Railinc, a leader in providing rail data applications and services to the North American freight rail industry, needed ongoing development and maintenance support for over 40 critical applications. These applications help railroads, equipment owners, and suppliers manage operational efficiencies and increase productivity.
Railinc faced several challenges:
- Application Maintenance: The applications needed frequent updates and fixes for both on-premises and cloud-based environments.
- Complex Business Logic: Many of these applications had intricate business rules with limited documentation, making it difficult for the development team to implement new features or updates efficiently.
- Mobile Access: Railinc wanted to extend the functionality of its services to mobile platforms, offering users the same data and services they get from web applications.
Evizi provided a dedicated offshore development team to handle both maintenance and feature enhancements. With expertise in cloud migration, mobile development, and quality assurance, Evizi worked closely with Railinc to ensure that all systems were maintained, secure, and improved as needed.
Evizi’s plan included:
- Maintenance and Fixes: Regularly fixing defects in applications, whether hosted on-prem or in the cloud.
- Feature Enhancements: Developing new features for existing applications while increasing unit test coverage to over 80% and addressing any security concerns.
- Mobile Development: Creating mobile applications for iOS and Android platforms to allow users to access Railinc’s services seamlessly from their devices.
Evizi worked closely with Railinc, setting up daily reports, demos, and weekly sync-up calls to ensure clear communication across time zones. The Project Manager played a crucial role in analyzing requirements and supporting the team to manage complex tasks effectively.
Without the proper maintenance and updates, Railinc risked:
- Disruptions in their critical rail data services, which could affect rail operations.
- Delayed feature rollouts, impacting productivity for Railinc’s clients.
- Increased security vulnerabilities without the necessary patches and updates.
Evizi’s dedicated development and QA team successfully maintained and enhanced several key Railinc applications, including Umler, Rate EDI Network (REN), and the Positive Train Control Interoperable Lifecycle Management (PTC ILM) system. The team also developed mobile applications that gave users secure access to Railinc’s data and services from anywhere. By integrating cloud technologies like Docker, Jenkins, and Kubernetes, Railinc’s applications now run more efficiently, with improved performance and security.