The Integrated Intermodal Drayage Management System is a PC-based system best run on a Novell network. It was developed in house for Rail Delivery Services in the early eighties using dBASE II on a CP/M-based computer.

Over the years the system has grown as the trucking company has grown. The software is also being used by several other trucking companies, each of which has influenced the continued expansion of the system's capabilities.

Although the current version is running the DOS-based FoxPro 2.5, it works well in a Windows environment due to the ability of Windows 95/98 to run stable DOS Sessions. The system has not be rewritten in a Windows-based language because of the poor performance and large resource requirements those graphics-based programs create.

The IISI Drayage Software System revolves around the Dispatch Command Center. It starts with the Master Dispatch View which contains all in-progress dispatch records. Within the View, dispatch records can be displayed in a variety of ways.

A Work Screen is a subset of the View which is divided up into categories and sorted within those categories. Each category has a header record to identify it and separate it from other categories. The View can support up to 8 of these Work Screens, where each Work Screen has its own categories and headers.

The Work Screens and the categories within them are defined by your company. You tell us how you want the dispatch records organized, and we program the Command Center for your design.

Records in the Master Dispatch View can also be looked up instantly by File, Trailer, Chassis, and more because the View maintains a large set of Indexes for quick and convenient lookup.

One of the available indexes is the Drivers Screen where you can see which drivers are on line, and which dispatches have been assigned to them.

The Master Dispatch View is the main view, but the Dispatch Command Center can support up to 16 specialized Dispatch Views. For instance, you can have an Appointments View, and a Last Free Day View.

As with the Work Screens, these Views are defined by your company, and we program them for you. This makes the system a bit complex to set up, but it assures that the system will work the way you need it to work.

As freight moves from one stage to another, the stages are recorded in Dispatch Actions. An Action is filled in as soon as the information for it is known. Information from the Actions also updates the Dispatch Full Screen Display which summarizes the movement data.

The Actions of a dispatch record are determined by a Movement Type assigned to the record at order entry. A Movement Type defines the most likely chain of events an order is expected to follow.

Movement Types are defined in Dispatch Setup. Each Movement Type is comprised of a specific Actions List which enumerates the expected flow of events. These actions come from Action Definitions where the Action Attributes of each action are defined.

Once more, the Movement Types and Actions are defined by your company. You can see how deep the system goes to allow itself to be tailored to a variety of perspectives on how dispatch should operate.

Although the Actions of a dispatch record are set by the Movement Type, the list of Actions is not etched in stone. Other Actions can be Inserted into the list at any time.

If Actions are not enough, there are also Movement Notes where further information about a movement can be recorded.

The Dispatch Command Center is supported by several Batch Processors which are unmanned computers running scheduled jobs 24 hours a day. They handle rail tracing, paging, faxing, reports, updates, EDI, and file maintenance.

They can feed information back into Dispatch, like Equipment Tracing Information and Driver TeleTrac Information. These Processors are what make the system much more than just an electronic filing cabinet.

In Billing, records are collected from Dispatch in a variety of ways, rated and paid (charges to the customer and payments to the driver are done together), proofed, printed, and moved out. The system does have Automatic Rating.

At night, an Invoice Update is run by a batch processor, and information from the invoices is used to feed Accounts Receivable, Driver Settlements, G/L (Mas 90), and Management Screens.

There's much more to see in this system. This write-up focuses on the main features of the main player -- the Dispatch Command Center.