Indian Railways automating crew management
Tuesday, 24 June 2008, 17:47 IST
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New Delhi: The Indian Railways, one of India's largest employers, is managing its crew better - thanks to the Crew Management System (CMS) which has automated the day-to-day functions, including duty rosters. The Indian Railways has nearly 100,000 guards and drivers for performing operations round the clock. "The CMS automates their day-to-day business functions by providing information of their status, rostering their duty allocations, providing information on the availability of crew at their home stations and assigning crew to trains. All this has led to better crew management," a railway official said. The Centre for Railways Information System (CRIS) rolled out the software system in December 2007. "The CMS at present has a database covering 35,000 crew members and over 8,000 crew members are being booked daily through the system," the railway official added. So far, about 1,000 data entry nodes at over 144 crew-booking points have been commissioned spread over nine zones and 30 divisions of the railways mainly in central, western, northern region of India. "By October 2008, another 140 locations will come up on eastern, southern and north frontier regions thereby computerizing crew booking in Indian Railways," the railway official added. The system has bio metric, thumb impression readers to tackle the problem of proxy reporting. It also uses SMS for providing instant access of information of crew available over mobile phones, the official added.
Source: IANS
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