Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) said that it has enabled Wabtec Corporation successfully wrap up the post-merger integration of GE Transportation’s core systems.

According to the Indian IT services provider, the integration gave Wabtec’s freight and rail business a future-ready digital core along with a playbook for future acquisitions and mergers.

TCS said that it was part of the pre-merger planning centering on the separation of the core systems from the parent having been a strategic partner for GE Transportation for several years.

After the merger deal was announced in 2019, the Indian firm had helped in mapping out the interrelationships and dependencies that make use of its deep contextual knowledge of the business and technology landscape of GE Transportation.

Richard Smith — Chief Information Officer of Wabtec said: “This merger with GE Transportation helps Wabtec become a technologically advanced global transportation and logistics leader with the integration of a highly complementary set of capabilities that enable us to accelerate the future of transportation.

“TCS’ strong understanding of our business and innovative approach helped in building a digital core which paves the way for our growth and transformation journey.”

TCS said that it had held design thinking workshops with stakeholders in 13 countries, for mapping out to create a detailed blueprint covering 100 plus business functions, for integrating the operations and systems of GE Transportation into the ecosystem of Wabtec.

The company by using its Digital Melting Pot framework is said to have consolidated the ERP estate of GE Transportation onto a single core instance, synchronizing processes and decommissioning the legacy mainframe-based system. This led to a single source of truth throughout the enterprise to facilitate better planning and make decision-making faster, said TCS.

The Indian IT firm said that the transformation also simplified the following integration of the consolidated core ERP instance which involved 130 legal entities, along with the entire business intelligence infrastructure that included 14,000 reports, 10,000 underlying ETL jobs and applications, data warehouses, and related databases into the IT landscape of Wabtec.

Furthermore, TCS helped Wabtec build a future-ready digital core by shifting the mission-critical remote monitoring and diagnostic applications of GE Transportation that monitor the health of more than 23,000 locomotives in the field, onto the AWS cloud.

The Indian company’s consulting and service integration practice performed a finance transformation, which improved the productivity metrics by 30%, while providing the base for an operating model transformation across the finance operations of Wabtec.

Anupam Singhal — Senior Vice President of TCS said: “We are very proud to partner with Wabtec in harnessing our collective contextual knowledge and helping integrate GE Transportation’s core systems within the stipulated timeline with zero disruption to business.

“The new digital core will help unlock business synergies from the merger and unleash digital technology capabilities that will transform the transportation and logistics sector.”

  Anupam Singhal, GE Transportation, Richard Smith, Tata Consultancy Services, Wabtec