Cloud-based transportation management system modules can be used to reduce fleet size and cut cycle time. They can integrate sensor data streams to deliver near-real time metrics.
The top-performing transportation management system tools give shippers the visibility and data to optimize processes at headquarters, the loadout and the transloading facility
By Jesse Morton, Technical Writer
The top-performing transportation management system (TMS) modules offer, first and foremost, visibility and automated analytics. Accurate ETAs and ETIs help the shipper be proactive. Analytics can be used to optimize processes, reduce fleet size and speed cycle time.
The top TMSs also serve as a single, centralized source of truth, consolidating workflows and simplifying reporting. Office tedium and paperwork is reduced. Accurate performance metrics generate automatically and are available immediately.
TMS suppliers say adoption is simple, usage is straightforward and the benefits are substantial. Future development, they said, is driven by customer needs and will add more reporting capabilities and automation.
Enhanced Visibility Provides Accurate ETAs, ETIs
Wabtec Corp. said the newly released Enhanced Visibility, an online railcar-tracking solution, gives shippers critical car and fleet metrics that can be used in planning and in process optimization. “Today, it provides a trusted single source of truth and industry-leading ETA and ETI performance data, helping shippers, short lines and logistics partners make smarter, faster decisions with confidence,” said Anna Kunnen, director of product management, digital products.
“This tool stitches all this data together across all the railroads and really provides that clear end-to-end picture,” she said.
Available by subscription and accessed on any device with a web browser, Enhanced Visibility is a module of RailConnect. Wabtec describes RailConnect as a platform supporting a “suite of transportation and revenue management services for railroads, rail shippers and rail leasing companies.”
Enhanced Visibility allows a coal shipper “to track all of their shipments regardless of what railroad they are on,” Kunnen said. It thereby eliminates some guesswork and empowers the user to cut inefficiencies.
“It provides very clear ETIs and ETAs, often that are 70% or more accurate than the ETA they would get from a Class 1 railroad,” she said. “And they would be able to see analytics against that asset utilization.” Those analytics are performed by “an algorithm that is so smart and so accurate that it takes into consideration not only historical run times on a single railroad, but across multiple railroads that often handle that loading facility’s shipment.”
The analytics can be used to support car and fleet management, planning and optimization. Enhanced Visibility ensures “you have the right information to manage your crews, which are moving at the appropriate pace that gets your shipment from Point A to Point B,” she said. It supports process optimization so a shipper can “have a smaller fleet they can load faster and turn faster so their asset costs can go down.”
Upon initial adoption, “there is about 30 days of history that we need to build up,” she said. “You have to build that history in order to get the algorithms to execute at their optimum level.”
The end-user simply “provides all the equipment information to us and then we plug it into the system,” she said. “We track all that information” and “that data repository builds.”
The software is “easy, super-intuitive” to use, and is loaded with “how-to documents,” Kunnen said. “You can’t break anything because there is no action that can be taken inside Enhanced Visibility that forces anything to get broken.”
Most customers require minimal support. “Once we’ve set them up and we do a quick 30-minute training, often we don’t hear more from customers,” she said.
One early adopter used it to dramatically cut car or fleet placement dwell and cycle time. “With the clarity provided by Enhanced Visibility and the details that come with it and knowing at a more than 70% accuracy rate that these locations can better plan, they were able to take their placement dwell average of 10 days and bring it down to 5.2,” she said. “That is a 48% decrease in that placement dwell.”
The module has also been used to reduce congestion and time spent at interchange. This is supported by accurate ETAs and ETIs. “If that interchange time can be reduced, how long those cars are sitting there, decreasing that time really decreases the turn time,” Kunnen said.
“One strong measurement that we’ve been focused on is decreasing that dwell at interchange,” she said. “We’ve seen a use case where it went from two days to less than a day. That is more than a 55% decrease.”
If the history of RailConnect is any indication, Enhanced Visibility will deliver on expectations. “RailConnect has been an industry staple for 30 years,” Kunnen said. “RailConnect was here and developed alongside Car Hire,” one of Wabtec’s flagship offerings.
The development of Enhanced Visibility was driven largely by customer feedback. It “was a solution need born out of our passion to listen to customer pain points,” she said. “During our annual RailConnect User Conference at the end of 2024, the theme ‘We Hear You’ wasn’t just a message; it was a commitment.”
Customers laid out their challenges, foremost of which “was the lack of reliable, accurate rail visibility,” Kunnen said. “Those pain points brought the need for a new solution to life.”
Development maintained a “laser focus” on those pain points, and resulted in “the accuracy the market had been missing,” she said.
Current and future development will build out some of the existing capabilities and add new ones. “Some of the new capabilities that we are really focused on because the end users are really focused on include expanding on the analytics and allowing more action to be taken within Enhanced Visibility,” Kunnen said.
“For example, that ordering of a car or releasing it, empty or loaded, submitting a bill of lading, creating those appropriate integrations to allow those users to be able to take action on the things that they are seeing within the data,” she said. “As more users are onboarded, we get more asks for data and how are we slicing and dicing it.”
Data, she said, is the lifeblood of the modern business. “We will continue to build out the dashboards and the data points that end users, coal mines, a shipper, a receiver of coal would need in order to make a good operational decision to drive their operating expenses down and keep the economy moving.”
Cloud-based Enhanced Visibility analytics can be used to support car and fleet management, planning and optimization. Above, the module shows delay time statistics. (Image: Wabtec)
Kaleris TMS Flags Delays, Errant ETAs
A rail-shipper solutions expert at Kaleris said its TMS helps coal shippers spot and address issues earlier, tighten cycle times and cut detention and demurrage exposure. “One key question shippers often ask is how to ensure they are paying only for the costs they are responsible for,” said Jake Thomason, account executive and rail solutions architect. “Our platform provides the transparency and auditability needed to answer that confidently.”
