Texas Petrochemicals LP (TPC)
eCast System
Houston, Texas

Project Overview

Texas Petrochemicals LP (TPC), headquartered in Houston, Texas, specializes in C4 hydrocarbons. The company's integrated manufacturing facility focuses on production within four main business units: C4 Olefins, Specialty Chemicals, Fuel Products and Polyisobutylene. TPC maintains its leadership in the industry with an innovative ability to bring high-quality products to the marketplace. Among the diverse product lines available to TPC customers are Butadiene, Butene-1, Isobutylene and Isobutylene derivatives.

Business Challenge
As a major provider of specialty chemicals, TPC was challenged with managing, coordinating, and communicating product order entry and shipment information with its many clients. The original process relied heavily on phone calls to place orders, confirm fulfillment and to track delivery by rail, truck, pipeline or barge. The TPC customer service staff was constantly bombarded with special requests for information, charting and legal documentation related to customer contracts, orders and invoices. Many of these requests were met through the use of time consuming manual processes including hand-generated reports, manual faxing and significant time spent on the phone. Compounding the issue was that many of the source systems providing the needed information were not integrated, requiring personnel to dual-enter information or look in multiple systems to fulfill customer requests.

TPC needed a way to improve these processes and increase their responsiveness to customer needs while reducing an already over-burdened staff. Trilliant Corporation was engaged by TPC to evaluate the processes and systems and to design, develop and implement a system to address these specific needs, TPC's eCAST (Customer Assistance and Shipment Tracking) System.

Technology Challenge
Trilliant Corporation set to work designing a system that would address the important customer service needs of TPC. As part of the design effort Trilliant had to address considerable issues in three key areas:

Functional Issues
o The system had to provide an array of information spanning numerous functional areas and departments within TPC including; Customer Service, Accounting, Order Fulfillment and Process Lab.
o The system had to filter data provided to customers based on the unique requirements of each customer based numerous parameters including:
-Company
-Plant location(s)
-Product type(s)
-Ability to view financial information (Invoice dollar amounts, etc.)
-eCAST had to be flexible enough to allow some level of customization for the users access to charting analysis data.

Integration / Data Issues
o Data required for the system came from a myriad of dispersed sources
-Cross platform - Oracle and SQL Server
-Cross department - Business Applications and Scientific Applications
-Cross application - Ross ERP, OTIS (TPC's order entry system), LIMS (Lab analysis tools)
-Cross enterprise - TPC internal systems and external data sources for shipment tracking (Bourque Data Systems)

Security Issues
o Paramount to TPC was the security of the data to be presented. The information is of direct value to TPC but also is sensitive and proprietary to each to TPC's clients
o TPC needed to ensure eCAST did the following:
o Did not allow access to internal applications at TPC
o Confirmed data displayed on the site was not accessible by unauthorized users.

Solution
In collaboration with TPC, Trilliant Corporation worked to evaluate and understand the current processes and systems in place at TPC to handle placement, fulfillment and tracking of orders to customers. In addition, Trilliant worked with TPC's customer service department to understand the many information requests solicited by their clients every day. These included requests for specific order information, quality analysis charts, legal bills of lading, current status of orders in transit and invoicing data. It was clear that TPC needed an efficient, reliable and secure way to allow their customers to place orders and gain access to important information related to their orders and invoices.

Trilliant Corporation's solution was a fully web-enabled application built within the following framework:
-Active Server Pages deployed on Microsoft IIS Web server.
-COM/DCOM components for the business logic layer
-Use of a Firewall DMZ to house the eCAST application and protect TPC's computing environment.
-SQL Server as a backend database
-Data interface with core TPC applications is handled via a "Push" of data from TPC applications out to eCAST in the DMZ
-SSL 64-bit Encryption
-FTP and custom protocols for integration with Bourque Data Systems (Shipment tracking)

The finalized system meets TPC's requirements addressing all the issues identified in the three areas of functionality, integration/data issues and security. Functionality included:

eCAST Application Features
-Access to Invoice History for up to 12-24 months
-Access to Volume and Purchase history from OTIS (TPC's Order Entry System)
-Access to Shipment Tracking information from Railtrac.com (Bourque Data Systems) including
o Shipment Method
o Actual Ship Date
o Expected Arrival Date
o Car/Truck Number
o P.O. Number
-Access to Bill of Lading data
-Access to product certificate of analysis information
-Ability to view future scheduled shipment data including dates and quantities
-Access to product MSDS (Material Safety Data Sheet) information
-Functionality to provide positive confirmation (e-Mail, Fax, Web, etc.) based on client preferences.
-Ability to view SOQ Graphs
-Ability to view Certificate of Analysis
-Specific product specifications for each customer by customer by product by site.

Conceptually, the TPC eCAST system architecture was as follows:

Benefit
TPC has realized significant benefits from the deployment of eCAST. With its initial release, the system reduced the workload on the Customer Services staff for tracking down status and other information on customer orders. This information is now available online and/or via fax or email to the customer based on their user set requirements.

The system provides a safe environment for customers to access their information and to place orders for product at their leisure. The TPC team now has a single source for accessing customer order, shipment, invoice and product information.

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