4 Lessons for Your Next Technology Project

ELFA’s 2021 innovation winner asks, “Is there an easier way to do this?” and finds improvements virtually everywhere.

In today’s competitive environment, companies that don’t adapt and innovate will soon find themselves falling behind. Technology is changing virtually every area of business, while best practices in operations and client and employee experience illustrate the power of being agile and improving outdated systems and approaches.

Chicago Freight Car Leasing Co. (CFCL), a Sasser Family Company, is a perfect example of the potential of technology and innovation to drive operational efficiency and growth. The company is the recipient of ELFA’s 2021 Operations and Technology Excellence Award (O&TE), which recognizes innovative uses of technology in the equipment finance industry. CFCL is recognized for creating Rail360, a proprietary, web-based application that gives the company unprecedented insight into its fleet of roughly 11,000 railcars. 

“Technology alone doesn’t solve problems,” said Tawnya Stone, Chair of the O&TE Award Subcommittee and Vice President, Strategic Technology at GreatAmerica Financial Services, noting that CFCL’s approach to their winning project made them stand out among this year’s impressive field of award applicants. “This initiative was created out of a need to solve a problem, incorporating customer needs, creating better flexibility and allowing the organization to scale over time. The fact that CFCL couldn’t find a solution, so they built their own so thoughtfully and thoroughly made their technology deployment stand out.” 

Lessons from a Digital Transformation

Rail360 connects accounting, asset management and customer management software to the new operations application. The system allows the CFCL team to easily see mileage, repairs, assets, leases, customers and real-time equipment tracing data in one place. By combining a number of existing operating systems as well as a public web portal for customer and repair shop access, the company consolidated and streamlined processes from two to three separate applications to one.

“The team took a systemic, thorough approach to this initiative,” says Jennifer Martin, Chair of ELFA’s Operations & Technology Committee and Vice President, Leasing and Vendor Program Support at Key Equipment Finance. “They were very thoughtful about their strategic vision and how to plan and build for it, while rooting their efforts in client experience.” 

The process of conceptualizing, developing and deploying Rail360 took nearly five years. Throughout that process, the team learned important lessons about embracing change, remaining agile and the importance of data and technology. Equipment Leasing & Finance magazine asked members of the CFCL team to share lessons learned from their project to help other equipment finance companies pondering changes in operations and/or technology. Read on for some fresh ideas and food for thought for your next technology project. 

1. Build Momentum with Small Deployments

CFCL is part of the Sasser Family Companies, a collection of transportation asset leasing services and management organizations. Sasser’s information technology (IT) team has always followed “agile methodology,” which is a means of making project management and software development more efficient by breaking it up into phases. Even so, it was challenging to move the project along with a series of small deployments instead of building out bigger pieces of the new system and then deploying them for greater impact. 

“It’s hard to get in the mindset of building something small and getting it out there for the user,” says Brock Morrison, Sasser’s Chief Information Officer. “We tended to do more of a ‘big bang’ approach where we would release more functionality at one time.”

However, releasing smaller pieces of the system had benefits. First, they were able to build momentum with small success stories, Morrison says. And they could catch opportunities for improvement. For example, by releasing tools related to repairs and operations management early, the company was able to reduce the time it spent calculating rental periods and issuing rental credits to customers, improving overall customer experience. 

In addition, a key member of the operations team was nearing retirement. By systematizing the processes that individual did from memory, CFCL was able to capture that institutional knowledge and approach to managing customers in the software, says Jay Wilensky, CFCL’s Vice President, Accounting & Finance. “A big driver of this focus was getting the knowledge that was in our team’s heads—how things worked—into the system,” he says.

“It’s like that Henry Ford quote, ‘If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.’ Nobody was envisioning the automobile at that time.”

Josh Chesser
Chicago Freight Car Leasing Co., a Sasser Family Company

2. Test Everything

By deploying small pieces of the overall system, the team was also able to test everything, which was essential to the initiative’s success, says Josh Chesser, CFCL’s Interim General Manager. Frequent testing allows the team to make changes to software and systems on a smaller scale, reducing the need for new code across the entire system. That duplication or correction of coding is called “technical debt,” and can be costly in terms of time and resources. 

Even though the testing was being done on a small scale, it was still hard for users to find time in their days to do the testing, Morrison adds. “We actually scheduled working testing sessions that were facilitated. By blocking out the time and making that commitment, we got the feedback we needed.” 

3. Keep Team Members Engaged and Involved 

Throughout the process, CFCL wanted to ensure that the team realized this was a chance to improve systems across the board. That required thinking beyond immediate tasks. “It’s like that Henry Ford quote, ‘If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.’ Nobody was envisioning the automobile at that time,” Chesser says. Team leaders encouraged employees to think about how every process and system could be streamlined or improved with software. 

“By continuously pushing people and saying, ‘Well, isn’t that how you do it now? Is there an easier way to do this? Can you do it in bulk?’ we found improvements virtually everywhere,” he says. These included everything from simplifying processes to adopting digital signature technology to automating repair, accounting and bookkeeping functions. “Everybody who had a keyboard inside of our organization had input into how this software was built.”

Another key challenge for the team was that, even as the new system was being developed and deployed incrementally, employees had to use both systems, sometimes entering data into both the legacy system and the new system. “We were operating at one period of time in two different systems simultaneously, which created duplicate work in some cases. But everybody understood that by going through this, it’s painful right now, but there’s a reward at the end,” Chesser says. “From the comments that came through, everyone would do it again.”

4. Build on Your Innovation Foundation

Now that the technological infrastructure is in place, the company has a solid foundation on which to build. So, what’s next? “To sum it up, in two words: digital business,” Morrison says. With the new system, CFCL can use its commercial API to enable customers to integrate with the company directly, instead of manually sharing data back and forth with email or some legacy system. Rail360 enables integration with other platforms to streamline transactions, collect signatures, and otherwise move the business forward, he adds. As new opportunities for innovation offer promise to help the business grow and scale, Rail360 can adapt to integrate with those systems and help the business capitalize on emerging opportunities.