Establish Baseline Metrics
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Observe historical data and compare results before and after, normalized by key industry metrics (average velocity, average terminal dwell), or through other controlled techniques.
Drive Railcar Movement – Both Loaded and Empty
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Find shipments in exception status – delays, bad orders, holds, and out-of-routes – and communicate with the railroads to find out why your shipment is not moving.
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Constantly strive to reduce the exception rate.
Focus on Destination Dwell
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Set up alerts that go to either customer service reps or key logistics/distribution personnel at your company to automatically and proactively notify employees when cars are sitting idle at destination longer than desired.
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Set up a detention report to quantify the impact for your company.
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Allow key vendors to directly communicate with your customers on your behalf.
Focus on Origin Dwell
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Establish contacts at each plant to whom you will send alerts and detention reports, and who at a “corporate level” would receive the reports across all facilities.
Implement Business Analytics
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Find an information system that sits on top of your data so that analyses can be conducted to determine bottlenecks where special focus should be placed order to drive improvement.