October 7th Webinar – Leveraging Advanced Planning Tools For Optimal Asset Acquisition

Photo by Gerardo Martin Fernandez Vallejo

Most freight railways are aware that advanced rail planning tools can provide real benefits in producing efficient operating plans for trains, wagons, locomotives and crews. However many planners do not know that these same tools can be crucial in informing rolling stock acquisitions and ensuring expensive acquisitions are for the right number and type of wagons and locomotives.

Many existing approaches to acquisition strategies use an Excel spreadsheet for evaluation. The Excel sheet is usually custom-made internally, and takes significant time to set up and check each scenario. Additionally, updating Excel sheets is prone to errors and it is difficult to troubleshoot old spreadsheets, first developed years earlier.

New rail wagons and locomotives are expensive, and acquiring a suboptimal set could mean significant additional spending on maintenance and storage. Integrated planning tools are needed to support rail planners and executive management by applying optimization and quantitative analysis for decision support.

Please join us for our October 7th webinar on “Leveraging Advanced Planning Tools to Determine Optimal Asset Acquisition Strategies” to learn how your organization can leverage planning tools to decrease your operational rolling stock requirements and reduce future capital acquisitions.

Webinar attendees will learn how Freightliner, UK and Kansas City Southern determined optimal wagon and loco acquisition plans. We will also review how rapid iteration of scenarios is used to analyze fleet outcomes. Our presenters will also demonstrate portions of the Navis Rail cloud-based software to show how domain-specific user interfaces drive understanding of opportunities to reduce rolling-stock. There will be a live Q&A session at the end of the webinar presentations.

About our presenters:

Tom Forbes, VP, Navis Rail

Tom Forbes, formerly the CEO of Biarri Rail and currently VP of Navis’s Rail Group, has worked with railways across Australia, Europe and North America delivering advanced planning, scheduling and optimization software solutions for the past two decades. Tom has an extensive background in leading companies that deliver planning and operational software solutions leveraging mathematics to deliver efficiencies across transportation, aviation and rail. He has first-hand experience in delivering innovation into railways such as Kansas City Southern, SNCF, Aurizon and Pacific National and is passionate about the benefits that new technologies and approaches provide.

Matt Herbert, Manager Field Operations, Navis Rail

Matt Herbert is Navis Rail’s Senior Manager for Field Operations. He is a business analyst, mathematician and project manager with extensive rail experience. Matt has led the delivery of many system implementations and consultancy projects to railways that have delivered significant savings, including; optimizing rolling stock allocations and reducing fleet sizes, multiple analytics consulting projects to identify opportunities to reduce fuel usage, predictive analytics utilizing machine vision data and other data sources to identify root causes of asynchronous wheel wear, and the delivery of a system to schedule and manage border crossings at an international railway bridge.