STM delivers better value for public money with IBM and SAP

IBM SOA Customer : SOA in Travel and Transportation

STM delivers better value for public money with IBM and SAP

“With excellent assistance from IBM Global Business Services, we can easily extend the benefits of SAP software across all parts of the enterprise, and add new functionality that is integrated into the core SAP software systems.” - Steve Boily, Divisional Manager, Architecture and Technology Support

Customer: STM (Société de transport de Montréal)
Deployment Country: Canada
IBM Business Partner: SAP
Industry: Travel & Transportation

SOA Solution: Business Performance Transformation, Enabling Business Flexibility, Enterprise Resource Planning, Infrastructure Simplification, Optimizing IT, Service Oriented Architecture

SOA Overview
Société de transport de Montréal (STM) manages the entire transport infrastructure for Montréal and all the communities of the Island of Montréal, and has a public commitment to “Being the best public transit company in North America.”

Business need: Constant pressure on the public purse means close attention to costs, and managers found that the information needed to understand and control expenditure was not easily available.

Solution: Working with IBM, STM embarked on a major rollout of SAP software, with SAP NetWeaver technology, designed to bring information from every aspect of operations right onto managers’ desktops.

Benefits: Better visibility of costs by activity in bus maintenance, one of the four key activities for STM; the team is able to set KPIs and measure performance, with the potential for significant reductions in long-term cost of ownership for vehicles, equipment and real estate.

SOA Case Study
The Société de transport de Montréal (STM) is responsible for the public transportation systems in the city of Montréal in the Québec province of Canada. The organization manages four metro lines, totaling 66 kilometers of track and serving 65 stations, and 186 bus routes – for a total of more than 360 million passenger journeys each year. STM has more than 7,300 employees and an annual budget of around CAN$870 million.

With a very diverse set of operations, STM found it hard to collect accurate financial data on - for example - bus maintenance costs, personnel costs, rolling stock, real estate and equipment. The information needed was hard to come by, originating from diverse systems that were hard to integrate. STM aimed to control and plan its activities more effectively, and deliver a better service to the citizens of Montréal, and to do this with an IT infrastructure which itself would be lower cost and easier to operate.

Strategic choices for SAP and IBM

In order to enhance business processes and gain a clearer view of enterprise performance, STM opted to expand its ERP software architecture from SAP and to deploy a new transportation management solution called GIRO.Together, these would allow managers to obtain operational data rapidly and cost-effectively, giving them true insight into the business as a whole.Working with IBM, STM has embarked on a major strategic project to deploy portal functionality to extend its SAP software.

The new approach enables the organization to extend the functionality of its core enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, and to create Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to help drive improvements in the efficiency and speed of maintenance processes.

Sylvain LaPointe, Divisional Manager, Business Solutions, comments: “By enabling us to set KPIs and measure performance against them, the IBM solution is already giving managers better information for decision-making.

“Ultimately, we expect to reduce costs and improve transparency across the entire organization – the IBM and SAP solution is a cornerstone of our future information strategy.”

Clearer view

Managers in the bus maintenance division now have better information on which to base their decisions, and in particular much better visibility of costs – whether human or material – by activity. “With SAP software, we are much more proactive and able to plan expenditure more precisely,” comments LaPointe. “There are three key objectives in this area: improve the reliability of the buses, improve their availability through optimal planning of routine maintenance, and reduce the cost per kilometer.

“By achieving the first two objectives, we will need fewer vehicles for the same level of service, so the cost per kilometer will fall. With SAP software running on the resilient IBM System p5 platform, we are making rapid progress towards these goals.”

Says LaPointe, “The strategic vision was to create a Service Oriented Architecture, building integrated business intelligence and other services around core ERP functionality.”

Enterprise-strength systems

STM’s existing ERP software was running on Intel-based servers running Microsoft Windows. Steve Boily, Divisional Manager, Architecture and Technology Support, comments: “To meet our future requirements, we needed to increase the number of concurrent users, and to enable batch and interactive tasks to run simultaneously.

“Our decision to build portals would extend the core SAP software functionality to new users, and extend the working day. We therefore needed a very robust, reliable and high-performance platform – and we chose IBM System p5 servers running AIX 5L.”

IBM provided technical assistance for the migration from Windows to AIX, moving the entire system to two IBM System p5 servers, with Oracle 9.2.0.7 database. In the near future, STM will invest in an additional pSeries for the test, development and quality assurance portions of the SAP software, leaving all the power of the System p5 servers dedicated to the production environment.

STM currently runs its SAP NetWeaver platform on Windows servers, and will migrate it to AIX on the System p5 servers in the coming months, together with other business intelligence components and SAP software interfaces. Consolidating all parts of the SAP architecture onto a single physical platform will aid application integration and prepare the ground for a planned move to mySAP ERP in the second half of 2007.

“The technical support from IBM during the migration to AIX was of very high quality, helping us to accelerate the process and keep risk low,” says Boily.

More intelligent architecture

STM has completed the rollout of the SAP R/3 and portal functionality across the bus maintenance division, and is now at the blueprinting stage for infrastructure maintenance management. With each new element of ERP, the company now deploys a corresponding business intelligence element, so that users can access reporting and KPIs. Says LaPointe, “It’s like a pyramid – ERP functionality at the bottom, SAP Business Information Warehouse in the middle, and the KPIs at the top.”

He adds, “The business benefit is to be able to support all processes, even if they are not standard in the ERP, and integrate the business intelligence function, all wrapped up in a portal that supports change management.”

STM has developed a Web services application in Java for vehicle inspection, delivered directly to maintenance staff through a portal. The application presents the required functionality in an intuitive interface, giving mechanics the information and tools they need without requiring any knowledge of the underlying SAP software. Boily concludes, “With excellent assistance from IBM Global Business Services (BCS), we can easily extend the benefits of SAP software across all parts of the enterprise, and add new functionality that is integrated into the core SAP software systems.

“The reliability and availability of the System p5 servers are more than enough for our requirements, and we are very confident about running the whole SAP software landscape on the System p5 platform in the future.

“The Société de transport de Montréal has set itself an ambitious goal, to become the best public transit company in North America. SAP and IBM solutions are some of the key components helping us to reach our destination."

Products and Services Used
IBM products and services that were used in this case study.

Hardware: System x
Operating System: AIX, AIX 5L, Win NT/2000
Services: IBM Global Business Services