Railinc Corporation
 | |
| Company type | Private |
|---|---|
| Industry | Software as a Service Freight Rail Data |
| Founded | Incorporated 1998 |
| Headquarters | |
Area served | North America |
Key people | E. Allen West President and CEO (since 2006) |
| Products | Umler System, RailSight CLM Engine, Interline Settlement System, EHMS, Car Hire |
| Website | http://www.railinc.com |
Railinc Corporation (pronounced "rail-link") provides information technology services to the freight railway industry. Railinc is a for-profit subsidiary of the Association of American Railroads.
Corporate structure
Railinc was established as an information technology department within the Association of American Railroads AAR, and later spun off as a wholly-owned, for-profit subsidiary of the AAR in 1998.
Railinc headquarters is located in Cary, North Carolina, between Raleigh and the technology-oriented Research Triangle Park.[1] The company was established in 1999 in this area to take advantage of the regions's strengths[2], including a highly-educated workforce, excellent quality of living[3] and overall cost advantages of the region.
Railinc employs a wide range of business and IT professionals from product managers and business analysts to software engineers and system administrators. Approximately ten percent of Railinc employees are certified project managers[4].
Products and services
Railinc processes and delivers vital rail data and provides software as a service (SaaS) to the freight rail industry. Because many of the company's IT systems are required by formal railroad operating rules, the company’s applications and services can be found embedded in critical operations and financial systems throughout the industry. One such system is the Umler system. The Railinc Umler system[5] is the rail industry's official, mission-critical source for rail equipment information, including freight cars of all varieties, locomotives and end of train devices. A 2009 redesign of this system replaced the 40-year-old legacy U.M.L.E.R. database. The name was an acronym for Universal Machine Language Equipment Register,[6] but the acronym was dropped in 2009 with the launch of the new Umler system[7] in favor of the lower case spelling and trademarked name.
Railinc also provides tracking and tracing data, known as car location messages (CLMs). The RailSight engine delivers car location messages to rail equipment owners, shippers, and third-party logistics providers.[8] The data is used for fleet management and to track and trace the movement of freight and freight cars throughout North America to ensure goods are delivered on-time or to track the progress of their movement. The RailSight engine delivers more than 7.5 million rail events each day from more than 550 Class I, Class II and Class III railroads and shops across the United States, Canada and Mexico.[citation needed]
Other Railinc systems include the Equipment Health Management System (EHMS) that monitors equipment to identify possible mechanical problems; Interline Settlement System that settles funds monthly between railroads; Forward & Store is a secure system for exchanging interline waybill information; Railinc Message Switch delivers more than nine million messages each day over its electronic data interchange (EDI) network, including transportation waybills, advance train consists, blocking requests and responses and trip plans; Railinc tracking and tracing services help customers identify cars and their shipments in the rail network. Railinc also maintains the only industry-accepted version of the North American railroad industry's official code tables, also known as industry reference files (IRFs), which includes the active reporting marks for the North American rail industry. Industry Reference Files (IRFs) are the spell checkers, data dictionaries and thesaurus for all intra and inter-industry communication and are used to assure consistency in data interpretation. Railinc offers a free online look-up of reporting marks and other industry reference files through the Railinc IRFi website. FindUs.Rail is a comprehensive source for individual contact information for specific rail reporting marks. The company also operates Steelroads, which allows shippers to trace the movement of their rail freight shipments.
The company is part of the surface transportation information sharing and analysis center (ST-ISAC).[9]
Awards
In 2009, Railinc was honored by the North Carolina Technology Association (NCTA), winning an NCTA 21 award[10] in the category of Industry Driven Technology Company. The NCTA 21 Awards are recognized as North Carolina’s most prestigious technology awards, celebrating innovation and excellence in the state.[citation needed]
References
- ^ Location of Railinc headquarters.
- ^ City of Raleigh Website, Accessed August 24, 2009
- ^ Raleigh Visitor's Center Website, Accessed August 24, 2009.
- ^ Carolina Newswire, February 6, 2009.
- ^ Stagl, Jeff. Progressive Railroading, July 10, 2009.
- ^ IRS Website, accessed August 24, 2009
- ^ Baysden, Chris, Triangle Business Journal, July 24, 2009.
- ^ Progressive Railroading, April 21, 2005.
- ^ Radvanovsky, Robert, Critical Infrastructure: Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness, Taylor & Francis Group; CRC Press, 2006.
- ^ "Journal of Commerce", November 7, 2009.