Website Login Register now System Status

It's all about the allocation: Train Maintenance

StarRail-Cleaning is contractor of one of Europe's largest national railway companies. It is responsible for cleaning and maintenance of passenger trains. StarRail-Cleaning has about 1400 employees.

Most employees are scheduled for cleaning-jobs, such as emptying rubbish bins and cleaning toilets during the short stops at the different stations.

A control centre plans, besides the monthly shift schedule, the allocation of the «flying teams». As you will see in the following example all teams communicate with the control central via SMS.

As main instrument of communication, the SMSBLASTER.COM web edition is used in combination with a Global Two-Way number (e.g. +447624000000).


StarRail-Cleaning sends all short messages with this number as originator.

The employees send short messages for the central exclusively to the Global Two-Way number +447624000000.

All replies of the messengers are received in the Two-Way Inbox of the SMSBLASTER.COM web edition.

StarRail-Cleaning maintains an address group for every team in the address book of the SMSBLASTER.COM web edition: Team X, Team Y, etc

Example

In an empty compartment a train conductor notices an ice cream on the floor. He sends an SMS containing train-, coach- and compartment number and a short Information about the problem to the centrals Two-Way Number. The coordinator looks up the rout of the train and its present position. With this Information he can Inform the next possible team on the trains rout.

At 15:07 the central receives this message:


It only takes a minute to find out the rout of the train. Because this train was about to get cleaned at the next station anyway, it would not be necessary to inform the team. All the same the coordinator decides to warn them and sends the information.


The team leader is grateful for the information of course and mobilises an additional cleaner with a bucket of water. Six minutes after the conductor found out about the ice cream the cleaning team is at work.

The train only stops for 12 minutes at this station. Until departure all the work has to be done. Whilst a caretaker empties the bins he notices a broken one. He forwards the information via SMS to the centrals Two-Way Number:


The central on the other hand calls up a technician the same way it organized the ice cream to be cleaned before.


The train leaves the station in time at 15:25. The cleaning team did its work without any unpleasant surprise. At the next stop a technician is awaiting the train to repair the litter bin. After he did that he sends a short SMS to the central to let them know the damage is repaired.


Before StarRail-Cleaning adopted the SMS coordination system, most deficiencies were forwarded via paper forms. So it could happen that a train travelled through the country for several days with a (known!) defect. Or a cleaning team was cleaning a train but had no time to clean up a major mess because they discovered it just too late.

With this system 300 to 500 special jobs get allocated every day and tidiness of the trains has improved noticeable.