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Short Line Data Systems Inc. ROCS Update – July 2002
Greetings.
As we said in last month’s update, we are going to have a number of announcements this summer. This month’s is the addition of a new railroad to the Short Line Data Systems’ ROCS family. We are happy to announce that the Adrian & Blissfield Railroad Company, a group of four lines in the Detroit, Michigan area has signed on to use ROCS, and we anticipate deploying the system on their computers in August.
We have been working on a couple of new features in ROCS over the last month, and here is what has been added to the system:
SmartArrive
As we all know, one of the big pushes within our industry for the last year or so has been the scheduled railroad. Now while most of can’t afford the multi-million dollar trip planning systems that the Class 1s have, we have come up with a system that uses the data that we have to more accurately estimate the travel time of a car.
The SmartArrive system has been set up with two functions to start with. The first estimates the arrival date of a car by using cars with the same STCC and origin in your database and averaging their travel time. If you don’t have any cars in the database that match the new one the travel time will automatically be set to ten days.
The second SmartArrive function is a pop up form that is available on the Inbound Cars screen. If you double click on the Last Event field on the screen, the form for that car pops up and shows the car number and origin, the number of days that the car has been traveling, the average travel time, the number of days until the car arrives, and how many cars make up the data set for that move.
We will be adding some new functions as SmartArrive evolves, but these first two functions should add to the accuracy of trip time estimation.
Bidirectional TRAINII
The development of the bidirectional TRAINII system is continuing. We are about half way through the development of the system that will separate the incoming TRAINII messages from the EDI messages, and once this is complete, we will be starting on the coding that will use the incoming messages for car hire processing.
Other News
We have added a pop up display to the Block Add section of New Waybills. This display makes it easier to set any exceptions for a car to be auto-rated.
The system has been running well at the SRNJ, with only some minor timing tweaks needed in the communication script and software.
Well, that is all for now. We are working on both new features and new customers, and will be moving ahead during the second half of the year.
Enjoy the summer,
Steven Friedland President |
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