With the emergence of Web services platforms that provide the ability of one computer to get
information from another computer without human intervention, companies are seeing an
immediate increase in the efficiency of their back-office functions. PC*MILER Web Services
provides a standardized environment in which your transportation costs such as rates, routes,
actual driven mileage, driver satisfaction, surcharges, and toll costs can be accurately managed.
ALK’s latest Web Services product continues to increase PC*MILER’s leadership position in the
transportation industry.
The benefits provided by PC*MILER Web Services include:
Access an accurate and reliable single-source of PC*MILER functionality.
Manage and plan all routing, mileage and mapping requests.
Standardize transportation transactions in a simple ubiquitous system-interface to any
platform.
Eliminate the need for extra IT resources, including maintaining and supporting multiple
servers.
Streamline freight payment/audit procedures.
Decrease time to market with optimized routes and standard mileage reports.
PC*MILER Web Services is designed to efficiently fulfill all PC*MILER routing, mileage and
mapping transactions in a simple ubiquitous system-interface to any platform. Web services in
general allow different applications from different sources to communicate with each other
without time-consuming custom coding, and because all communication is in XML, Web
services are not tied to any one operating system or programming language. For example, Java
can talk with Perl, and Windows applications can talk with UNIX applications.
A hardware and software agnostic interface, PC*MILER Web Services gives you the ability to
access all the functionality associated with the core PC*MILER product, making it easier to
share data and improve efficiency. It offers a standardized way of integrating Web-based
applications using XML and SOAP over an Internet Protocol Backbone, where XML is used to
tag data and SOAP is used to transfer the data. Developers can then add the Web service to a
GUI (such as a Web page or an executable program) to offer specific functionality to users.
Technical benefits of PC*MILER Web Services include:
Access to an open-source, platform agnostic, Microsoft .NET XML Interface. A schema
driven SOAP/XML interface developed in .NET.
Alternative programming interface to our existing COM, Java, or OLE-
Additional mileage solution to PC*MILER’s existing PC, Unix/Linux, AS/400, and
Mainframe-based solutions.
The security of knowing that the service is hosted in an enterprise-ready data center to
provide you with a consistent and reliable source for your mileage, mapping and routing
needs.
Transparent access to mid-release and/or annual map, data and routing updates to keep
your operations in one central location, running on the most reliable routes.
Seamless integration with Web Services or .NET interfaces or applications.
PC*MILER Web Services is housed in a production-ready data center on a number of servers as
part of a server farm. A load balancing router will act as a gateway to these servers, and forward
requests appropriately.
The diagrams below are high-level graphical representations of PC*MILER Web Services.