

Logistics professionals are under increasing pressure to manage costs. However, customer expectations are changing – we are accustomed to Amazon-like ETAs in our personal lives and expect similar experiences in our professional lives now.
Our last article discussed how end-to-end ETAs calculated by a third party provide a more accurate estimate. Shippers can then plan to communicate arrival dates to receivers and transloaders and plan pipelines for loading/unloading at facilities. In turn, transloaders and receivers can plan further in advance of railcars arriving, minimizing dwell time at destination yards. As a result, cycle times decrease, and shippers can move more products with the same railcars, lowering railcar lease or purchase costs.
None of these results can be achieved without consistent transportation performance. An accurate measurement of each railroad’s on-time performance is essential to maintaining the ETA’s consistency (and, in turn, accuracy). Shippers and railroads should meet regularly, if not monthly, for strategic partnerships to review the critical operating metrics over the road and the first and last mile and collaborate on any course-corrective actions needed based on the actual performance data.
Railroads keep a close eye on performance metrics because they directly impact their bottom line. They may provide shippers a quarterly or monthly performance deck, which is extremely helpful in understanding the trends and underlying context. Still, shippers need a control-tower type solution for monitoring performance across all the rail partners in real-time, so they can immediately understand changes in the trend and communicate the impact to their customers at any time.
An effective railroad on-time performance management tool should be included in any modern railcar tracking system. The most effective systems will have two reporting functions:
The On-Time Performance tool should be able to be customized to different business needs, depending on the user and the business problem they are trying to solve. One-size-fits-all static reports provide an excellent KPI, but they do not help the data analysis that will have a transformative impact on the shipper’s rail network.
Some of these custom functions might include:
The data management process that powers these reports is equally important – if the data has gaps, the reports will not be meaningful for analysis. One critical feature is backup logic for when each segment is not reported. For example, suppose the delivering carrier does not report the interchange delivery. In that case, the receipt event from the receiving carrier can be used to stop the clock for the previous segment.
In any business case, these tools should allow users from divergent functions (logistics, sales, customer service, finance) to perform their own analysis without needing advanced data skills. Users should be able to filter, refine, and customize the data with the click of a few buttons instead of downloading to excel to create pivot tables or add formulas.
In our last article we explore how railroad operating performance, Trip Plan compliance, and rail shipment ETAs are calculated and how rail shippers can work with these metrics to improve their rail network.
Software solutions like RSVP automate transit performance analysis so logistics managers can spend more time improving their network and less time gathering data.
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