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Short Line Data Systems Inc. ROCS Update – January 2005
Website: www.sdsrocs.com
2005? Already?
Well, believe it or not, this is the beginning of the fourth year of these updates, and on June 1, we will be celebrating our fifth anniversary. If you asked me five years ago where I thought this company would be, I really couldn’t imagine both the response of the industry to a small company providing EDI software to small railroads, and how the system has grown and changed to meet the industry’s needs. As we move into the new year we are adding new features to Version 9 of ROCS, continuing development of ROCSMobile, and we have a new project to announce.
Version 9
Deployment of Version 9 is continuing, and we have been working on some significant new features to the system. We have added an automatic transfer of liability system to Version 9 to handle reclaims for switching railroads. As installed, the system will automatically send out a Train08 TOL request to Railinc when a cycle is closed, or the user can manually select which cars to send a TOL. The system will then process the inbound Train28 when it is received, and make the approved change to the inbound interchange date and time. The system is accompanied by a number of forms and reports to allow the user to monitor the reclaims.
We have also worked on cleaning up a number the pull down selections on forms, making them more responsive to the rest of the data on the form, and hopefully speeding up the work cycle. A new button has been added to the Customer Status screen that lets the user transmit data to Railinc without having to leave the Customer Status screen. We have also been working the current revision of the Users Guide, which will incorporate the latest revisions to the system, and add more answers to the “How do I…” questions.
Dispatch System
Our latest project is a computer based dispatch system. Our intent is to make this system a replacement for the paper dispatch sheet, Form D (track warrant) book, crew board, and extra list. The system will be point and click, just like the regular ROCS system, and incorporate a number of smart pull downs to speed data entry. The system will also interface with ROCS to print out any track condition or out of service information with the train crew worksheets. We are currently testing a number of the features of the new system at the M&E, and we will probably have a version ready for customer use early in the second quarter of the year. As for a name for this new system, I’m currently leaning towards ROCSDispatch, but there might be a witty acronym in the wings.
If anyone is interested in this new product, please drop us a line, as we would appreciate any input or suggestions that you might have for the system.
A Couple of Thoughts About the Report Cards
For a while now, we have been receiving the Event Reporting Report Cards from Railinc every month. While they can be hard to understand, they do provide a number of important things about how you operate.
When you look at the report cards, there are two numbers that you should be looking at. The first is the compliance with messages reported. This number tells you if you are sending all of the messages that you are supposed to be sending. This number has nothing to do with the time between the event and the report just if the report is being sent. No matter what system you are using, this number is just based on whether the report is sent or not. The second number is the time it takes from the event occurring to sending the message. If there is less than a twelve hours gap between the event and the message, then you are in compliance.
What is my point of bringing all of this up right now? I’ve run into a couple of people who feel that their Class 1 partners should give them the EDI tools so that they can do their event reporting. The facts are that there are free tools available for short line use, and yet there are still railroads that don’t report. What this means to me is that there are railroads that don’t want to commit the time needed to do event reporting. The sad thing is that for most companies, it would be a commitment of about an hour per day of operation by one person.
The argument that most make is that there is no straight dollar benefit gained by compliance. They are absolutely correct, no one is going to hand them a stack of dollars for reporting their events, and there is no trophy for the best compliance. The indirect benefit is that a reporting railroad will be more visible to its customers and shippers, and by adding to the data available to them, it will reduce their need to manually get information from the railroads. Usually this is done with phone calls, taking up both the shipper’s and the railroad’s time. In the end, the railroad might end up spending less time fielding calls from shippers and customers.
I haven’t even touched the security issues surrounding this issue, but believe me when I tell you that this is looming on the horizon…
Well, that is all for now. May you all have a safe new year.
Steven Friedland President |
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