Carlson Wagonlit Travel
The Wagons-Lits brand was formerly well known for its hospitality services onboard trains. Nowadays, Carlson Wagonlit Travel is grown to a huge international company where 'travel management' is its core business, servicing mainly companies of all sizes.
The company acts in close cooperation with all big "players" in the travel business, in the area of air, hotel, car rental, technology. Their expertise and accuracy have made Carlson Wagonlit Travel a world leader in its field, with directly controlled operations in forty countries all over the world.

Automation of CWT logically is a matter of great complexity. A good amount of the transactions is controlled from every country individually. The core of the backbone software consists of WINGS, an in-company developed ERP application. It got its own specific set of parameters per country. WINGS integrates a variety of functions in the area of reservations, purchase, payment, invoicing, sales, tax, management information, administration of relations and documenting. The application has a considerate amount of interfaces with software of suppliers, clients and others, like banks and governmental institutions. WINGS is written in RPG-IV and is controlled with TD/OMS of Remain.

TD/OMS
From the start, it was Remains ambition to make TD/OMS suitable for very complex environments with versions that differ per country. The software was installed often and successfully, but such a complex environment as the one found at CWT was rarely found before. How is TD/OMS coping under difficult conditions? We travel to Brussels to find out.

Ivo Schraepen
Brussels is a very little accessible collection of communities, and later than agreed, we announced ourselves at the CWT Belgian headquarters. Senior Information Manager EMEA Ivo Schraepen's welcome is very friendly. He makes the impression to know his business both technically as in organizing. He speaks with an equal amount of insight about technical details and the ins and outs of his organization.

Schraepen demonstrates the technical infrastructure. All countries work remotely on one production machine located in Brussels. Furthermore there are two machines for testing and development. Each country has three test environments: because nothing may go wrong, nothing is left to chance. Schraepen: "As you see, we use a lot of applications within TD/OMS. At a certain moment even too many, more at least than TD/OMS could handle. The Remain people have worked extensively hard to solve the problem. And they succeeded. I can honestly say I praise them for it."

Implementation
A promising start of the conversation, you could say, for Remain. What, actually, was the situation before TD/OMS was about to be implemented as the software managing tool? Schraepen: "Before TD/OMS our world was difficult to handle. We're talking back in 1996, and something had to happen then. The selection of the badly needed managing tool was handed over to IBM Belgium, as our crew is of limited size. IBM advised TD/OMS, and subsequently we've passed our own advice on the matter. Then we ordered TD/OMS, based on reliance on IBM and our first impressions. Our people were well instructed by Remain, and as a result they were well fit up to install TD/OMS autonomously."

"The fifteen European countries where this tool is implemented are fifteen independent entities. We've defined a separate cycle for problems that need immediate solving. The control of database triggers of OS/400 caused some initial problems. For this we wrote an extensive application ourselves, which is activated through one of the external TD/OMS connections. We left the concept of constraints completely."

"Also we have our own module for problem management, with a connection to TD/OMS. In this way, problem management and development are separated. Here the documented issues are stored per request."

TD/OMS put into practice
Schraepen makes it clear: WINGS is a solid application, that can last for years. Of course provided that every change is well-thought-out and fully tested before being brought into implementation. "It is a very coherent entity", he states. "And it has proven to be reliable. We use traditional iSeries objects only. Of course a transaction is something which integrity should be guaranteed. On a yearly base, we have three or four release updates, that we implement land after land. Such an implementation is a very drastic thing. We test it thoroughly, not only its functionality, but also the performance. We've created an environment that can simulate almost full reality for the test user."

"Obviously the recession has affected our clients, and the pressure the low cost carriers are exerting on the airline market is changing the landscape. As a consequence we have adapted our business model to assist our clients attaining the most cost effective solution. It has had an impact on the IT organisation as well, but not dissimilar from any others. We are continuously challenged to deliver productivity improvements without increasing overhead. More than ever we demand from the existing software full reliability. We handle that job with our five employees. At the moment we have also twenty-one external professionals working for us."

Does Ivo Schraepen feel the need for new functionality of TD/OMS?
"TD/OMS offers already more than we're asking for. We're not in the need of automated management of our PC objects, for instance. In the near future we'll be working web-enabled, but TD/OMS offers IFS support already."

Conclusion
Ivo Schraepen concludes the interview. Maybe he has a last anecdote on TD/OMS to tell? "What can I add? All people working with TD/OMS have a positive opinion. TD/OMS is an error-free software, which is an exception. People here have no fear for release implementation anymore. Which is the biggest compliment I can make."

Jan de Zeeuw