Moving bulk material by rail is a unique and complicated challenge. While the ultimate goal may sound simple and straightforward, the systems used to oversee this process are usually quite complex because it requires the integration of independent teams.
Transporting material from its source to a client as quickly and efficiently as possible may sound simple enough, right? Well, not quite. As part of the mining supply chain, you’re required to move materials quickly without ever turning into a bottleneck. Now that you understand the overall goal, let’s take a look at the type of systems that these logistics teams are working with.
The Challenge Part 1
The challenge of integrated planning starts with all the constraints that a rail logistics team must consider and adapt to, such as:
As with all supply chains, the entire integrated planning operation must be run as tightly as possible. Any unplanned activity that occurs during this process can lead to a series of events that can take hours, days, or weeks to stabilize.
The control center experiences disruptions, delays, and unexpected crises on a regular basis. Ensuring that the system runs as smoothly as possible can be a monumental task for a logistics team, which must:
The challenges faced by a logistics team bring to mind a common military adage: “No plan ever survives first contact with the enemy.”[1]
This means that it’s important to plan continuously, but that the plan can go out the window just as quickly as it was developed. As Dwight D. Eisenhower said, “Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.”[2]
Everything relies on the quality of the data or information that’s available—along with the ability of the team to process it quickly, efficiently, and correctly.
This is a fast-moving network of many pieces that have constantly-evolving problems, and these problems require speedy solutions to keep the system optimized and running efficiently.
Surely, there must be some effective integrated planning solutions that can achieve this? Well, yes and no. Here’s why finding the right set of tools can be difficult:
Because each of those systems is so complex, there is no one size fits all solution that could automate this work for all these teams.
To recap:
Maybe this sounds a little too familiar? No wonder rail logistics professionals require such high-tech control rooms! This isn’t the type of team that can simply use an outdated, one-dimensional software solution that may make their jobs easier in five or 10 years. They need help now.
This is where the SimWell team’s incremental approach comes into play.
The Solution
This approach allows for innovation without disruption and incrementally builds integration, prediction, and optimization solutions to support the logistics team.
First, by working with future users, we’ve identified the fundamental building blocks that ensure more efficient operations for the earliest deliverable product concept, which involves:
To achieve this with minimal operational disruptions, SimWell proposes a solution that focuses on building the most critical and urgent sections of a customer's operations first. We’ll also implement simplified versions of other services to ensure end-to-end visibility of each process.
Here's a summary of the approach and solution we provide:
Leveraging this approach, SimWell provides a Digital Twin solution that delivers immediate value and sets the foundation for future scaling. This solution was developed by prioritizing the most critical and urgent operations and then gradually adding sophistication as needed.
This results in increased system-level throughput and a faster return on investment that can financially support its own future vision without breaking anything.
Typical rail logistics projects resulted in the ability to simulate scenarios within seconds, generating valuable new insights and results using existing data. The implementation of our tools leads to happy customers, future phases, and projects that allow us to implement a larger-scale solution with a wider scope of operations.
We also have the ability to progressively integrate optimization and AI technologies to make the control center operator’s job less stressful, one step at a time.
While this article focused specifically on rail transportation, the same ideas and approaches can be applied to other industries such as manufacturing, scheduling, mining, healthcare, supply chain, and more. In fact, virtually every field struggles with effectively managing an infinite amount of data in formal and informal sources, staying afloat in a fast-paced environment, handling the difficulties of unexpected emergencies, fear of risky monolithic technological implementation, facing the challenges of demonstrating ROI to unlock the required fundings, and more.
While the similarities may be obvious, how can a solution designed for a large team in a control room apply to your operations? At SimWell, we understand that every operations manager or decision-maker would benefit from visualizing their toolset as a control room, even if it’s not a physical room that contains dozens of monitors.
By adopting this way of thinking, the path forward becomes clearer, resulting in better insights for decision-makers. This allows them to make the best possible decisions at all times by offering:
Interested in learning more? Book a demo to see how SimWell can help you increase insights to make more calculated decisions and improve your systems and operations.
Footnotes