52 DC VELOCITY APRIL 2016 www.dcvelocity.com
a
p
p
l
ic
at
i
o
ns
XTRA LEASE IS ONE OF THE NATION’S LARGEST
semi-trailer rental and leasing companies, with a fleet of
over 75,000 trailers and 50 locations. Trucking companies
look to lease trailers when they need additional capacity or
when they want to free up capital for other business needs.
Keeping track of all of those trailers can be a daunting
task. The St. Louis-based transportation company must
run some 1. 3 million data jobs each year to keep tabs on
all of its trailers. Not long ago, Xtra Lease was running a
hodge-podge collection of manually run or semi-automat-ed systems, including trailer tracking, accounts payable,
invoicing data, and asset management. None of these systems were synchronized.
“We lacked consistent monitoring, and it wasn’t always
easy to determine if something failed,” recalls Mitch Land,
chief technology officer at Xtra Lease. “In some cases, cus-
Xtra Lease realized it needed to centralize its automated
systems so that it could reliably monitor activities. The
company also sought a consistent automation environ-
ment that was more easily understood and supportable
by all IT staff. To meet these goals, Xtra Lease implement-
ed ActiveBatch, a workload automation solution from
Advanced Systems Concepts that simplifies the creation
and implementation of business and IT operational work-
flows for improved service.
With ActiveBatch in place, Xtra Lease now can easily see
which jobs are running, on which machines, and when.
“The level of automation allows us to quickly react to
any issues and resolve them before they become critical,”
says Land. He adds that ActiveBatch has provided clarity
into the company’s IT operations simply by allowing it to
understand how all of the various systems are interrelated.
Xtra Lease says it runs approximately 75,000 jobs a month
now, with a success rate of 99.3 percent. The system also
generates and delivers reports to Xtra Lease customers
assured that its thousands of semi-trailers stay on the road.
