Precisely > Case Studies > Crowley Maritime Attains Enterprise-Wide Data Access with Precisely Connect

Crowley Maritime Attains Enterprise-Wide Data Access with Precisely Connect

Customer Company Size

Large Corporate

Region

America

Country

United States

Product

Precisely Connect
Cloudera
Snowflake
Apache Kafka
NiFi

Tech Stack

Change Data Capture (CDC)
Cloud Data Stores
Streaming Frameworks
Relational Databases

Implementation Scale

Enterprise-wide Deployment

Impact Metrics

Cost Savings
Digital Expertise
Productivity Improvements

Technology Category

Analytics & Modeling - Real Time Analytics
Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Data Management Platforms
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Databases

Applicable Industries

Marine & Shipping

Applicable Functions

Logistics & Transportation
Business Operation

Services

System Integration
Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services

About The Customer

Crowley Maritime is a global leader in marine solutions, energy, and logistics services, with a rich history dating back to 1892. The company has over 5,000 employees worldwide and provides a wide range of services, including shipping, LNG distribution, and port escort operations. Crowley Maritime is also a leading provider of logistics for U.S. Federal and NATO agencies. Over the years, the company has built a reputation for agility, responsiveness, and innovation, constantly adapting to the changing needs of the industry. With a focus on marine solutions, vessel management, energy, and supply-chain management, Crowley Maritime has become an internationally respected industry leader. The company has a strong commitment to modernizing its operations and leveraging technology to enhance its services. This commitment is evident in its recent efforts to move its operations to the cloud and reduce its dependence on mainframe systems. By embracing new technologies and solutions, Crowley Maritime aims to improve its operational efficiency and provide better services to its customers.

The Challenge

Moving to the cloud meant establishing a cloud-based Enterprise Service Bus architecture that could support distributed processing for analytics and reporting. That in turn meant integrating all existing applications and data. To get there, Crowley Maritime had to overcome many challenges. But one issue emerged as a major roadblock: Integrating mainframe data into the new distributed, cloud-based architecture. The complexity, labor time, expense, and risks of directly porting decades of data and hundreds of customized mainframe applications made that approach completely unworkable. A different path to mainframe integration had to be found. In total, Crowley Maritime’s business was being run on over 300 separate mainframe applications, most of which had been developed many years earlier and could not realistically be updated or expanded. While many of those applications were handling tracking of ship and container movements, port operations and land logistics (truck, rail, etc.) were being managed on entirely separate applications. All the associated data each application generated were also stored in separate Db2 databases. This led to many operational challenges. For example, each time a customer inquired about the status of their shipment, Crowley’s customer service agents had to query as many as 17 different systems to get the answer. Compounding the issue was the fact that none of the agents involved had full visibility to all systems.

The Solution

To overcome the challenges of integrating mainframe data into a cloud-based architecture, Crowley Maritime implemented Precisely Connect. This solution provides change data capture (CDC) for mainframe, identifying and capturing changes made to Db2 databases as they occur and replicating them in real-time across relational databases, streaming frameworks, and cloud data stores. Crowley Maritime began pulling change data from Db2 tables for delivery to its Cloudera data lake on AWS, using tools such as Apache Kafka and NiFi. It then implemented Snowflake to further expand its reporting and analytics capabilities. Generating reports in Snowflake rather than via Db2 queries freed up mainframe processing capacity, sped up system response times, and significantly lowered the cost of Crowley’s mainframe operations. With Db2 data streaming to its cloud platform in real-time, Crowley Maritime began integrating it with data from all its other applications and systems, making everything available to both its own internal teams and its customers for use in cloud-based analytics, reporting, and dashboarding. This integration allowed Crowley Maritime to provide a constantly updated, unified, end-to-end view of all its shipments and logistics, enhancing its ability to deliver customized, customer-centric reports and dashboards.

Operational Impact

Crowley Maritime now enjoys a constantly updated, unified, end-to-end view of all its shipments and logistics.
The implementation of Precisely Connect unlocked the ability to implement more robust data governance practices.
Department managers across Crowley Maritime became incentivized to prioritize and streamline their compute requirements, leading to reduced overall compute, storage, and reporting demands.

Quantitative Benefit

Crowley Maritime can deliver fully customized, highly focused, customer-centric reports via e-mail batch every two hours.
Mainframe processing capacity was freed up, speeding up system response times and significantly lowering the cost of Crowley’s mainframe operations.