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BC Rail Ltd. recently awarded Wabtec Global Services a three-year contract to implement a rail-car repair billing system designed to collect repair and inspection data from field locations, and automate administrative billing tasks.

A Wabtec Corp. subsidiary, Wabtec Global Services began rolling out the system in May. The supplier customized its Wireless Rail-Car Maintenance and Billing, and Back Office applications to integrate with BC Rail's corporate accounting system, and provide the railroad software training and general database maintenance.

The system is designed to enable BC Rail's maintenance personnel to use a wireless, handheld device to record inspection and repair work conducted on cars in off-site field locations, and submit the data to a central network server. Maintenance workers also can retrieve car-repair history information, access work orders, and print work and repair records.

"Our goals were to recover 100 percent of car-repair costs, provide online repair information collected at the repair site, ensure that incorrect or inappropriate charges for offline repairs are not paid, and reduce processing costs of billing and receivables," said Thomas Aydon, BC Rail supervisor of mechanical systems, in a prepared statement. "We expect that billing revenue will increase this year by approximately 10 percent and billing errors will be virtually eliminated."

During the past five months, the regional has improved inventory management and mechanical operations, gaining timely accounting summaries, and crew-time and material reporting, said Aydon.