Duty travels to and from the workplace are part of everyday life in rail freight transport. Employees have to get from home or a hotel to their respective place of work, in some cases over long distances and with changing connections. At first glance, these duty travels look like a necessary by-product of planning. In reality, they hide real costs and untapped optimization potential.
This is exactly where our Duty Travel Savings Calculator comes in. Right on our website, you can run through your own figures and see how much savings potential is hiding in your current duty travel planning, with no obligation and in just a few minutes.
Why Staff Scheduling Is So Time-Consuming
Why Staff Scheduling Is So Time-Consuming
Anyone scheduling staff in rail freight transport knows the problem: staffing a tour means far more than assigning someone who happens to be available. Planners must consider several framework conditions at the same time:
- Qualifications: Route knowledge, medical fitness, and other requirements must match for every tour.
- Working time regulations: Rest periods, shift sequences, and maximum working hours are set by law and by agreement.
- Duty travels: Employees' journeys to and from their place of work must also be planned.
Smaller operators often still handle this with Excel spreadsheets, a process that quickly reaches its limits as complexity increases. Larger companies rely on systems that check qualifications and contract data and map available employees. The actual assignment, however, has so far often remained manual and relied heavily on individual planners' experience.
Duty travels are just one of several factors, but they're the one where the effect of our AI feature is easiest to grasp with your own figures. The other factors open up even greater savings potential on top of that, more on this later.
What the AI Feature Delivers
What the AI Feature Delivers
The calculator gives you a first impression of how strongly our AI feature for staff scheduling affects your duty travels alone. Behind it is a solution that brings together three key data sources: employee data such as qualifications and availability, duty and tour data with driving times and breaks, and public timetable data, which allows duty travels to be planned automatically.
The result: the feature assigns tours, including valid duty travels, at the push of a button. What used to mean days of manually checking routes, rest periods, qualifications, and duty travel planning now happens within seconds.
More Than Just Saved Duty Travels
More Than Just Saved Duty Travels
Duty travel is the entry point, but by far not the biggest lever. The calculator shows only a small slice of what the AI feature can save in costs overall. On top of that, it triggers the following effects:
- Productivity: Fewer manual checks and shorter duty travels mean more productive time, for planners and train drivers alike.
- More balanced working hours and less overtime: A more even distribution of tours has a direct effect on costs and employee satisfaction.
- Transparent, traceable logic: Knowledge that used to exist only "in the heads" of individual planners is transferred into a documented, verifiable structure.
- Scalability: Planning stays stable even with short-term absences or a growing volume of tours; upcoming functionality will make it possible to exclude specific employees from rescheduling.
In the end, these are the effects that carry far more weight than the pure duty travel savings. The calculator gives you a first, concrete figure for one part of the picture.
Try It With Your Own Figures
Try It With Your Own Figures
How much your duty travels alone can save through the AI feature can't be answered in general terms, the starting conditions are simply too different from company to company. With the Duty Travel Savings Calculator, you get a first estimate tailored to your own data in just a few minutes, for one part of the solution.