On the Right Track

In May 1998, Ferrovalle (Ferrocarril y Terminal del Valle de Mexico), a railroad terminal, interconnection and multimodal services company, launched operations offering a new option for freight transportation in and around Mexico City and State. The company’s initial goal was to facilitate freight exchange operations between connecting trains, enabling freight to continue on to its final destination.

Today the company employs over 1,150 workers distributed throughout the Valley of Mexico area, and it has more than 844 km. of track, through which it handles a significant part of Mexico’s land transportation activities. The company’s infrastructure includes a gravity-operated automatic sorting system for freight cars known as STAR I (the only one of its kind in Latin America), as well as reception, sorting and dispatch yards, satellite and intermodal systems (for fiscal and pre-clearance purposes), and a signaling system for train control and dispatching.
This infrastructure enables Ferrovalle to meet any rail freight transportation demands from the various industries operating in Mexico City and the State of Mexico.

However, due to its constant growth, Ferrovalle was faced with an important challenge: it needed to incorporate appropriate technology to conduct its operations, manage its business and automate company processes.
Because of its size, it seemed that the only way to do this was to employ a large team of technical specialists with experience in the area to develop software capable of meeting all of the company’s needs. However, this was not a viable option as Ferrovalle is a company with highly specialized processes, and it would take a great deal of time for any new technical team to become sufficiently familiarized with each process and acquire a proper understanding of the business. Another possible alternative was to hire a company that would fully develop the necessary systems, but this option also had two major disadvantages: it was very costly, and it meant that Ferrovalle would be absolutely dependent on the service provider.

This situation led the company to begin a search for models of its own and for proper development tools that would be capable of meeting such models’ process automation demands in a short time. In this context and with the aim of taking full advantage of the human resources available in the company and maximizing their potential, Ferrovalle chose GeneXus, because it is a tool which is very easy to use and is thus rapidly assimilated.

GeneXus proved to be an ideal choice, primarily because of its built-in design and prototype structure that, among other features, enables a quick development that entails rapidly deploying the system. Another advantage was that the short development times provided by GeneXus allowed Ferrovalle to significantly save time even after the solution was implemented.
“We can’t afford to spend two or three months in development tasks, because that would mean missing out on a business opportunity. With GeneXus we don’t have that problem, because development times are considerably shorter, and that gives our customers a great advantage,” Rúben Castillo, Ferrovalle IT Manager, declared.

Today, more than 65% of Ferrovalle’s systems are developed with GeneXus, and this tool represents a valuable ally when it comes to achieving the company’s business goals. An example of this is the Intermodal Logistic System, the most crucial element of the solution. This system controls the company’s operational management, its invoicing and the financial interfaces with an ERP system, incorporating a website for online queries where customers can monitor their activities or consult their service status. And all of this is developed on GeneXus.

“GeneXus allows you to have preliminary contacts with end users and make any necessary adjustments before anything is released. Today we can save the knowledge obtained through our development and change the platform whenever business requires it,” Enrique Torres, Systems Development Coordinator at Ferrovalle, explained.
With its new GeneXus-based technological architecture, Ferrovalle has enhanced its relationship with end users by bringing the company closer to its customers, and it has achieved the capacity to rapidly adapt to changes in its business processes, thus gaining an edge in an industry marked by constant innovation.