RailConnect™ Transportation Management System

RailConnect Transportation Management System (TMS)

A backbone operational system for railroads, RailConnect TMS automates the day-to-day operations, provides visibility to railcars and railroad assets, facilitates seamless interchange of rail traffic, and manages daily operational functions (yard, inventory control, train management, waybill control, switching, etc.).

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Key Capabilities:

• Car and Train Scheduling: Plan and schedule train and railcar trips. Measure actual performance against plan.
• Crew Work Orders: Generate work orders for train crews based on railroad transportation plans. Record completions, delays/incompletions.  
• Advanced Automation:  Automatically classify and block cars as they are received or delivered and move over the railroad infrastructure.   
• Train Exception Management Rules:  Establish operating rules for safety and compliance.
• Dynamic Notifications: Systematically create customized notifications for internal and external use. Send customers daily reports of cars on hand, cars en route, and cars handled.
• Complete Waybill Control: Manage all aspects of railcar billing  
• Scheduled Reports:  Easily create reports with user-defined tables and run at scheduled times.  
• AEI: Automate Arrivals, Departures, Set-outs, Pick Ups, Placements, Releases, and Waybill Weight updates.  
• Comprehensive Interfaces:  Includes Dispatch Systems, Scale, Hump, ERP, AEI, and more.

RailConnect Revenue Management System (RMS)

RailConnect RMS is a comprehensive railroad accounting system that fully automates the rating process and optimizes revenue management performance. Integrating seamlessly with the industry standard Interline Settlement System® (ISS), RMS features a powerful rating engine and rate database that manages the settlement of freight revenue between railroads. 

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Key Capabilities:

• Powerful Rating Engine: Automate the rating process for all aspects of railcar billing. Streamline the settlement of freight revenue between railroads. Quickly access current and historical rates.
• Revenue Protection:  Ensures that all traced waybills have associated revenue related to car movement.
• Electronic Exchange of Waybills: Automates electronic transmission of invoices to customers. Seamlessly integrates with industry standard EDI transaction sets.

RailConnect mCrew

Boost productivity by putting the power of RailConnect TMS directly into the hands of train crew. RailConnect mCrew is a mobile reporting tool, integrated with RailConnect TMS, that enables train crews to execute their work in a digital application. Train arrivals, departures, customer placements and pulls can be quickly and easily entered into TMS directly from mCrew.

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Key Capabilities:

Crew Capture: Train crew able to update work in real time via mobile device from the field.

Yard Management: Track to track, station to station movements.

Train Management: Enables crews to report arrival/departure, pickups/set-outs.

Real Time:  Updates work orders with work performed en route in real time.  

Offline/Online:  Allows train crews to work outside of network coverage and auto-syncs when within coverage.

Work List Management: Enables crews to manage subset of cars within yard or in multiple yards  

RailConnect Visibility and Planning

Unlock data to better track and organize railcar shipments. RailConnect Visibility and Planning alleviates the complexities of the supply chain, enabling informed, real-time decision-making and bringing predictability and efficiency to freight rail.

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Key Capabilities:

• Dynamic shipper demand forecast (30 days)  
• Inbound rail car pipeline visibility  
• Inbound view
• Visibility to railcars in yard
• Dynamic ETAs/ETIs
• Holistic rail integration:  Short lines and Class 1s  
• Workload planning  
• Work order automation  
• Operational metrics

RailConnect Car Hire System

Automate your accounting processes with RailConnect Car Hire System. Car Hire efficiently manages processing for railroads, while quickly and accurately calculating car hire and reclaims for hundreds of payable and receivable customers. A robust system, Car Hire helps railcar users calculate monthly car hire hours and automatically submits industry-mandated AAR files – handling more than a million equipment cycles per month.

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Key Capabilities:

• Car movement and waybill data from RailConnect TMS is tightly integrated with RailConnect Car Hire and AAR’s Liability Continuity System (LCS), providing timely and accurate information
• Car Hire Receivables provides a thorough audit of monthly Car Hire earnings and produces claims where shortages are detected  
• Reports to identify above-market rates, missing reclaims, excessive dwell, mileage overpayment and unreported interchanges
• Robust reports to monitor activity and identify trends
• Ability to audit monthly Car Hire earnings and expenses
• Generation of claims when shortages are detected  

RailConnect Contract Management

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Efficient execution and management of contracts over their life cycle is central to maximizing business performance. RailConnect Contract Management is a fully integrated contract platform, designed uniquely for railroads, that manages the lifecycle of all freight service contracts, provides visibility to stakeholders across the organization, directly connects contract data with REN (Rates EDI Network) and RMS (Rating Engine), and optimizes the contracting process.

Key Capabilities:

Contract Creation / Quote Generation:  

• Prepare, quote, negotiate, and approve
• Origin/Destination pair-to-route matching validation
• Simplified price input; streamlined to Rates EDI Network (REN) publication

Publish Pricing:

• Integration with Rates EDI Network (REN); validation with industry reference files
• Integration with rating engine – RMS
• Compliance with industry standards

Operationalize Commercial Agreements:

• Central freight contract repository
• Secure access protections
• Searchable database, accessible to all authorized stakeholders

RailConnect Advanced Analytics:

Dealing with data is time-consuming and complex.  The new and ever-increasing abundance of data being collected is often overwhelming for most organizations, and, as a result, usually underutilized. Companies often find it challenging to translate the large volume of data gathered into useful information that provides actionable business intelligence to unique stakeholders across the organization. The result: paper-based reporting, limited access to information, and resource intensive processes.   

Advanced Analytics is a powerful business intelligence reporting tool for RailConnect Transportation Management that integrates, aggregates, and correlates rail data and delivers actionable intelligence for empowered decision making.

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Key Capabilities:

Revenue Management: Provides powerful, real-time business intelligence for the management of railroad accounting, revenue, and invoicing.

• Improve Accounting
• Eliminate manual processes
• Monitor, measure, and manage business
• Drive business outcomes

Transportation Management: Delivers analytics and business tools designed to support and improve operational decision-making.

• Drive operational efficiencies
• Monitor, measure, and manage business
• Maximize asset utilization
• Increase business velocity

Car Management:  Delivers comprehensive analytics and business tools designed to support and improve the management of car accounting.

• Improve accounting
• Maximize asset utilization
• Forecast car hire
• Maximize opportunities

Corporate Reporting: Consolidates valuable business information across multiple railroads and provides organization-wide visibility and actionable business intelligence.  

• Gain visibility and business insights
• View all railroads at one time
• Integrates operational data from multiple sources into a single consolidated view
• Monitor, measure, and manage business