TERADATA CASE STUDY: 
NORFOLK SOUTHERN

BeyeNETWORK Research Report  
Operational Business Intelligence: The State of the Art 
Research conducted and written by Judith R. Davis, Claudia Imhoff and Colin White 
NORFOLK SOUTHERN CASE STUDY
COMPANY BACKGROUND
Major transportation
company and rail
carrier
THE BUSINESS PROBLEM
Customers and
internal users
needed “self-
service” reports
Existing reports not
designed to meet
customer needs
Secure, reliable
access to near real-
time data
Copyright © 2009 BeyeNETWORK, BI Research, Judith R. Davis, Intelligent Solutions, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Norfolk Southern Corporation (www.nscorp.com) is a leading U.S. transportation
company. Its Norfolk Southern Railway subsidiary manages over 21,000 route miles
in 22 eastern states and the District of Columbia, and owns and leases 4,000
locomotives and over 95,000 freight cars. Norfolk Southern serves all major
container ports in the eastern U.S. and connects with rail partners in the west and
Canada. The company states that it is North America’s largest rail carrier of metals
and automotive products.
Headquartered in Norfolk, Virginia, Norfolk Southern was founded in 1883 and has
over 30,000 employees. Revenue in 2008 was $10.7 billion.
Blair Hanna, Manager e-Commerce, provided the information for this case study.
Hanna’s group is responsible for all of Norfolk Southern’s Internet applications.
Several years ago, the e-Commerce marketing group recognized the need to give
customers and internal front-line users a “self-service” environment in which to view
and analyze operational data about train shipments. Goals were to eliminate the need
for Norfolk Southern staff to help external and internal customers create reports,
provide maximum flexibility for the customer and give internal users access to
critical data.
For example, customers wanted to know, “Where are my railcar shipments?” At the
time, reports were generated from many different mainframe systems. While these
systems worked well internally, they were limited in what they could provide to the
customer, primarily because they had not been designed to focus on customer needs.
From an internal perspective, marketing needed transportation data from systems that
were separate and impossible to access.
The company identified several important criteria for implementing a self-service
reporting system.
 Dependable point of access for 24x7 operation.
 Access to accurate and timely data, updated hourly in some cases and covering
many business scenarios, including specific business groups, types of traffic and
periods of time.
 Security – Important features here were the use of HTTPS, IBM RACF user IDs
and passwords expiring in 90 days.
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Drill down on
customized data
Fast delivery and
flexible formats
THE OPERATIONAL BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE SOLUTION
accessNS provides
self-service access
to Teradata EDW
Web portal, single
sign-on, interactive
SQL-driven reports
Production systems
update EDW hourly
Response time
goals supported by
EDW performance,
table structure
Norfolk Southern
built its own report
wizard for
customized reports
Copyright © 2009 BeyeNETWORK, BI Research, Judith R. Davis, Intelligent Solutions, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
 Access to easily understood data – For example, summarized data with drill
downs to details, the ability to customize data and a standard “look and feel.”
 Fast and reliable data delivery – All reports had to run in 30 seconds immediately
or with the option to schedule a report for delivery.
 Multiple delivery methods (fax, email or FTP) and formats (HTML, text, CSV,
XLS or XML).
ENTERPRISE DATA WAREHOUSE. Norfolk Southern’s operational BI solution is an
Internet-based suite of self-service operational and reporting applications called
accessNS. These applications access data in an 8TB Teradata enterprise data
warehouse (EDW) that contains 4TB of user data updated as frequently as hourly.
Components of accessNS include a Weblogic web portal with a single sign-on to all
underlying resources for each user; an interactive interface based on JavaScript,
HTML and Ajax; SQL-driven reports; JDBC and web services connectivity to the
Teradata database; and the Teradata EDW. In addition to a production environment,
the EDW provides test, quality assurance (QA) and data recovery environments.
Data from production and transportation systems (which run the railroad) is now
downloaded to the Teradata EDW hourly to limit the amount and impact of BI
processing on the operational systems. “Now we can hit against the EDW without
impacting the performance of operational systems. Previously, we couldn’t give
customers access because it would have caused problems with operational
performance,” states Hanna. The total number of users accessing the EDW is now
19,000 and growing.
Hanna added, “Our rule is that everything in accessNS has to have a response time of
30 seconds or less for returning information to the user. With Teradata, we meet that
performance standard. We can return current data plus two years of information,
summarized to the car-movement location for each trip, within 30 seconds. We limit
the browser to 100 rows, but can have a summarized report with up to 4,600 rows of
data.” To help meet this requirement, the company structured its web-enabled EDW
tables in a very specific format. Large tables were broken down into multiple smaller
ones and “we indexed exactly what we needed,” according to Hanna. Data includes
equipment (e.g., railcars), waybills, revenue, routing and movement.
REPORTING. In the accessNS reporting environment, customers and internal users can
create, customize and run their own shipment reports. To implement this, Hanna
worked with Mark Wittl, manager of customer applications, to build a report wizard
that provides access to more than 125 fields of information. Using the report wizard,
users can easily build their own reports or modify existing reports anytime without
any help from Norfolk Southern. Reports can include links so the user can drill down
from summarized data to underlying details. Wittl also created an internal tool to
monitor and manage the Teradata platform, which works almost flawlessly, providing
great performance and continuous availability.
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High adoption of
customization
14,000 users of
accessNS
Customers also can
access operational
apps: ordering
railcars
Vendors get
purchase order and
pricing information
accessNS supports
full decision cycle
for customers
IMPLEMENTATION STEPS AND ADVICE
A robust solution,
measure and learn,
understand the data,
be good to your
DBAs
