Pace Suburban Bus Improves Bus Service with Better Operational Visibility and Integration after Enterprise Resource Planning Upgrade
 
 

Pace Suburban Bus Improves Bus Service with Better Operational Visibility and Integration after Enterprise Resource Planning Upgrade

  • Oracle Customer:  Pace Suburban Bus
    Location:  Chicago, Illinois
    Industry:  Public Sector
    Employees:  2,200
    Annual Revenue:  $100 to $500 Million

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Pace Suburban Bus is the premier suburban transit provider, quickly moving people to work and school, safely and efficiently. The backbone of Chicago’s suburbs, Pace serves tens of thousands of daily riders with fixed bus routes, vanpools, and Dial-a-Ride programs. Pace covers 3,500 square miles and is one of the largest bus services in North America.

 
 

 
 

Challenges

A word from Pace Suburban Bus

  • "With Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.1 and Oracle Exadata Database Machine, we integrated almost all of our critical business functions and gained the ability to track all transactions, improving visibility into our bus system operations and enabling us to more effectively serve our customers." – Raj Sachdeva, Section Manager, Pace Suburban Bus

  • Eliminate information silos across the organization to improve bus system operations
  • Improve visibility into grant-funding management to ease audit processes for the publicly-funded organization
  • Improve system performance for critical geographic information systems (GIS) to improve decisions regarding bus routing and marketing

Solutions

Oracle Product and Services

  • Implemented Oracle E-Business Suite and ultimately upgraded to Release 12.1 to eliminate data silos, reduce data redundancy, and enhance information sharing across the bus system’s departments
  • Automated the entire grant workflow process with Oracle Grants Accounting—creating requisitions and requests for proposals, converting them into purchase orders, and flowing them into payables—enabling Pace to improve project budget management
  • Reduced the time needed to reconcile grants data for auditing purposes, from months to just two to three days
  • Cut the time to close bus system inventory each month from 30 hours (a staff of six employees, each taking five hours) to just 20 minutes—enabling the organization to close out all inventory and open balances for the next month
  • Used Oracle iStore to enable customers to purchase tickets online and flow that data directly into Oracle Order Management and Oracle Financials to automatically generate invoices
  • Enabled managers to easily determine if purchase requests fit within their budgets and automatically approve or reject requests, or request additional information
  • Implemented Oracle Exadata Database Machine, improving performance of Pace’s Trapeze application by 50%—a GIS system that enables the organization to map bus stops and shelters, as well as manage schedules and dispatches—
  • Consolidated 10 servers and 1.5 terabytes of data by moving to Oracle Exadata
  • Reduced the time to run nightly GIS data batches, from six to eight hours to just one hour—putting data into the hands of business users and managers more quickly
  • Reduced the time to analyze commuter volume from four-and-a-half hours to just 20 minutes—enabling Pace to more easily identify which routes are most heavily traveled, adjust routes as needed to meet demand, and customize marketing activities

Why Oracle

Pace Suburban Bus chose Oracle E-Business Suite because it met the organization’s need for a fully-integrated application suite and had the key modules Pace needed to support its business processes. It selected Oracle Exadata Database Machine to reduce its server environment complexity and boost critical system performance.

Implementation Process

Pace first deployed Oracle Financials and Oracle Procurement in 2008. In 2009, it implemented Oracle Order Management, Oracle iStore, and Oracle Grants Accounting. The organization upgraded to Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.1 in March 2010. Pace deployed Oracle Exadata Database Machine in December 2012 and is in the process of migrating critical databases to the new system. Pace is currently in the final process of implementing Oracle Enterprise Asset Management.

Partner

Booz Allen Hamilton, Rolta International, and Global PTM have  worked closely with Pace Suburban Bus on its Oracle E-Business Suite implementation and upgrade.

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