Have you ever wondered how much information Challenger stores in its computer storage systems? In computer terms, 1 byte is 1 character and 1 trillion bytes make up 1 Terabyte. We currently store 24 Terabytes of information! So what does that look like ? 1 Terabyte can hold approximately 1,000 copies of the Encyclopedia Britannica. This equals about 24,000 complete sets of Encyclopedia Britannica or over 1 million volumes resulting in 3 million pounds of books. Can you imagine the space required to store 3 million pounds of books? Not to mention how time consuming it would be to retrieve useful information? Technology has come a long way and the need for readily available information grows dramatically every day. This is where the IT Team comes in – our role is to keep our data secure and our systems up and running.

Because of the complexity and the fast rate of change in technology, the Information Technology team consists of three very distinct and different areas – Network Services (NS), Application Development (AD) and Business Intelligence (BI). Although we can cover each other on basic issues, each of these disciplines require a very different skill set and knowledge base. To manage all the changes/additions that are required daily, we use a ticketing system called ChangeGear and assign the tickets to the appropriate group. We also use our ticketing system to store solutions to common problems, identify long term solutions to reoccurring problems and better plan our resources. Every month, the number of tickets opened and closed averages around 600 tickets! As you can imagine, without our ticketing system, it would be impossible to keep track of all the issues. Just like Challenger, it runs all day and night, 365 days a year, IT Support is also available 24/7/365.

Network Services (NS) takes care of the Help Desk, all software and issues around the PC network, connectivity between our branches and our phone systems. We manage and support over 50 servers, 100 mobile devices, 300+ desktop phones and over 450 notebooks/desktops. One of our key metrics for the Helpdesk is measuring the ‘5 Business Day Close’ for tickets that are related to this group (averaging around 400 per month). We have consistently surpassed our goal of 85%.

The Application Development (AD) group develop and support applications that run on our main business system, CAIN. This includes the software used for all the transportation related functions (ICC), EDI to and from our customers, Satellite communications to and from our Drivers, maintenance related functions (Enrich), the warehouse functions (Logimax) and the financial systems (Infinium). Making changes and additions to these systems are very time consuming and depending on the complexity, can take many months of work.

Business Intelligence (BI) is the newest discipline in our group. There is a wealth of knowledge within the many, many bytes of information Challenger has created and stored over the years. The role of BI is to take all this data and present it to each Business Unit in Challenger in a format that they can use to quickly glean knowledge and understanding . This helps each group understand what has happened in the past and better plan for the future. Virtually every piece of data from each of the systems mentioned above is downloaded into a Data Warehouse nightly, linked and formatted into a structure that allows for rapid analytic reporting.

One last interesting bit of trivia … How many times do you think information is added or changed in CAIN daily? Over 2.5 million characters are either changed or added every day!

Thanks,

Eveline Gaede
Director, Information Technology