When our clients are looking for effectiveness in their processes, they usually are trying to downsize the workforce. Still, they are stuck between - letting go of knowledgeable employees and losing effectiveness or increasing losses. And a similar situation is in all economic challenges:
On one side (when the financial situation is uphill) - shortage of skills, talent, and experience;
On the other hand, (when economics is subtracting) – ensure top expertise and knowledge would stay in the company, reduce cost and increase agility.
In any situation, it’s tough to find top talent and maintain knowledge in an organization. Especially so when the need for expertise spreads across all company divisions. For example – VAT assignment - maybe not only must the financial division must know these laws on how to assign VAT to services, but:
station workers who prepare waybills or shunting documents,
locomotive drivers, who add additional services documents,
back-office workers who manage all documentation.
Or perhaps waybills filling rules must be known to the central office, drivers, and station workers. Again, such a broad need for knowledge increases the chances of human error and financial or time losses.
We see CargoRail as a solution to connect knowledge for everyone, from railway drivers to financial specialists. In optimal business processes, all roles work together to achieve business goals from different cities, countries, or continents.
Moreover, we try to ensure that all business roles will do minimal in their knowledge capacity. In that way, we know that our clients can scale faster (let go or hire more employees depending on the economic situation).
Also, we try to minimize interactions with CargoRail as much as possible – to ensure that operations will go smoothly without a lot of data entry. That way, we are confident that our client’s employees will adapt quickly without much training.
At this time, we will cover a process from client registration to invoicing through the principles described above. Finally, you will see how different employees use CargoRail to enter knowledge and share it across all job functions.
At first, we are entering the client data into CargoRail.
As a side note in CargoRail, every participant in the process is called a ‘Party’ – parties can be organizations or individuals (from your client to employees). Parties participate in this process through roles – payer, client, the recipient.
In this case, we are creating a party, which will be the payer, client, and recipient:
On the right side, we identified VAT information about this party to automatically calculate VAT in all situations, based on VAT assignment rules.
To calculate services for the client, it must have the contract and prices for services. The sales manager enters agreements and rates for services, and this information helps calculate taxes for all provided services automatically.
First, the sales manager creates a contract with the party:
He adds services to the contract (the client can have different agreements for different sets of services) for price calculations.
And later, he defines tariffs of services – based on valid data, from – to if applicable (for example, different calculations depending on length). Finally, you can define unique coefficients with their own application rules:
At the operations level driver, opens CargoRail – automatically to the locomotive window. The role-based system ensures that the driver sees only relevant information:
wagons in the station track where the locomotive is standing;
locomotive operations history;
available tasks or operations (couple/uncouple wagons, start/stop shunting, technical or commercial inspections).
The driver is responsible for entering only his work-related data -
shunting operations, couplings,/uncoupling. Other data - client, agreement, cargo data, wagon, or locomotive data, is provided automatically. CargoRail’s or back-office employees’ responsibility is to prepare documents and send them to infrastructure managers, other railway carriers, and clients.
After he completes shunting operations, back office takes the process further.
At the end of the day or any period, back-office or station officers reviews all completed operations in CargoRail. Their main goal is to prepare needed documents, confirm the provided services list with the client, and calculate taxes.
To help back-office or station officers, CargoRail:
shows all billable operations;
helps prepare documents and calculates taxes automatically (from contract and VAT assignment information).
All operations, which are not included in documents but are billable, will be shown to CargoRail users. Clients will get and approve documents electronically if needed.
The financial officer issues invoices to clients at the end of the period independently from back-office or station officers. Invoices are compiled from documents taxes automatically from CargoRail.
What we saw here - different roles participate in the same process:
a system administrator with financial office guidance enters VAT calculation rules;
salesperson creates contracts and pricing strategies;
sales manager approves contracts for further usage;
driver performs shunting operations;
back-office or station officer prepares shunting statements, calculates taxes, and gets confirmations from clients;
financial officer forms and sends invoices to clients.
As we can see, every role plays a part in the business process, using the knowledge needed to fulfill their operations, but not more.