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36 Chapter 2 • Systems Integration

CASE 2-1
Opening Case
Air Cargo’s e-Enterprise System

Source: Adapted from Financial Executive’s News, June 2002, p. 8. www.Ioma.Com; Ed McKenna.
(December 13, 2004). ACI Hits Stop Sign. Traffic World. Newark, p. 1.
Air Cargo, Inc. (ACI) is a logistics management company providing air cargo ground
services to 17+ shareholder airlines and 53 associates, including a road feeder service
that connects airports and cities in the United States and Europe, pickup and delivery of
regular air cargo shipments, small package air cargo pickup, and delivery of flight-
specific, time-definite shipments. A major system crash in the late 1990s caused ACI’s
revenue to drop from about $150 million to about $145 million; this served as a wake-up
alarm for management and started their systems integration effort with their e-Enterprise
system.

PROBLEMS WITH FUNCTIONAL SILOS
ACI runs various business applications for dispatching, invoicing, freight audits, and
reconciliation. Before converting to ERP, ACI’s accounting staff had to export and import
text files to communicate across accounting and business applications. This took time and
made even the most recent report slightly dated. ACI initially considered simply upgrading
its existing accounting system to a new release; however, Jack Downing, ACI’s IT director,
decided this approach was not feasible because they had developed numerous custom
procedures in their accounting and other business applications. “An upgrade wouldn’t
have been economical,” he explained, “because we had made so many custom changes to
the old software.”

e-ENTERPRISE SYSTEM
ACI therefore implemented four e-Enterprise applications—its financial series, distribution
series, customization series, and integration series—and integrated them with a database
management system, Microsoft SQL Server, at the backend. In addition, ACI used the
Microsoft transformation services. The immediate effect of this implementation was the
integration of the accounting system with the line-of-business applications, thereby elimi-
nating manual data reentry. This occurred because Microsoft SQL Server and the Data
Transformation Services (DTS) software connected to ACI’s line-of-business applications
and delivered transaction data to the ACI e-Enterprise system. DTS software is an extract,
transform, and load (ETL) tool which consolidates data from disparate sources to single or
1
multiple destinations. These data were used to update the financial records. Note that DTS
runs in the background on a regular basis without requiring manual intervention. As a
result, the accounting department no longer needs to export and import line-of-business
records manually to generate its reports.

1 See Microsoft Web site for more details: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc917688.aspx (accessed February
2007).