YRC Case Study

Yellow Roadway Corporation, a Fortune 500 company, is the leading transporter of industrial, commercial and retail goods, specializing in solutions for businesses across North America. YRC reflects the merger of Roadway and Yellow Transportation in 2003.

In 2007 YRC initiated a major business transformation initiative to combine the Roadway and Yellow brands, integrate transportation networks and move back-office systems to a single application platform. The initial timeline for the integration was two years and, following an intense selection process, YRC selected MDX from Gaine Solutions to integrate itʼs legacy application systems.

MDX at YRCW

Deteriorating trading conditions and liquidity concerns stemming from the credit crunch in mid-2008, forced YRC to accelerate the integration deadline by six months. Indeed, the very survival of company and 30,000 jobs became dependent upon YRC completing the integration of the companies and cutting costs as promised to its lenders.

The flexibility and control provided by MDX were major contributors to the success of YRC to meet the imposed deadlines without compromising the integrity or stability of its core systems.


Approach

The Roadway legacy system was built on Model204, a niche development platform with a proprietary database structure. The Yellow application was a combination of COBOL, VSAM and DB2. Not only were the database structures radically different, but the fundamental application design implemented to manage complex bill-to, ship-to and sold-to relationships was totally unique within each system.

YRC decided to collapse one application into the other with limited modifications to the surviving platform o close only the most critical gaps between the applications. Due to the time pressures imposed, any modifications to the new National system would need to be identified and applied concurrently with the migration of the legacy data.

This dynamic approach created additional pressures on the data migration team as changes to the migration specification continued to evolve throughout the project. In spite of the extreme circumstances and the tight deadlines, YRC was able to deliver its integrated National system ahead of schedule and with no major customer impact.



Key Success Factors

There were several aspects of the MDX platform that contributed to the success at YRC:

  • MDX is a configurable, rules-driven platform. YRC did not have to write a single line of data transformation code. Key technical resources from YRC were able to concentrate on “what” they needed in the new platform without concern for “how” it would be transformed.
  • MDX provides a single repository for all specifications and business data. This repository ensured that every change requested could be analyzed, isolated and applied without the need to rebuild the entire integration environment.
  • MDX provided YRC with best-in-class data migration capabilities with no lead time. YRC had all of the capabilities it would require throughout the project available on the first day of the project.