1. Greyhound Lines POS Manual Agent Xpiration (MAX)
Wade Rugenstein, Director ITS (Greyhound)
Steve Brewer, Senior Manager NonStop & DB (Greyhound)
John Johansen, Founding Partner (Agile Technologies)

2. Agenda Introduction Greyhound Business Overview
MAX Solution (Business)
Greyhound Technology Environment
MAX Solution (Technical)
MAX Demo
Greyhound Tandem Strategy
Lessons Learned
Q&A

3. Business Overview
Founded in 1914, Greyhound Lines is the largest provider of intercity bus transportation, serving more than 3,100 destinations with 16,000 daily departures across North America moving over 22 million passengers a year.
Greyhound PackageXpress offers same-day and early-next-day package delivery to thousands of destinations.

4. Business Overview Greyhound has changed a lot in the past five years.
Route Restructure “Stop Less Go More”
“Elevate Everything” – Buses, Customer Service, Internet in terminal (Chicago, Milwaukee, Minneapolis)
Technology is key to our future success.
Kiosks
Internet
IVR
Bus Side Scanning

5. Business Problem
Only 86% of the Greyhound ticket network was online or automated which leads to high back office costs.
Training around a legacy system was difficult and expensive.
The 14% of the manual tickets sold were by agencies that had high employee turnover.
Fraud is high in manual tickets and pricing is not accurate.
Legacy system is somewhat difficult to use and “clunky” with use of function keys and shortcuts

6. Business Solution
Create a web based Point of Sale to support manual agents.
Simplify the screen flow of Legacy system (TRIPS).
Make it easy to sell tickets to customers requiring little to no training.
Let agents use their own PCs and internet connection.
Manual Agent Xpiration (MAX) is BORN!

7. MAX
Released on 02/01/05.
Uses screen scraping via the CAIL XML Adapter.
Written in Java.
Greyhound brought in Agile Technologies to do the development of the solution based on their experience in Tandem and system solutions.

8. Technical Environment
Three S74000 servers
4GB Memory per Processor (1970-D)
U.S. Production (\PRD1) - 6 Processors
Canadian Production (\PRD2) - 4 Processors
Development (\DEV) - 2 Processors
Operating System - G06.21
Application - Pathway
Database - Enscribe, SQL/MP & RDF
JRE - NSJ 4

9. HTTP/J2EE Environment
HTTP
Operating System – IBM AIX 5.2
Application – IBM HTTP
Database - None
J2EE
Operating System - IBM AIX 5.2
Application - IBM WebSphere Application Server

10. Technical Architecture – Design Goals
Simple, functional presentation layer
Extensible TRIPS communication layer
Loose coupling between the presentation layer and the TRIPS communication layer
Minimal new or duplicated business logic in the web application

11. Technical Architecture – Logical Layers

12. Technical Architecture – Technologies
J2EE platform using Servlets and JSPs
The presentation tier uses the open source MVC framework Struts.
Deployed to Greyhound’s production WebSphere application servers on AIX.

13. Technical Architecture – XML Driven State Machine
Communication with TRIPS is managed by an XML-driven state machine which keeps track of where in the TRIPS application the system is at any point in time.
For each screen navigated by MAX, the XML file records the unique pieces of text that allow the state machine to identify the screen, the list of screens which can be accessed from this one, the error messages that may appear on this screen, and the keystrokes required to submit the information entered on this screen or to “back up” to the previous screen.
TRIPS error messages are detected by the comm library and thrown to the presentation layer as standard Java exceptions.

14. MAX Today
Supports well over 150 agents with multi-million dollars in tickets sales…
Rel /01/05 with new functionality..
GLI continues to leverage the MAX library (CAIL XML) to handle connections to TRIPS.
98% Automated as of 12/01/05…
DEMO

15. GLI Nonstop Strategy
MAX
Migrate from WebSphere to WebLogic
Migrate from AIX to Linux or OSS
General
More Java, less COBOL, some C, no TAL
More SQL/MX
Evaluate JBOSS on OSS
Evaluate Apache on OSS
Have one way to get at the Tandem vs. ten ways

16. www.agiletech.com (John Johansen) www.cail.com (Ron Thompson)
Lessons Learned
Screen Scraping through CAIL/Java performs!! Screen transitions from 1 to 3 seconds (scraping up to ten screens).
Agile Technologies and CAIL were strong partners which allowed us to go to production in less than six months.
Technical solution continues to be sound..
Phased approach to delivery was the key to our success.
(John Johansen)
(Ron Thompson)

17. Q&A
Thanks for listening….