Automated tools help manage rail car fleet, develop businessBy Peter A. Buxbaum, AJOTIn 2002, American Rock Salt Company was operating a fleet 600 rail cars to move its product, highway deicing salt, to its customers, municipalities and transportation departments, primarily in New York State and Pennsylvania. At the time, it was taking Barb Horton, the company’s rail and stockpile supervisor, four to six hours a day to keep track of and manage the location of American Rock Salt’s cars. Especially since American Rock Salt was considering expanding its fleet in advance of 2002’s cold weather season, the company, headquartered in Retsof, New York, decided to deploy an information management tool to streamline the process. “In a business like ours, turn times are a top priority,” Horton explained. “Critical salt stockpiles only hold a certain amount of tonnage. It is up to us to resupply them and we need to keep in touch on a daily basis, if not more frequently. If a customer’s stockpile is low, we can get the product to the customer in a timely manner by pushing cars through the system.” American Rock Salt owns and operates a rock salt mine located 35 miles south of Rochester, New York. Before it started using the ShipperConnect tool from RMI, Horton had to log on separately to the websites of each of the railroads carrying American Rock Salt cars and then dump the information she extracted into an Excel spreadsheet. That is what took so long. Since using the RMI tool, American Rock Salt has increased its rail car fleet to one-thousand units, and Horton has decreased the time she spends managing car locations to an hour or an hour and a half a day. Before joining American Rock Salt, Horton worked for Genesee & Wyoming Inc., a short line railroad operator headquartered in Greenwich, CT. “I worked closely with RMI for ten years when I worked at the Genesee & Wyoming,” Horton related. “But when I got to American Rock Salt, they had no procedures for tracing railcars.” Tracking, tracing, updatingRMI, an Atlanta-based company, collects car location messages from the major carriers, according to Paul Pascutti, the company’s vice president of marketing. “We get hourly updates directly from the operating systems of the Class One railroads,” he explains. “We provide fleet visibility both loaded and empty. Movements of empty rail cars are as important as loaded because they need to get back to the load point as quickly as possible. Visibility lets users know if cars are being detained, if they are in need of repair, or if the network is experiencing bottlenecks or potential bottlenecks.” RMI recently announced that the private equity firm The Carlyle Group has acquired a majority stake in the company. With RMI, shippers are able to track deliveries from origin to termination, even when not under the control of a short line railroad, Pascutti noted. “This gives them real time visibility to see where bottlenecks are occurring and where cars are located,” he added. RMI provides American Rock Salt automatic updates of car locations every fifteen minutes, according to Horton. “This is critical even in the summertime when we are replenishing our customers’ stockpiles in a round robin pattern,” she said. Tracing car locations is important for Horton to provide proper service to American Rock Salt’s customers. If she finds, for example, that a car hasn’t moved for several hours, she can call the railroad and spur them into action. Similarly, if a customer is waiting for a delivery, Horton is able to inform the customer when to expect it. “If it is going to take two days to get there we can tell the customer that,” she explained. “If the trace indicates the delivery won’t be there for five days, we can start making phone calls to push cars to their destinations.” Horton calls the Class One and short line railroads and tells them a car is sitting idle with a critical commodity and that a major snowstorm is expected. “The railroads usually will do what they can t