| (March 22, 2004) – The Strategic Sourcing and Supply division of Burlington Northern Santa Fe Corporation (BNSF), one of the largest railroad networks in North America, will use Catalog Builder® software to help improve the efficiency of maintaining and repairing its 33,000 route miles of track and thousands of train cars.
The railway’s field maintenance force—those that are charged with maintaining and repairing the rail cars and tracks that weave through our cities, prairies, and mountain regions—don’t work out of networked offices, they work out of their trucks. Up until now, when they needed a part in order to make a repair, they leafed through paper catalogs to find the part number and called in their order to the office. “The problem with this method,” stated BNSF Director of Systems and Processes, Michael McClary, “was that the catalogs we produced didn’t provide a lot of details, and no pictures. We couldn’t have fit everything in and still produce manageable-sized catalogs.” So the result was that the field crew often had to call in for more information about a part before ordering it. What’s more, the catalogs were cumbersome to search through and grew outdated quickly. Because most of these field people now carry laptops on the road, BNSF began searching for an easy way to create a catalog that could be browsed electronically. “We chose Catalog Builder software because we were looking for an electronic catalog tool that would require no programming and would have an easy-to-use interface for creating CD-based catalogs,” McClary explained. The Catalog Builder software suite from Computer Pundits Corporation steps users through an automated process of creating interactive CD-ROM catalogs. It can pull from existing databases or spreadsheets, or data and images can be entered manually. Then that data can be easily updated and new CD’s produced whenever necessary. The benefits are numerous. McClary outlined a few:
• His division will be able to eliminate the hassle of producing and distributing paper catalogs.
• The field maintenance team will have an easy to use, searchable tool for quickly finding the parts they need.
• Because the CD catalogs will include much more detailed information about the parts, as well as the ability to include pictures, the person in the field will feel more confident that he or she has identified the proper part.
• Therefore, purchasing should become more of a self-service process than in the past. “People are responding positively to the test CD catalogs we’ve created so far. They’re anxious to start taking advantage of this technology,” concluded McClary. About Burlington Northern Santa Fe Corporation
Headquartered in Fort Worth, Texas, Burlington Northern Santa Fe Corporation (BNSF), through its subsidiary The Burlington Northern and Santa Fe Railway Company, operates one of the largest railroad networks in North America, with 33,000 route miles covering 28 states and two Canadian provinces. This network covers the western two-thirds of the United States, stretching from major Pacific Northwest and Southern California ports to the Midwest, Southeast and Southwest, and from the Gulf of Mexico to Canada.
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