That transparency also allows coal shippers to identify and mitigate potential delays. “Coal shippers often struggle when a bad order or defective car is removed from a unit train,” he said. “Kaleris provides clear visibility into these stragglers, allowing shippers to immediately identify which car had the issue and where it is located.”
The TMS gives coal shippers the ability to view, assess and act on the big picture. The shipper can “manage shipments from a unit-train perspective, rather than one car at a time,” which “is a major advantage,” he said. “The Unit Train Summary tools can provide coal-centric insights such as coal quality, mine manifest information and unload times, making it easier to understand where every car is and how the train is progressing.”
Those metrics and others enable the coal shipper to be proactive instead of reactive. “A frequent challenge is ensuring accurate loading weights,” Thomason said. “By integrating directly with scales and loading systems, Kaleris eliminates operator error and increases automation,” he said. “Without this visibility, shippers often waste time chasing information instead of acting on it.”
Thomason describes the Kaleris TMS as “a multimodal solution with an integrated suite of rail-focused transportation and asset management tools designed for industrial shippers, terminals and carriers.” It “delivers comprehensive rail and road transportation management capabilities that support shippers across the shipment and railcar lifecycle.”
The TMS “streamlines freight rate management, billing, shipment tracking, yard operations, maintenance and analytics,” he said. “Customers can adopt our comprehensive Enterprise Rail TMS solution or get started with capabilities that meet their immediate needs, such as tracking or billing, and add on over time.”
The engine of the TMS, the Enterprise Rail Management Platform, “unifies transportation, fleet and maintenance workflows into a single, cloud-based system,” Thomason said. It provides “real-time visibility into all rail assets, locations, ETAs and shipment statuses.” It can support automated billing workflows. It enables “end-to-end, yard-shop-yard lifecycle tracking for railcars and chassis.” And it talks to an integrated repair shop network comprised of more than 700 shops.
The platform offers key capabilities for rail shippers. Central to them is the Transport Analytics module, which Thomason describes as “a business-intelligence layer providing deep rail supply-chain analytics.” The module delivers information such as load status, in-transit metrics, cycle time, dwell time and detention charges. “It also includes dashboards, root-cause analysis tools, mobile apps and multi-source data ingestion.”
The TRAX module gives “real-time shipment tracking by integrating event data from hundreds of railroads,” he said. “It provides the locations of shipments, real-time status updates and ETAs.”
The TMS also employs a module for intermodal and trucking operations.
These integrated modules centralize, clarify and streamline rail-shipping management processes. Without an Enterprise Rail Transportation Management Platform, “shippers often rely on multiple websites, manual workflows, or spreadsheets, limiting real-time insight,” Thomason said. The platform “centralizes this information, giving shippers a clear and up-to-date view of their operations.”
The platform has been used by rail shippers for more than two decades to provide the visibility needed to debottleneck operations. For example, one shipper used the platform and modules to demystify billing, speed decision-making and generate actionable metrics. When moving up to 10 trains or 1,400 cars per week, from a mine loadout to power plants and along two Class 1 lines, complexity and inefficiency created compounding challenges, a manager with Kaleris said.
“Every coal movement was billed as a single ‘unit train,’” said Elizabeth Hansen, customer success manager. “This means back-office teams still had to trace more than 130 cars individually to understand location, ETA and exceptions,” she said. “In this setup, exceptions surfaced late, and status views were fragmented across railroad portals.”
The shipper was also seeking to cut time at interchange. “The lack of early warning on dwell- and interchange-delays led to irregular cycle times and mounting detention and demurrage exposure,” she said.
The amount of manual work involved in tracking metrics was unwieldy, Hansen said. “Operations teams spent hours building spreadsheet reports with inconsistent KPIs for transit, dwell and trip performance.”
Providing end-to-end, lifecycle tracking for railcars, the cloud-based Enterprise Rail Management Platform supports multiple workflows and gives a clear, timely view of rail-shipping operations.
The Kaleris TMS enabled unit-train reporting and management so “planners could see the entire train as a single asset, with drill-down to car-level exceptions only when needed,” she said. Unit-level dashboards that highlight exceptions support timely decisions.
Trip and fleet management tools alert and flag “dwell over thresholds, interchange delays and miss-to-plan ETAs,” Hansen said. “KPIs like transit, dwell, cycle time and trip analysis are computed consistently at train and car levels, making performance reviews simpler and comparable across lanes and plants.” And template-based, configurable, scheduled reporting capability ensured “leadership and plant schedulers got the right report at the right cadence without manual work.”
Currently, the Kaleris TMS is being enhanced to enable and support more automation and inputs. “Advancements in cameras and AI will help fill information gaps and further reduce operational costs compared with legacy AEI readers,” Thomason said. “Our goal is for shippers to log in and immediately see the items needing attention, not the items already operating smoothly.”
Identifying many of the items needing attention will be automated. “Upcoming capabilities will allow railcar events to trigger automatically based on flexible business rules, improve the precision of placement logic and streamline the entire railcar loading and unloading lifecycle,” he said. “Bulk processes, both for inbound and outbound, are also being optimized for speed and efficiency.”
Reporting capabilities will be upgraded. “Our reporting suite is growing with new operational reports designed to give rail teams deeper insight into loaded cars, inventory adjustments, unloading activity and more,” he said. “Enhanced cycle time analytics and improved straggler reporting will make it easier to spot trends, isolate issues and make faster, better-informed decisions.”
These updates, when released, will reduce maintenance work, Thomason said. They will tighten “system cohesion and give rail operators the precision tools they need to move faster and operate smarter.”
Source: www.coalage.com
