The primary types of data that feed RMS are: Waybills and CLMs. RMS imports waybills for each outbound and inbound rail shipment for your organization. A waybill is a near duplicate of the bill of lading that you or your suppliers fax or transmit to the rail carriers to initiate a shipment. It contains railcar initial and number, origin, destination, shipper, consignee, care-of, weight, commodity, rail contract, ship date and time, bill of lading number. RMS usually gathers waybill records directly from the rail carriers that originate the shipments via the Internet; it can also integrate with your in-house business systems to get this data. CLM (Car Location Master) records are gathered directly from Steelroads (or another source of your choice) via the Internet.

Once the necessary data is imported, RMS then proceeds to create trip cycle records, which are kept up to date on a daily basis. These trip cycle records enable you to quickly run reports that summarize transit times, loading and unloading times, and dwell times. These reports can be run anytime and most of them take merely seconds to display. Many reports blend the waybill and CLM data. Many reports are available that enable you to manage by exception and only deal with delayed or problem shipments.

Your supply chain partners (suppliers and customers) are going to want to see these reports, so RMS provides a feature where you can create custom reports for each partner, mark each report with the recipient’s email address, and transmit each report to its intended recipient automatically. Both the import of data and dissemination of reports can be scheduled enabling you to achieve nearly “lights out” operations.