.. • Phased approach to delivery was the key to our success. www.agiletech.com (John Johansen) www.cail.com (Ron Thompson)

  17. Q&A Thanks for listening….

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