Travel and Transportation: Doing great things with Oracle Technology

Schneider National Implements Next-Generation IT Infrastructure to Continue Leadership in Transportation and Logistics Industry

Oracle Customer:Schneider National, Inc.
Location:  Green Bay, Wisconsin
Industry:Travel and Transportation
Employees:  18,000
Annual Revenue:  $1 to $5 Billion

Schneider National, Inc., a leading provider of truckload, logistics, and intermodal services, serves more than two-thirds of the FORTUNE 500 companies. Its customers rely on Schneider National’s transportation and logistics solutions to transport their products reliably, cost-effectively, and safely to markets in 28 countries.

Challenges

• Create a next-generation IT platform to efficiently and consistently manage the quote-to-cash process across the company’s various business units and support long-term growth objectives
• Improve ability to provide drivers, customers, and business partners with convenient access to the information and services they need
• Improve back-office processes to support greater operational efficiency and profitability

Schneider's Online Tools Today: Schneider's online tools provide customers, transportation service providers and corporate suppliers with a secure environment to conduct their freight management needs. These tools will help access information that will reduce costs and improve  visibility to information to better serve their customers. Track loads and retrieve documents, all with the click of a mouse. More than 2,000 Schneider Customers use the online tools to manage their transportation. Customer Capabilities Access to information specific to services and information available to their customers Easy and timely tracking of extensive information regarding their orders Ability to set customized order tracking searches that can be run with the click of a mouse at their convenience Access to view, print, email and fax order related documents Request and receive spot quote pricing Transportation Service Provider Capabilities Access to information specific to services and information available to service providers Ability to search for freight available to be moved for Schneider Easily provide tracking updates for Schneider freight Quick and easy access to payment information

• Used Oracle applications, middleware, and development tools to create a next-generation IT platform to drive profitability, reduce costs across all divisions, and position Schneider for continued growth
• Leveraged Oracle SOA Suite to integrate Oracle E-Business Suite, Siebel CRM, Oracle Transportation Management, third-party, and custom applications
• Built 400 BPEL processes that generate over 60 million composite instances across five SOA clusters
• Leveraged Oracle B2B for EDI with over 900 trading partners
• Leveraged Oracle Data Integrator and Oracle SOA Suite to set up a shipment hub that provides real-time shipment data to enterprise applications handling more than 500,000 updates per day
• Enabled secure access to enterprise applications
• Implemented a centralized repository for digital content and documents that drives dynamic enterprise portals
• Enabled drivers to quickly update their benefits, view online training, and check their pay statements
• Provides customers and partners with convenient access to the information they need
• Enables more streamlined monitoring and management of software and hardware
• Enabled more consistent processes across functional areas, ranging from sales and operations to finance, improving order accuracy, profitability, on-time service, and payables management
• Reduced days for sales outstanding significantly

 The post below is a repost from January by one of my fellow WebCenter teammates, Christie Flanagan.  I thought it was a great post to highlight yet another customer in the Travel and Transportation vertical doing amazing things with Oracle technologies.

Holland America: Optimizing the Online Customer Experience with Oracle Real-Time Decisions

By Christie Flanagan onJan 14, 2013

• Why It Is So Important to Know Your Customer
• Segmentation and Targeting: Your Tools for Personalizing the Online Customer Experience
  
• Defining Your Online Segmentation and Targeting Strategy
• Optimizing the Online Experience with Oracle WebCenter Sites and Oracle Real-Time Decisions
  

Today, we're expanding on this theme and featuring a guest post from Oracle sales consultant, Sumeet Prasad.  Sumeet is part of the Oracle Real-time Decisions strategy team. Sumeet has been with Oracle for six years and has twelve years of experience in the real-time decisioning space. This post will give you a very good sense of the truly powerful capabilities of Oracle Real-Time Decisions for optimizing the online customer experience.

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Holland America is a wholly owned subsidiary of Carnival Corp. It is recognized as a leader in the cruise industry’s premium segment. Holland America Line’s fleet of 15 ships offers nearly 500 cruises to 320 ports of call in more than 100 countries and is expected to have carried over 750,000 cruise passengers in 2012 that visited all seven continents.

Like many in the travel industry, Holland was looking for ways to increase revenue and margin in a poor economy. Maximizing the revenue from their passengers was important to increasing overall revenue. The travel industry is trending towards more online bookings and customers are increasingly more web savvy. Holland’s existing websites for both cruise booking and shore excursion provided a one size fits all approach in regards to customer experience.

Holland America decided to utilize Oracle Real Time Decisions (RTD) to help achieve their goals. They went live with RTD in June of 2012 within their Online Shore Excursion booking process. They had 2 primary business goals for this initiative:

• Leverage Real-Time Decisions to help increase booking revenue for Shore Excursions, Indulgences, Spa and Dining by optimizing cross-sell and up-sell offers in the web channel through adaptive learning and multi goal arbitration
• Leverage Real-Time Decisions to improve the overall customer experience by providing personalized and targeted content, and product recommendations throughout the Shore Excursion selection experience.

RTD provides Holland America with a cross channel, centralized decision management service for Customer Experience Optimization. RTD enables real-time intelligence to be instilled into any customer interaction, thus Holland is able to learn and predict which shore excursions, indulgences, and dining options are most appropriate to deliver to a customer. By learning from every single interaction and adjusting their processes in real-time, Holland America always takes the best course of action and optimizes the value of each opportunity.

The RTD Decision Management Framework provides for user-defined business rules, automated segmentation, real-time predictive models, test and control capabilities and user defined performance goals for optimizing decisions. Both rules and models can operate on historical, transactional and contextual real-time information.  This allows Holland America to treat every customer coming to the Shore Excursion site as a “segment of one” and provide for personalized and optimized customer experiences.

There are four optimized decisions that RTD makes as part of the Shore Excursion Booking Process. 90% of visitors have the optimized experience (RTD) and 10% of the visitors have the control experience (status quo):

• Decision #1: Show/No Show shore excursions landing page:  Determine which flow is best for each customer.
• Decision #2: Which landing page image is best to display?
• Decision #3: Rank order the top excursions on the catalog page for each customer?
• Decision #4: What are the best additional shore excursions, indulgences and spa and dining offers to recommend on the shopping cart page?

Within one month of being live, Holland America saw booking rates increase by 14% for the optimized experience (RTD) vs. the Control Experience (status quo). The success of this first project is helping pave the way for future RTD projects, as well as the adoption of Web Center Sites for building and managing their websites.