Cogent Services

Visitrack is a comprehensive, web-based tracking and fleet management system for railcars and containers. Key benefits include shipment status visibility, customer service, management reporting and performance measurement & analytics. The result is cost savings, productivity improvements, enhanced information and time to focus on performance-improving decisions.

Shipment / Equipment Tracking

	Web-Based System – This allows for simplified client implementation. Field offices, managers, customers and suppliers can access system for greater visibility.
	Railcar Trip Detection & Processing – Collection of trip messages can occur from client order management systems, BOL and Waybill transmissions (EDI 404/417) or directly from plants/suppliers to improve accuracy, speed data into the system and decrease manual data entry.
	Automatic Sighting Updates – Updated equipment sightings are automatically processed from stream of railroad CLM data. Visitrack includes inferred sighting capabilities to handle situations involving non-reporting shortlines.
	Shipment and Equipment Inquiries – System provides extensive search parameters to identify shipments by status, customer, supplier, origin, destination, product group, assigned fleet, various equipment and shipment reference numbers, and more. User login filters allow clients to model territories, regions and areas of management responsibility.
	ETA Forecasting - The system develops continuously-refined, statistical ETA forecasts for active rail shipments from the sighting messages it processes. This forecast will be available to the user as rail shipments advance from origin to destination. Overall transit projections can be based on both user-defined benchmarks and historical experience for a given lane. ETAs from both the independent, statistical forecast and the rail carrier CLM estimates are available.

Management Reporting & Alerts

	Exception Detection - During message processing, the system detects a variety of situations to which the user may need to be alerted. These situations, or exceptions, will result in one or more exceptions being linked to the shipment. Exceptions cover railroad reported problems (Bad Order reportings), anticipated delivery problems (forecasted ETA later than customer expectation), and carrier handling problems (car picked up by a non-route carrier). They also include ‘non events detection’, or events which should have occurred but did not (missed delivery, etc.).
	Event Notification – Visitrack can push events to users when they occur through the Event Notification Engine. Users may subscribe to receive notifications for key system events (e.g. operational exceptions, specific car/shipment events). This feature allows system users to be notified about specific events via a variety of methods such as email, fax, or pager / SMS phone message.
	Customer/Supplier Performance – Visitrack reports dynamically summarize on-time performance data by customer and/or supplier.
	Railroad Performance – The system measures railroad service performance at the shipment level with individual exceptions noted and with comments (reason, etc.).
	Trip Plan Measurement – The original ETA generated for each shipment establishes a trip plan and the system tracks status and progress against that plan. Historical transit times with statistical summary, plus individual car measurements provide solid data for lane analysis and planning.
	Operations Status – Dynamic operational snapshots provide quick picture of equipment on-hand and shipments moving loaded/empty by facility and broken down by fleet and vendor cars.

Service & Performance Analytics

	Dwell & Detention Reporting – Visitrack automatically calculates dwell time at facilities and provides dynamic detention/demurrage reports.
	Equipment Utilization – Fleet statistics such as cycle times, dwell times and empty/loaded factors are maintained and available via management reports.
	Fleet Sizing – This report allows users to project fleet size requirements by pool and identify reduction opportunities.
	Fleet Management – Visitrack provides the ability to manage equipment profiles, fleet assignments, lease information and other fleet management requirements.
	Transit Time Analysis - Lane-based transit times are derived and stored in the system as shipments are completed. This data can be statistically analyzed by carrier and supplier/customer and also compared to service benchmark expectations.

Optional Features

	Intermodal Extensions.
	Anonymous, Web-based Tracking.
	Integrated Mapping.
	Event/Exception Notification.