PLANNING AND MANAGEMENT OF STAFF

 CREWS Data Sheet 

Overview

As transport liberalisation grows worldwide, promoting the separation between operation and infrastructure management, companies face increased competitive pressure due to the entrance of new players in to the market and a trend for consolidation. This pressure calls for operational effectiveness and agility, and, as a result, productivity and optimisation of resources get unprecedented attention. One of the main issues that companies have to address is crew planning and management, a task known to be labour-intensive and complex.

CREWS, the award-winning product, provides solutions to this core problem that transportation companies face today – effective planning and management of the work of crew members.

CREWS addresses, in an integrated way, all phases of the planning and management process – long-term planning (duty and roster planning), short-term planning (staff allocation and changes to the plan), real-time management, and controlling the work done.
CREWS enables quick and efficient planning and management staff, provides fast responses to train and crew changes, minimises crew-related train disruptions, and provides evaluation of strategic options.

At any stage of the process, the integration of a very powerful optimiser with the possibility of manual intervention provides an un-precedent power and flexibility that are unmatched by any other system in the market.

The modularity of CREWS enables transportation companies to introduce different components in their process at their own pace.

Aside from being powerful, CREWS-based solutions can be fully customised to the reality of each individual company.

Main features

• Covers, in an integrated way, the continuum of phases in the planning and management process

• Provides continuity of data across planning phases, making sure that data are complete and consistent

• Prepared to handle the full complexity of the planning and management processes in a way that is simple to develop, maintain, and change

• Provides similar look and feel across all components, easing the need for user training

• Allows stepwise expansion, avoiding “big-bang” introduction of a new system

• Combines a state-of-the-art optimiser with the full flexibility of manual operations

• Provides decision-support, with full interaction between the user and the system

• The unmatched optimiser guarantees significant savings, while the manual operations provide full flexibility to handle exceptions or preferences

• Intuitive graphical interface integrates manual and automatic operations

• Plans both on-board personnel (whose work is based on timetables) and station personnel (whose work is based on workloads)

• Provides full power in the specification of labour rules

• Prepared to handle the changes in data and in rules that occur, flagging any conflicts that result from the change

• User interface easy to work with and intuitive. It performs an active role in the planning process providing context sensitive and dynamic information to support the user’s decisions

• Supports client’s native language

• Enables access to all stored information

• Context sensitive on-line help

• Zoom in / out in the windows to see data with more / less detail

• Provides powerful simulations capabilities

• Prepared to be fully integrated with existing systems using standard protocols and data interfaces

• Interconnectable with ONTIME (timetable) and FLEET (equipment) software

Modules

• Duty Scheduler (produces duties)

• Roster Scheduler (produces cyclic rosters)

• Staff Allocator (allocates staff members to the lines of the cyclic roster, takes into account staff preferences)

• Short-term Scheduler (handles planned changes to the regular work, special days, engineering work, staff absences and holidays)

• Real-time Dispatcher (monitors what is happening during the day of operation and provides decision-support to deal with unexpected events)

• Work Recorder (computes the work that has been done and prepares information to be supplied to the payroll and human resources systems)

• Web-based Communication Functions (enables workers to inspect the planned work, to introduce requests about absences and to specify preferences about the work)

• Web-based Work Recorder (enables workers to inspect the work that has been done and to introduce requests about changes)

• Long-term Data Manager, Short-term Data Manager (communicates with outside systems, handles changes, makes sure that data is consistent and complete)