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Short Line Data Systems Inc. ROCS Update – January 2003
Website: www.sdsrocs.com Happy New Year! With the New Year we are bringing out a couple of new features that dramatically change how ROCS works for you, and we are starting to look forward to the release of Version 6 this spring and the new features that will be available in the new version.
New Features Automatic Car Hire Rating We are currently in the final testing stages of the new Automatic Car Hire Rating system. This system, which is completely transparent to the user, sends a rate query to the Car Hire Accounting Rate Master (CHARM) rate master, which replies with the user’s current rate for that car. The user can now do their own car hire reports (albeit non-LCS), without having to send their data to an outside source and wait for their reports in the mail.
Automatic UMLER information The other new feature is automatic retrieval of the physical information about a car from the online Uniform Machine Language Equipment Register (UMLER) system. The system sends a query out when you add a car to the database whose information is not already in your system (this is done only one time per car, so if you get the same car regularly only one query is performed). The information is available to the user on the Advance Cars and Customer Status screens on a pop-up form, and we plan on using the data in a number of new features that will be released in the future.
Bits and Pieces We have taken care of a couple of known problems that have been in ROCS for a while. Both had been dealt with previously through work-arounds, but we have been able to fix them in the program. The first was a situation that required the user to re-type in the release time in the BOL time field of an outbound waybill or BOL if the release time was 0959 or less. This has now been corrected to eliminate the need to re-type. The second was a situation that existed when you tried to view an archived outbound hazmat bill, and this has also been corrected. One other improvement has been the elimination of needing to enter the waybill date for a cars that you are adding via the Block Add function.
Looking Forward to Version 6 I took a trip to demonstrate ROCS to the Short Line and EDI groups at BNSF during December, and they made a couple of suggestions for improvements to ROCS. The first is a communications scheduler to facilitate near real time reporting. This will probably take the form of an automatic transmission of any messages every half hour for those users that have a constant internet connection (DSL or Cable). The downloading of data will probably remain a manual function. Another suggestion was inbound processing of 404 (Bill of Lading) messages. BNSF receives 404s from their Short Line’s customers for outbound loads, and then sends a copy of the 404 to the Short Line. The plan is for ROCS to process the incoming 404 and automatically create the release in the user’s system, hopefully improving communications between the customer, Short Line, and Class1. We will be incorporating full LCS car hire in Version 6. The current plan is to keep the LCS events separate from the events that the user reports. This will allow the user to evaluate the difference between what they are reporting and the LCS time, which should help identify reporting problems. As with the rating and UMLER systems, this system will operate in the background, with no user input needed. We will also be continuing the development of the PDA version of ROCS. As some of you might recall, we started investigating a PDA version about a year and a half ago using a Palm-based PDA, but the limitations of the software available at the time really prevented producing a product that we would be comfortable with releasing. We are now using the Pocket PC platform, and it looks like the available PDAs and software will allow us to develop a proper system.
Well, that’s about all that is going on for now. We will be installing the system at the Housatonic in the next week or so, and we will be getting the updates out to the other users shortly.
Stay warm, Steven Friedland President |
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