Solutions
Timekeeping for Operating Personnel
Position Management for Non-Operating Personnel
Time and Attendance for Non-Operating Personnel
Crew Management Systems
PST's crew management systems are in use today by every singe Class I railroad in the US and Canada except one. This market dominance is due to our in depth understanding of what it takes to develop an effective crew dispatching system. Over one thousand man-years have been invested in our product line, thus allowing crew management center managers the ability to sleep better at night.
Our crew management solution gives you the tools you need to manage your people in one single Solution and redefines the level of performance in today's labor operation. Our advanced scalable architecture helps you centralize and automate performance. You'll see improved efficiency and cost-effectiveness throughout your workforce management cycle.
In addition to the effective management of the crew dispatching process, regulatory requirements like the FRA Hours or Service rules are strictly enforced with our product line. Many of our clients have received their electronic waivor, providing for more effecient means of managing a potentially expensive liability penaty process for lost Hours of Service slips.
Enterprise Messaging Service
The Enterprise Messaging Service is a product that will allow users to generate messages to a specific employee or set of employees based upon employee filters/attributes. EMS will provide screens to create and display messages to users of the system. The EMS system will allow for the creation of employee filters from a Customer data source (i.e. Terradata system, etc). Administrators of the EMS can control what employee filters a user can see while creating a message. This product will also provide a method for controlling access to different filters, data and screens based upon a user’s roles and responsibilities.
EMS can integrate into your organization’s secure network to allow for single sign-on. When a user logs into your organization’s intranet, EMS will check for messages and redirect the user to the EMS product to view messages. Once the messages have been acknowledged and processed, the user will be redirected to the original website selected.
Timekeeping for Operating Personnel
The unionized labor market is extremely difficult to manage. When it comes to pay, the rules required to accurately pay your operating personnel are very complex. Our rules-based solution allows the administration team to create effective profiles to handle the automation of pay rules once thought impossible. (Learn More)
Position Management for Non-Operating Personnel
The challenge of managing employees in such a diverse geographic environment is made tougher buy collective bargaining rules that don't necessarily lend themselves well to efficient operations. Keeping tabs on which engineering gangs are on property, which project are they working on, how many people are assigned, when the employee's special qualifications expire, and who has seniority on which job, can be overwhelming without automation. Regardless of the size of your organization, optimizing the number of employees you actually need to run your rairoad has significant impact on your bottom line.
PST's solution, iTrakForce, provides a complete web-based solution for all of your position management needs including, job maintenance, seniority management, qualifications management, and bulletin and assignment processing. If you are currently keeping track of any of these processes manually our solution is for your organization. Allowing your employees to update information that the have permission to, keeping track of their current assignments, and determining where their seniority will allow them to work, can have significant impact on the overall morale of your team.
Time and Attendance for Non-Operating Personnel
The collection, review, and payment of payroll is a significant task for any organization. PST's iTrakForce-Time provides an intuitive interface to manage all of your time reporting needs. Not specific to the transportation industry, iTrakForce's J2EE platform provides scalability and flexibility for your organization, regardless of its size.
iTrakForce-Time assists your organization by automating the following processes:
- Time reporting and collection This function will enable collection of time and attendance information from non-operating employee base via a variety of means such as web browsers, kiosks, proximity cards, etc.
- Rate management This function will allow the definition and management of various rates required for the calculation of an employee’s gross pay. In some cases the rates used will depend on the employee’s work history.
- Time validation and approval This function provides sanity checks to ensure that the time and attendance information reported is valid and provides a workflow engine to ensure it is approved by appropriate supervisors.
- Time-to-gross calculations This is a complex function that aims at translating the reported and approved time into gross pay while complying with a myriad of policies and union agreement constructs and mandates. This includes managing guarantees, protections, territorial changes, per diems, etc.
- Labor cost distributions This function aims at providing a means of near realtime distribution of labor costs into different categories, such as gangs, projects, customers, activity type, etc. to enable decision support for managers and to allow for joint facility accounting.
Crew Optimization
The challenge of managing thousands of miles of track and thousands of employees, their statuses, their rest times, total time on duty, hours of service, and hundreds of other components is impossible without technical assistance. CrewVue, PST's crew optimization platform, allows your organization the ability to minimize deadheading, heldaway, and tow-in, all while protecting the needs of service. If your find your operating personnel spending a great deal of time keeping track of where a crew is, which train they are scheduled to return on, where is their transporation, CrewVue's intuitive approach to managing your terminals is the product for you. CrewVue receives data from multiple sources, evaluates supply and demand, providing your operating management team with a constant view of what is going on with your manpower. Trying to determine how many trains you will be able to run in a specific corridor by hand is virtualy impossible and changes as soon as you have it figured out. Service interuption, high layoffs, increased traffic, can all be handled much more efficiently with PST's CrewVue.
Short line and Regional Rails
Facing short line and regional carriers today are a myriad of responsibilities that drive the need for a solution beyond managing through manual processes or older systems, such as:
- Managing crews while factoring in parameters such as seniority, qualifications, union rules, vacation and sick time accrual and job bidding
- Preparing and managing crews for high-traffic special events
- Timekeeping, attendance and payroll management
- Time-to-gross pay calculations
- Generating reports such as absenteeism, shift reports, bulletins, etc.
On top of that, while the business complexity is demanding, the solution should not be. Any solution has to run on cost effective technologies such as client-server and be easy to support, manage and use.
With this in mind, PS Technology Inc. created the short line and regional version of Crew and Timekeeping Solutions. With Crew and Timekeeping Solutions, you get the advantages of leveraging the advanced technologies and experiences resulting from years of solving Class I freight workforce challenges, but without the system complexities requiring highly trained staff and costly IT infrastructure.
Similar to the solution for Crew and Timekeeping Solutions Class I freight, the short line version is comprised of three core components, tailored to the short line and regional operations needs for managing crews, performing timekeeping and generating reports. Additionally, all functions of Crew and Timekeeping Solutions are accessed through an enhanced graphical user interface that streamlines user tasks, reduces training time and dramatically improves usability for all system users.
Transit Systems
Running a transit operation is a constant daily challenge. Each day, something new can occur that creates demands upon the system whether it is employee availability issues, equipment outages or even weather. One small disruption can have a ripple-effect throughout the system. To help keep your trains running smoothly, PS Technology Inc.® Crew and Timekeeping Solutions™ provides the most advanced crew management and timekeeping solution for your operation. Growing out of PS Technology Inc.'s in-depth expertise in solving the rail crew needs, Crew and Timekeeping Solutions has been tailored to address the needs of the transit operation. Advanced crew management and timekeeping features include:
- Automated job posting, bids and awards processes based on defined company policies and rules
- Vacation scheduling
- Vacancy fill
- Advanced decision support for dynamic service disruptions to respond optimally to unplanned events
- Reserves boards
- Employee qualifications tracking
- Comprehensive tracking of work history
- Automatic time slips and flexible time-to-gross pay calculations
- Automated approval process
- Easy to use web user interface
- Cost-effective, easy to management systems environment
Voice Services
PST has been involved in the Interactive Voice markets for almost 20 years. Our ability to automate transactions that are currently being done by human talent is significant. Many of our systems handle millions of calls a month. Both inbound and outbound, our expertise can assist your team in automating hundreds of processes currently done by your personnel.
Consulting Services
PS Technology Inc. is more than a software development company. Our strength and the value we bring to our customers lies in the wealth of knowledge and expertise that we have accumulated through developing and implementing solutions for others. Our hands-on, tailored approach means PS Technology Inc. partners with its customers from testing to implementation and beyond.