Prioritizing digital transformation is not always easy, but by 2020, 47% of companies plan to prioritize investments in collaboration and agility throughout their supply chain. 2 dimensions that are essential to the management of rail flows. 

Rail transport must be thought of as a whole: a huge number of players are involved, which makes it complex to manage, where each step is important in order to achieve increased performance. 

How can we get all these players to interact for a more agile management of its flows? 

This strategic approach necessarily involves the digitalisation of its transport, which will have a positive overall impact. However, rail freight has not quite completed its digital revolution, unlike road freight. 

How can these challenges be met? Two answers: visibility and collaboration, which are not mutually exclusive. Explanations. 

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End-to-end visibility for real-time incident management at all levels

Real-time tracking is a significant plus for proactive transport management. The monitoring of shipments allows to work on the anticipation of delays, and especially to be proactive in the management of hazards, regardless of the partner/service provider. 

Real-time visibility is beneficial for all the players in the railway industry. 

The transport flow drivers, who ensure the correct routing of products, are thus alerted to anomalies as early as possible. With instant visibility, he is able to inform partners and take action as soon as possible.

Loading and unloading locations, departure and arrival of railcars, are typically information that customer plants need in order to organize the means of loading/unloading (crew, equipment, slots). Thus, if they are instantly alerted of a gap between the arrival schedule and the reality on the ground, they can react and anticipate.

Shippers also benefit from this visibility: while waiting for their goods, they need to be warned of possible delays for certain products in order to find alternatives or levers for action.

As you have understood it, transport visibility is therefore necessary to follow its transports, but above all to communicate to the actors waiting for the train on arrival (Customer, Supplier, Partner factory). 

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Full rail visibility means optimal collaboration

A transport management solution, especially for railways, must today put collaboration at the centre of the digitalisation of business processes, taking into account all customer constraints, but also those of service providers, and in real time. 

Considering each actor and proposing an interface for each perimeter makes the execution of a multi-actor process more fluid. Collaboration is therefore central, particularly in transport planning - one of the key aspects that a TMS covers - where all the constraints of your activity must be centralised. 

Having a collaborative TMS tool therefore makes it possible to fluidify and formalize exchanges within the Supply Chain, during complex logistics operations. 

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How to improve rail visibility? 

Today, there are very few TMS solutions on the market dedicated to rail, which make transport visibility in railways an essential asset, unlike road transport.

With its railway expertise, Everysens combines its expertise in AI and IoT to enrich the classical functionalities of a TMS to offer the first collaborative and real time TMS on the railway market.

Rail transportation visibility is based more on the tracking of a car and the GPS messages it emits, which can result in erroneous tracking. Everysens provides real-time rail visibility from the train's departure to its final arrival. To do this, we have therefore put into production a unique calculation of the position of the convoy based on all the railcars. This improvement enables us to detect alerts as early as possible (delay, wagon spread...) and to provide our customers with end-to-end visibility. Our customers are therefore able to take corrective action thanks to our alerts. 

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Want to learn more? Schedule a meeting with our team.