Bundling Railroad Goals and Outcomes
AVP Jeanne Petty was featured in the November 2021 edition of Progressive Railroading magazine. She shared some insights on where PST is headed:
This is a really exciting time to be managing the direction of our solutions at PST. More than ever, our customers now have overlapping needs, concerns, and goals. Some are well-known business goals, and others are growing in importance, such as Green initiatives.
Why is this an exciting time? We’re now able to connect our existing solutions and new offerings together with some very intelligent, layered capabilities. This enables different business silos to simultaneously push for those broader enterprise goals while also hitting their individual KPIs.
Our customers are working with us to develop completely new ways of doing business as an industry and successfully achieving multiple outcomes. For example, one of our newer offerings, Precision Train Builder, checks all the boxes for building safer real-world trains using physics modeling. This is critical as train length continues to grow. But new train-building outcomes are also getting attention such as modeling fuel burn and optimal locomotive selection, placement, and usage or route selection based on train size. It’s a painless way to go Green, build safe trains and save money at the same time.
Our product strategy sits at the nexus of user goals and corporate KPIs. Simply put, we’re helping railroads do business the “new” way. That means, augmenting human abilities with transparent decision support tools and reducing analysis fatigue by surfacing smart insights. Plus, it’s critical we also help customers integrate their own data into this expanding ecosystem we provide. These informed, linked operations are reducing the guesswork of running railroads safely and efficiently.
All these new abilities are bolstering a Green, robust supply chain while keeping rail as a competitive alternative to very sophisticated trucking competition.
These are more than socially responsible initiatives; these are things that positively impact railroad KPI’s in a major way. The user-centered design solutions we’re adding to our products are reducing onboarding and training costs, eliminating performance errors, and engaging intelligent automation to eliminate slowdowns caused by tedious work.
Whether it’s managing unionized workforces, streamlining Drug and Alcohol testing, or peeking into locomotive, yard and train performance, these intelligent and integrated abilities are reshaping how running a high-performing railroad is done.
Who wouldn’t want to be part of reshaping rail?
