How a major freight railroad cut driver wait time 50% by consolidating fragmented SAP data into a single customer view

A major North American freight railroad ran its customer logistics data across three separate SAP systems: ERP, CRM, and APO. Nothing talked to anything else in a meaningful way. Shipment details, driver data, cargo information, and freight status all lived in silos, and pulling a coherent picture required manual work.

The consequence on the ground was real. Drivers were waiting over 90 minutes at facilities, with no visibility into equipment dwell or shipment status. Performance metrics like export on-time rates and port dwell hours were nearly impossible to track in real time.

At the same time, the railroad had a separate problem: aging customer-facing applications that couldn't keep up with data volume, hurt accuracy, and needed replacing. The organization was also relatively new to Agile, which meant any new delivery approach had to be piloted carefully before wider rollout.

Mindset ran design thinking workshops to understand the people who would actually use the tools: drivers, facility operators, and logistics coordinators. The solution was built from those personas out.

The Customer 360 work integrated SAP ERP, CRM/CRP, and APO into a consolidated view built on S/4HANA, SAP Gateway, SAP UI5, and HANA XSA. The platform surfaced average and total driver wait time, equipment dwell, and shipment performance analytics by terminal, port, and time period, across day, week, month, and quarter cuts.

For Facility Tools, the team replaced the legacy customer-facing applications with a central dashboard and three specialized Fiori apps: Equipment Summary, Order In Equipment, and Release Equipment. The build ran on SAP HANA Enterprise with NetWeaver Gateway, SAP CRM, and SAP TM, and connected non-SAP systems via Webseal, IBM MQ, and the railroad's internal TYES rail management tool.

Delivery used an agile, portfolio-backlog approach with a full release plan. The team piloted both tools with a small user group before rolling them out more broadly, which gave the organization a low-risk way to build confidence in the new platform.

Driver wait time dropped by roughly 50% from a baseline of over 90 minutes. The Customer 360 platform identified the top five customer locations with the highest driver wait and equipment dwell, giving operations a clear list of where to focus.

The solution brought new visibility into export performance (on-time to port cutoff percentage) and import performance, including port dwell hours, vendor transit and processing time, and customer dwell hours. Data that previously required manual assembly was now available by terminal, port, month, week, and quarter in a single view.

Facility Tools delivered measurable gains in user adoption and data-processing accuracy. Legacy systems were retired, reducing system landscape complexity and the maintenance overhead that came with them. Users reported higher satisfaction with the replacement tools.