Copyright © 2009 BeyeNETWORK, BI Research, Judith R. Davis, Intelligent Solutions, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Hanna’s group has created over 1,900 standard, scheduled reports. These answer the
question: Where are my railcar shipments? Reports provide current and historical
railcar location, origin and destination of railcars in the system (“traffic”), etc. With
various filters applied, over 39,600 versions of these are delivered weekly for an
average of 5,800 per day. In addition, users have created almost 10,000 customized
reports (or variations on the standard reports) and another 4,400 unique reports.
As previously mentioned, about 19,000 users now take advantage of the accessNS
Web portal; 14,000 of these are external users and 5,000 are internal users. Because
internal users have access to other systems, internal usage of accessNS is not as
heavy as usage by customers. However, there is so much flexibility and functionality
in the solution that more and more internal users are getting on board. One big
advantage is that the user can connect to accessNS from any location.
OPERATIONAL ACCESS. The accessNS suite also supports operational applications. For
example, a customer can now reserve railroad cars over the Internet. Before
accessNS, this was a manual process with no history or reporting capabilities.
Incorporating the ability to order equipment in accessNS has improved data quality
and accuracy, provides historical data on which to analyze trends and enables
customers to get reports on equipment on order (e.g., a summary of empty cars
ordered).
As another example, vendors can now get purchase orders with information
downloaded daily from Teradata. accessNS also delivers information regarding price
applications, and new prices are entered using Teradata data feeds.
CUSTOMER EXAMPLE. Here is a real-world example of how accessNS supports the full
operational BI decision cycle for Norfolk Southern customers. A customer notices on
an accessNS report that a railcar shipment is destined for the wrong facility. The
customer is then able to go into accessNS and make a routing change for the car to
get it to the right location. This is a shipment of steel and had it gone to the wrong
place, the customer would have had to re-route the car to the right place. This would
have delayed the shipment for days and cost the customer additional money to have
the railcar moved because the error was made by the customer (shipper) and not
Norfolk Southern. In summary, the report from accessNS facilitates recognition of
the problem, correction of the problem and confirmation that the problem was solved.
Hanna described several “lessons learned” in the process of implementing accessNS:
 Offer a robust and manageable business solution – This is key.
 Measure what you do – In addition, it is important to learn from your
measurements, respond positively to usage and don’t let pride of ownership hold
you back from making necessary changes to the solution.
 Understand the data you are presenting – “This point cannot be over-estimated. I
have had years of experience with the company so I am the go-to guy when it
comes to questions customers have about the data. This can be a curse because it
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SUMMARY OF BENEFITS
Users get maximum
flexibility, support
costs go down
Doing business is
easier
SUMMARY OF CRITICAL SUCCESS FACTORS
Teradata platform
plus implementation
advice
FUTURE ISSUES
Customer staff
changes mean more
support is needed
SUMMARY
Self-service access
to up-to-date railcar
status information
Copyright © 2009 BeyeNETWORK, BI Research, Judith R. Davis, Intelligent Solutions, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
takes time to answer all those questions. The good news: We know the answers.”
 Establish a good relationship with your database administrators (DBAs) – “My
DBAs are such a help to me that anything I can to do to make their jobs easier is
invaluable to me,” says Hanna.
 Look for new opportunities and technologies – Always be on the lookout for new
ways to do things. For example, Norfolk Southern’s disaster recovery can be
managed from anywhere now.
A major benefit is the self-service aspect of accessNS. This gives both customers and
internal users maximum flexibility in getting the reports and data they want when
they want them without needing help from Hanna’s group. As a result, the group can
focus on more complex reporting projects and enhancements to accessNS.
As Hanna describes it, "Users love it. It takes most business users only five to ten
minutes to customize their reports, and sometimes new users never even need to
contact us at all while creating their own reports." New Internet reports, created by
Hanna’s group, are typically built in a half-day or day, depending on the complexity.
“These capabilities definitely improve the ease of doing business at Norfolk
Southern.” And the solution has “definitely increased customer satisfaction.”
Hanna cites the fact that Norfolk Southern has a good platform with Teradata, and the
data available is accurate and in well-structured, well-indexed tables. Other critical
success factors are the first three points under “Implementation Advice” above: a
robust and manageable solution, the need to measure what you do and learn from this
and the ability to completely understand your data.
Hanna says, “In an economic downturn with fewer people doing more work, it is
important to communicate what we have so people use it. Our customers are
downsizing, so we have new people working with us and our systems and we have to
train them on what they can do themselves. We spend a lot of time on
implementation and support now.” Norfolk Southern will also look to make more
departmental information available online.
Norfolk Southern’s operational BI solution offers customers and internal users alike
fast, round-the-clock, customized access to current and historical information in the
Teradata EDW about the status of shipments and railcar equipment. Customers can
even reserve empty railcars online. The solution’s self-service approach optimizes
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 flexibility for users while minimizing the need for support from internal staff.

Increased customer Operational BI has enabled Norfolk Southern to extend access to shipment and
satisfaction is key to railcar information to customers and give the customers the ability to determine
success report content, format and delivery. This has resulted in increased customer
satisfaction, a key criteria for success in today’s highly competitive environment.

Copyright © 2009 BeyeNETWORK, BI Research, Judith R. Davis, Intelligent Solutions, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 5