Customer Case Rail: Mineral oil producer trusts in NIC-place for monitoring its transports on rail

Visualization of the mineral oil producer’s mixed wagon fleet

When transporting mineral oil products by rail, wagons of the largest European rental companies are mainly being used. Currently, NIC-place collects and standardizes the telematics data of the more than 2,500 rented rail wagons in order to create a unified data stream for required intenal follow-up processes. Among other things, the installed telematics systems provide technical information on position, temperatures, shock and flat points.

Automated train monitoring

During transport, the automated temporary merging of several wagons into a logistical unit – a train – simplifies the operational handling of the approximately 3,000 transports per month.  At the same time, the data quality of a transport is increased, since to date, in rail freight business not all wagons are yet equipped with telematics. This means that the data of one wagon can serve as a reference for the whole train.

Via the implemented NIC-place Connect interface to the leading transport management system SAP of the mineral oil producer, the electronic waybill and relevant planning data are transmitted. Based on this information, NIC-place assembles the train from individual rail wagons and automatically revokes the process when the transport is completed. Independently of this, wagon telematics data is continuously transferred to the NIC-place system. The intelligent combination of TMS and rail wagon data allows continuous monitoring and analysis of the entire transport. All changes in SAP are automatically updated via the NIC-place Connect interface, eliminating the need for double manual administration.

Additionally, our customer’s logistics managers can easily track the transport duration from A to B, identify unplanned waiting times and are proactively notified when critical waypoints such as border crossings are reached. During the actual transport, NIC-place escalates all deviations and events via e-mail or SMS to defined logistics employees if, for example, individual wagons are removed without planning. Our customer’s single rail wagon transports can be tracked exactly the same way.

In addition to the automated train monitoring, responsible persons can also view all wagons and transports in the web-based Dashboard in NIC-place and filter them according to various criteria in order to gain further insights. This includes, for example, the analysis of completed transports with regard to on-time performance, mileage or standing times.

ETA for rail

The calculation of realistic estimated arrival times (ETA) of rail freight transports enables the mineral oil producer to optimize his loading and unloading processes. Through planned start and end POIs as well as actual entries and exits from these geofences, NIC-place generates the necessary operations information. This is done through the calculation of deviations from the network infrastructure systems and railway schedules, the combination with live GPS data as well as numerous other data sources and machine learning algorithms that take current and historical movements into account.

Comprehensive analysis tools based on master data

NIC-place automatically creates a report with all information and data for defined recipients of the mineral oil producer at the end of the transport. From this, efficiency evaluations per transported quantity or product as well as the transported quantity per customer can be calculated, as well as the identification of empty runs. Essential for this is the use of wagon master data imported into NIC-place via the eRSRD² interface and its intelligent combination with information about loaded mineral oil products from the waybills.

Furthermore, access to master data and individual alarm profiles enables easy maintenance management.

Multimodal project roll-out

An essential decision for the logistics solution NIC-place was the possibility for the mineral oil producer to easily integrate further transport modes besides the rail business. In the next step of the project, distribution transports by road leaving the rail terminal can be tracked continuously and the combined supply chain will then be completely visualized.