Logistics – Fraikin
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Fiorano SOA powers electronic traffic fine management and inventory management for French logistics giant, Fraikin
Customer Profile
Fraikin is one of the largest commercial vehicle fleet services company in Europe, providing fleet management, contract hire and rental solutions, together with other support services, to both the private and public sector. Fraikin operates 230 integrated service facilities across Belgium, France, Luxembourg, Slovakia, Spain, Switzerland, Poland and the UK, employing over 3,000 staff. Today, the Group collectively manages in excess of 64,000 vehicles.
Fraikin is a leading provider of commercial vehicles fleet services in Europe, including contract hire, fleet management and rentals with its international Head quarters in Paris.
Fraikin's strength in delivering transport solutions lies in building strong business-to-business relationships to ensure it meets its customer's requirements for utmost satisfaction. This success has earned Fraikin a long list of major clients, from food manufacturers to paper merchants, as well as high-tech logistics companies and parcel carriers.
Fraikin has deployed Fiorano SOA Platform as an integration platform for several projects.
Project 1: Fiorano SOA powers electronic Traffic Fine Management for French Logistics Giant
Business Problem
Fraikin, being a leading vehicle fleet service provider in Europe, has a fleet of 40,000 vehicles running on the roads of France. With such a large fleet on road, incidents of traffic violation are not uncommon. The traffic fines, including parking fines and speeding fines, issued to Fraikin are to the extent of 12,000 fine tickets per year.
Until recently, before the computerization of the fine management system, the fine tickets were sent to Fraikin by post. On receipt of fine tickets by Fraikin, they used the details of fine tickets to manually search the clients' credentials for the hired vehicles, and the fine tickets were sent to them.
With the implementation of an electronic system of fine management by the Government of France, Fraikin was given a set of specifications to develop an application to facilitate electronic communication between the logistics giant and the Government. The government specifications included mandatory communication of Fraikin's fleet to the Government twice a year, communication of Fraikin's fleet modification every week and quick processing of traffic penalties or fines. The biggest challenge for Fraikin was to build a rapidly deployable integrated platform, which would meet all the requirements specified by the government.
Solution
Fraikin has a multi-platform environment including Windows machines and an IBM z/OS mainframe Main client records and vehicles records are stored in the mainframe DB2 database. In order to build a scalable integration platform and to leverage on existing hardware, Fraikin decided to deploy Fiorano Middleware Platform SOA.
Fraikin used the Fiorano Platform to develop a series of event processes to exchange and process traffic fines.
Event Process Flow 1: The first process flow was constructed to enable communication of Fraikin's fleet to the French police, twice a year. This process converts the flat file provided by the mainframe into an XML file, which is verified against the government specified schema. If the file is correct and error-free, it is sent to government records via FTP.Event Process Flow 2: An event process flow was built to meet the government requirement of communication of fleet modification every week. This event process is similar to the first flow, except its frequency is weekly. These flows help the French Police keep records of the vehicle fleet of the largest logistics services company in Europe.
Event Process Flow 3: An event flow was built to receive fine notifications by the French Traffic Authority. This flow retrieves and processes the XML file sent by the French Police on a daily basis. This XML file is split into messages and each message becomes a Web Service request sent to the mainframe, where the DB2 database is updated.
Event Process Flow 4: Another process flow was constructed to facilitate Fraikin's response to the government, communicating the credentials of the companies hiring Fraikin's fleet at the time of penalty. This flow is a continuation of the previous flow, which extracts the information to every demand, as updated on the DB2. A flat file with responses to the demands sent by French Police are being written by the mainframe, and this flat file is being converted to XML, which is then submitted to the Police via FTP.
Event Process Flow 5: An event process was created to manage errors in reporting. There have been incidences of rejection of responses by Fraikin, sent in event process 4. In such cases, the event process 5 receives the errors and processes them.
Benefits
Some of the benefits of Fiorano powered Fraikin's communication platform are
- Fiorano enabled Fraikin to quickly put in place an infrastructure that was compliant with the new Government regulation of electronic communication.
- Accurate and error-free record management of its extensive fleet of vehicles for the French Traffic Police.
- Quick and error-free processing of traffic fine notification, including receipt of the notifications, response to the latter while directing the Police to the respective companies hiring Fraikin fleet at the time of traffic violation.
Project 2: Fiorano SOA Platform facilitates Inventory and Facility Management for Fraikin
Business Problem
Fraikin operates over 220 integrated service facilities across Europe and uses the Fiorano SOA Platform, to manage its complex warehouse inventory across these locations. With parts information and inventory levels changing with every purchase / usage at various warehouses spread across different geographic locations, the challenge lies in effectively updating and maintaining stock of hundreds of these parts. With various legacy systems already in place, there was a strong need for a flexible, versatile integration platform that would encompass the existing legacy applications and provide an easy means of access to these for newer technologies.
Solution
Fiorano SOA platform with its diverse set of adapters is being used to unify and merge data from different sources and formats into one unified repository. The data (as raw text) across different transports including emails, flat files over FTP, shared file systems are culled into the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), converted to appropriate formats using the powerful set of transformation adapters and routed to appropriate data channels. Fraikin's existing legacy applications are integrated into this platform and exposed to the standards gateway using Fiorano's standard based pre-build adapters. This lets Fraikin's partner and service facility applications to co-exist with the legacy applications.
About Fiorano Software
Founded in 1995, Silicon Valley based Fiorano is a California Corporation with proven leadership in enterprise middleware and peer-to-peer distributed systems. Fiorano's innovative event-driven SOA platform integrates applications and complex technologies into an enterprise nervous system, increases business process performance, yields higher message throughput and enhances availability through agent-based visual composition that bridges the capability gap between business models and its implementation – the model is the application, ready to run.
Global leaders including ABN AMRO, Boeing, British Telecom, Capgemini Telecom, Chicago Mercantile Exchange Group, McKesson, NASA, POSCO Steel, Qwest Communications, Rabobank, Schlumberger, Lockheed Martin, United States Coast Guard and Vodafone have deployed Fiorano to drive innovation through open, standards-based, event-driven SOA applications built in just days, yielding unprecedented productivity.
Fiorano Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) and Fiorano Message Queue (MQ) deliver the industry fastest, lowest latency, highest throughput Real-Time messaging (asynchronous and synchronous) to power high performance, highly available, and collaborative workflow applications where application services are distributed throughout the IT landscape. Fiorano's distributed, peer-to-peer agents abstract complexity of developing and deploying services to unlock value in a customer's enterprise architecture framework.
To find out more about how Fiorano can help you meet your enterprise integration objectives, visit www.fiorano.com or e-mail sales@fiorano.com
