Here’s what a modern Crew Management solution can do for you
Remember the days of tedious, manual timekeeping, clocking in crew hours of service and allocations in a terminal? This often led to redundancies and incorrect pay calculations, which meant you had to go back and adjust payroll, resulting in a loss of time and an increase in cost. If your railroad company is looking to make those days a thing of the past and transform your crew management through a digital solution, then think of automation and optimization as two of the biggest ways to modernize railroads – yours included. Navigating train crew management in an increasingly digitalized world means that the railroad can also benefit from the modernization of their crew management systems. This will impact every facet of crew management, and today we’re going to talk about how a modern crew management software solution for railroads can benefit your timekeeping operations, resulting in rapid crew allocations and automated timekeeping data and reports for auditing and payroll. By making strides in integrating a cloud-based crew management solution into your railroad, you’ll insure that you’re making continuous improvements to your crew management system and staying innovative within the railroad industry. Major challenges for crew managers The logistics of running a crew are complex and tricky, not to mention overwhelming if you don’t have the right tools to do it. Functioning under a manual system, the chance of making errors or experiencing redundancies and making erroneous pay calculations increases. Working within an inflexible system isn’t the best way to optimize your processes and make timekeeping and tracking crew allocation more efficient. Here are some of the major challenges that crew managers face in their daily operations: Manual notifications resulting in communication breakdowns Decentralized data Inefficient use of crew and long layover times A slow learning curve But the prognosis for the future isn’t all doom and gloom for railroad companies – especially if you’re ready to take the next steps and digitalize your crew management solution. Cloud-based systems have gone a long way in addressing the challenges of a multi-faceted transportation organization, including the ones listed above. You don’t have to stay stuck at step one: identify your pain points. Let’s talk about the next step in your crew management modernization. Integrate a centralized, rail crew management system An important step in modernizing (thus, digitalizing) your crew management system is to centralize all your data in one location. You want to make sure that crew availability and allocation is tracked continuously in real-time. That way you avoid having to go back later and manually input crew hours of service (HoS) or crew allocation. Within this crew management solution, an automated pool order is created, and an optimal crew rotation plan is delivered that complies with both crew union rules and FRA regulations. Valuable data is then delivered in real-time, via a that is accessible through a desktop computer or mobile device.