Case Study: GNAR achieves real-time rail yard visibility and operational efficiency with Heroku

GNAR Transforms Rail Yard Operations with an IoT platform on Heroku

GNAR, a digital product agency, partnered with RMS Intermodal—one of the U.S.’s largest intermodal terminal operators—to solve pervasive inefficiencies in rail yard operations that relied on driving managers, CB radios, and memory. The challenge was to deliver an immediately useful, scalable system that provided precise, real-time location and workload visibility across large, distributed sites without forcing GNAR’s small team to take on heavy DevOps duties.

GNAR built Intrmodl on Heroku, using Android tablets to stream GPS data, Apache Kafka on Heroku for event streaming, Heroku Postgres (with a follower for analytics), and Heroku Redis for caching. The platform gives managers real-time views of vehicles, crews, and container movements and pushes alerts to workers, improving coordination and productivity; five terminals are fully deployed with 45 more beginning rollout. By offloading operations to Heroku, GNAR focused on features while enabling a smooth handover to RMS’s internal team.

GNAR

Yuri Oliveira

Full Stack Engineer