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Short Line Data Systems Inc. ROCS Update – June 2005
Website – www.sdsrocs.com
Greetings –
As summer starts to heat up, we have been busy traveling all over the country visiting our current customers, and showing off our wares for prospective ones. We have also been busy working on all of our systems with a string of improvements.
Travel, travel, travel
As I said above, there have been a number of frequent flier miles racked up over the last few weeks. I spent a couple of days out at the Tri-Cities & Olympia RR at the end of May, and was able to further customize the system to their needs. As many of you know, we set the system up to allow us to access the system remotely, and this works well almost all the time, but sometimes the face to face visit uncovers some issues that wouldn’t surface otherwise. I also made a similar visit to the East Erie Commercial railroad last week and made a number of improvements to their system.
In between customer visits was the Norfolk Southern short line meeting in Roanoke, VA. The NS meeting has become one of the best meetings for the short lines, with a program that covers areas of interest, face to face meetings with the various account managers or technical people, and a trade show featuring the business groups and operational departments, as well as the four EDI service providers. Having the EDI providers there showed how much of a role we play in both the day to day operations of short lines, and being a intermediary between the Class 1 and the short line. Thanks to John Kraemer, Brenda Taylor, and the rest of the NS team for a great meeting.
Our Work is Never Done
For the first few years of SDS’ existence, we spent most of our time building new parts of the system. It was a time when the screens of the program would change almost daily, and the changes were coming fast and furious (one little known fact: the ROCS screens originally were maroon, not blue). At the same time that we were writing the system, we were also learning the ins and outs of Access, so we really didn’t have all of the tricks we could have had at the time.
Our latest push has been to look at where the program is not running as fast as it could and see if there are ways to speed it up. In addition, we are looking at some of the processes of the program, and if there is a better way to do the process, we are reprogramming the function. The project has been successful so far, with a 50% speed improvement in the refresh and return functions on the Customer Status screens.
As I said earlier, when ROCS was first created, we really were learning Access at the same time that we were doing heavy programming. What we are finding now, as we go back into the darkest reaches of the code is that while what was written worked, there are processes that we know about today that work better and faster. When we find these sections of code, they are usually greeted by comments regarding the lack of brainpower of the programmer (yours truly), of a questioning of what I was thinking about at the time. While the program runs well, we do have more room for improvement.
Some of the areas we are also working on is the Car Hire processing, customer reports, and some of the communication features. While many of the changes will not be visible on the surface, we will be working hard to continually improve our product. And this process also applies to our newer products, ROCSMobile and ROCSDispatch, so that they maintain the highest quality that we can attain.
Well, that’s what is going on here. We will have some new screens up on the website soon, and another update late in July to keep you posted about our goings on during the summer.
Stay safe,
Steven Friedland President
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