Jacksonville, FL — March 20, 2003 — Landstar System Inc., one of the country's fastest-growing transportation services companies and named to Forbes magazine's Platinum 400 List for four consecutive years, has nearly 1,000 independent sales agents and more than 7,000 independent business capacity owners who supply more than 8,000 power units to the Landstar system. With that much business data from so many different places, the company decided it was time to connect its network of independent truckers, agents and customers via the Web for the sake of its business intelligence.
That's why this week the company announced it has deployed the Enterprise Integration Suite from Ascential Software Corp. to share strategic business data across its customers, agents and affiliated owner/operators via the Web.
Landstar System Inc., the holding company for six operating companies, deployed the Enterprise Integration Suite to profile, transform and load high volumes of disparate data from those companies' legacy computer systems into a central data warehouse. That Ascential-based data warehouse feeds standardized data to Landstar's business-to-business Web site and business intelligence applications to meet the needs of a broad range of business contributors, including the company's agents, transport suppliers and customers.
Within the Enterprise Integration Suite are three data integration products for data profiling, data quality and data transformation on a shared platform of software services that achieves scalability through parallel processing, management of metadata (descriptive information about data), and connectivity of source and target data, according to Ascential.
"Landstar's success is predicated on the success of our affiliated network of sales agents and business capacity owners — thousands of small businesses," said Landstar Vice President of Advanced Technology Patrick Wise. "That entire network depends on continuous flows of accurate, timely data about every aspect of our shared business."
Forward thinking seems to have paid off for the transportation services provider: Forbes magazine noted in its most recent Platinum 400 listing that Landstar's stock price has increased 297 percent over the past five years.
