It may be said that predictive maintenance is the poster child for the "analytics of things." Preventing down time and reducing maintenance costs has been a successful use of data science for a long time. But sometimes there is…
Much attention has been heaped upon the data science profession for about a decade now, including by our own chairman, Tom Davenport, who called it "the sexiest job of the 21st Century". Well-known hierarchies of types of analytics generally show…
As a heavy industry, railroads seek to appeal to the finance community by focusing on metrics that speak to the company’s efficient utilization of its assets. A key metric is Operating Ratio, which is defined as operating expenses as a…
Year-over-year comparisons can attribute too much of a volume decline to COVID-19. That is what we showed at the beginning of the pandemic, with predictive analytics applied to railroad car loadings data from the American Association of Railroads (AAR). The…
In early 2020 the Federal Railroad Administration issued a final rule - 49 CFR Part 271 - to help railroads establish a "Risk Reduction Program" to improve the safety of its operations. Part of the rule states, “RRP is a…
The railroads are a great indicator of the strength of the economy and nobody monitors rail traffic more than the American Association of Railroads (AAR). Their weekly rail traffic reports are watched closely, even when extreme stresses to the economy…
Union Pacific recently announced that, for the second year in a row, it has been the top-performing railroad in employee safety. Furthermore, 2016 was the safest year in their 154 year history. While the railroad has undertaken a decade-long pursuit…
Union Pacific’s announcement this week of an all-time record low reportable injury rate, making it the safest Class 1 railroad in the United States, is a validation of a data-analytic approach to safety. First Analytics has worked with Union Pacific since 2011…