Case Study: Canal Barge Company achieves faster, better‑informed decision‑making and unified collaboration with IBM Connections Cloud (IBM)

Canal Barge Company Inc. boosts competitiveness by bringing decision-makers together in the cloud

Canal Barge Company (CBC), a family‑owned marine transportation firm with a distributed workforce across vessels, multiple facilities and field staff, needed to share knowledge more effectively and make faster, better‑informed decisions to stay competitive. To break down silos and improve agility, Canal Barge Company turned to IBM, adopting IBM Connections Cloud and IBM Verse to provide cloud‑based collaboration, mobile access and social business tools.

IBM migrated CBC from its on‑premises Notes/Domino environment to IBM Connections Cloud (with IBM Verse), rolling out communities, wikis, activities, video conferencing and mobile access. Adoption grew to more than half of corporate employees; in 18 months CBC added over 2,000 pieces of content and created 70 active communities, with about 40 users on the mobile app, while mailbox migration proceeded smoothly. The IBM solution centralized collaboration, accelerated decision‑making, increased transparency and accountability, and helped CBC streamline processes and prepare for secure external collaboration.

Canal Barge Company

Carl Fravel

Director of Information Systems and Knowledge Management