At OOCL, event processing system targets all the ships at sea

by Jack Vaughan, SearchSOA

Orient Overseas Container Line Ltd.’s Information System Development Center on Zanker Road in San Jose is many miles from the Pacific Ocean, where the Hong-Kong-based company’s ships are constantly cruising. They carry steel and aluminum containers that transfer to trains, trucks and trailers as part of the staccato dance of modern commerce.

But the activity of the Orient Overseas Container Line (OOCL) development team on this historic Silicon Valley boulevard is an integral part of the complex, global shipping operation. There in San Jose, Matt Rosen, director, application development, worked with teams to orchestrate new event processing systems that connect OOCL business leaders to ships and ports in its far-flung operations.

The systems allow managers to look, ship by ship, to see how many containers are going to come through any facility at a given time, how many containers are going to discharge per ship, where cargo is in terms of all-important clearance releases, and more. The point, of course, is to be successful and profitable.

“A good portion of our success is due to our IT solutions,” Rosen said. “We can tell what the contribution to the bottom line will be on a shipment before we do it. That is because we have a good understanding of our costs.” This gives an edge in the challenging shipping world………….

……

The chain of tool and runtime software Rosen’s colleagues used to create this system is extensive. Connections were built into SAP ERP applications. Sparx Systems Pty Ltd.‘s UML Enterprise Architect tools were used for constructing models of rules, which were validated with stake holders in the lines of business. Oracle Coherence in-memory distributed data grid software was used to ”persist” business objects and SOA services for clustered application servers. Tibco Software Inc.’s Business Events software works as the complex event processing engine. Importantly, OOCL partnered with SL Corp., a software provider and middleware performance specialist firm, to create real-time information displays for both system and process monitoring……….Article