Getting right on track with an Enterprise Integration Platform

Having emerged from a period of significant investment and network growth, ARTC’s strategic focus now is to bring more freight onto rail through a business transformation strategy.

Putting customers at the centre, the aim is to continue the transformation into a company that is committed to customer success in order to realise the potential created by the investment phase. As part of this overarching business transformation strategy, ARTC endorsed a Digital Strategy that included a project known as Strengthening The Core (STC). The end goal of STC is to:

ARTC already had an inhouse solution that would allow them to read these weights and use the data as required. However, this solution was not hosted in the cloud and wasn’t designed to allow the accurate capture of weights across all weighbridges. This was impacting their customers, so ARTC chose to move to an Enterprise Integration Platform, which would allow a more streamlined process and importantly, offer consistently accurate data.

ARTC developed an architecture design and blueprint for the new platform and asked Fujitsu to implement this.

We needed to determine how to get this data to the right people at the right time. As a result, they designed and built a series of RESTful APIs using Azure Function Apps (hosted in Azure API Management).

These APIs give both internal and external consumers a convenient way to access their data. By using the tags provided on individual wagons, this system also ensures that the data is secure and that customers can only access their own data.

By moving from their legacy in-house solution to an Enterprise Integration Platform, ARTC has made their data more accessible across the companies that require
it and are now showing them real-time data from the weighbridges. This allows for decisions to be made accurately and efficiently, leading to a more reliable
network for all involved.

Having the solution hosted in Azure results in less maintenance and down time and has meant that any infrastructure issues are resolved in line with SLAs
provided by Microsoft.

Through this digital transformation, ARTC now have a more reliable service for their customers.

ARTC have re-engaged Fujitsu to assist them with the next step of their digital transformation. A solution being built that leverages the work already produced to allow ARTC to better maintain and monitor their network of weighbridges via a mobile phone or other device. This is now underway and will be another great step in the strengthening the core strategy.