(The following story by Bob Brewin appeared on the ComputerWorld website on January 26.)
FRAMINGHAM, Mass. — Any casual shipper can tap into a FedEx or UPS Web site and determine the location of even the smallest of packages. But until recently, The Burlington Northern and Santa Fe Railway Co. (BNSF) tracked its trains the old-fashioned way, through two-way voice radios located in every locomotive cab.
Train crews dropped off cars and then radioed that information back to a dispatcher at BNSF’s high-tech network operations center at the railroad’s headquarters in Fort Worth, Texas. The dispatchers would then have to type these reports into DB2 databases running on IBM mainframe computers.
Though BNSF could communicate with train crews over engine-cab radios hooked into a private microwave system that spanned 14,000 miles in 27 states, the system provided “static information,” according to John Hicks, BNSF’s director of unified messaging. Crews would start their day with written work orders and turn them in at the end of the day — with periodic calls to report cars dropped off or picked up. Jeff Campbell, BNSF’s CIO, viewed this approach as outdated, cumbersome and incapable of meeting the demands of customers and railroad management for near-real-time data. Last year, BNSF launched a project to automatically turn those voice radio calls into data capable of integration into the company’s computer systems.
Campbell says BNSF decided to use its voice radios as the interface to an interactive voice response system and tapped ScanSoft Inc. in Peabody, Mass., to provide it with speech-recognition software. ScanSoft had never integrated IVR with a radio system before, and the company found it a challenge, said Rob Kassel, ScanSoft’s senior product manager for network speech.
That’s because two-way radio systems have lower fidelity than the phone lines traditionally used with IVR. The fidelity problem was compounded by the noisy environment of a locomotive cab, Kassel adds. ScanSoft built the BNSF IVR application on its SpeechWorks software and added noise filters. ScanSoft also sampled engineer radio calls to teach the software to recognize speech generated in such a noisy environment.
Although this is an unusual application of an IVR, Dan Miller, an analyst at Zelos Group Inc. in San Francisco, says radio-to-data interfaces are the next frontier for IVR systems. There’s a “huge growth potential” within many industries, including trucking, utilities and field service fleet firms, he says.
Once ScanSoft completed its work, Campbell says, BNSF integrated the SpeechWorks software with an IVR platform from Intervoice Inc. in Dallas and a digital radio interface from Telex Communications Inc. in Burnsville, Minn. Beth Bonjour, assistant vice president of technology at BNSF, says the railroad then wrote the middleware to integrate what the company calls the Radio Telephony Interface (RTI) into its systems.
Dispatchers at BNSF’s network operations center control the RTI through a phone icon on their screens, Hicks says. This shows all the radio frequencies as well as cell phone and landline connections. When a train crew calls in, the dispatcher clicks on the appropriate link, and the RTI takes the crew through an interactive audio menu with prompts for information such as car number and location.
BNSF rolled out the RTI in its Fort Worth division last year and plans to take it systemwide by 2005, starting with its Gulf and East Texas divisions this year, Campbell says. He declines to break out the cost of the RTI but says BNSF’s IT budget will hit $274 million this year, up $1.5 million from 2003.
The result, Hicks says, is a system that automatically integrates radio calls with back-end systems, providing BNSF with a level of visibility into its trains and individual cars it never had before. Campbell says this “improves customer satisfaction” by allowing BNSF to update its Transportation Support System in near real time. The RTI allows BNSF to provide customers with more frequent information on car moves “and closer expected time of arrival,” Campbell says.