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WE REPLENISH OUR ROLLING STOCK WITH GONDOLA CARS

Oleg, how have the affiliation in Rail Garant Group affected the general strategy of PTC? What are further outlooks of your company’s development?

PTC have been created as an operator dedicated to running car rolling stock to transport large diameter pipes to be used for the construction of gas/oil pipelines. Dynamic development al-lowed the company to become a leader in the railway transportation segment of these goods. However, in the second half of the year 2009, a decision was made to diversify rolling stock by means of the active increase of multipurpose rolling stock (of gondola cars and boxcars), as well as of rolling stock of other specialization (cement/grain bulk cars).

The affiliation of PTC in Rail Garant enabled later on the more active implementation of this strategy. Now, PTC is a main company in the holding, its operational rolling stock amounts to 60 % of the entire Rail Garant’s rolling stock that numbers about 20,000 cars.

In this connection, I would like to specify, what are plans for PTC’s rolling stock renewal?

The Company increases its rolling stock actively. Its quantity is approximately 11,500 units at the moment. By the end of this year, the Company will dispose of 13,500 cars. If one would like speak about medium-term objectives, then we intend to increase our rolling stock up to 20,000 units by 2013.

As priorities shifted towards the goods transportation in multipurpose rolling stock, we started increasing gondola cars rolling stock, the number of which exceeds 6,000 units now.

At the same time, one of the main activities of PTC remains, as before, the transportation of large diameter pipes. At the moment, our pipe cars rolling stock numbers over 1,200 units. The organization of LDP transportation is more important for our company than just a market seg-ment. I dare say that we are the best in these activities. That is not the case that there is the largest rolling stock of dedicated flatcars and adjusted carefully methods of their loading and running. The case is that there is huge experience our specialists acquired during the years of elaboration of large projects for the LDP transportation across Russia and CIS.

FULL DISPATCHING

An important part of the organization of efficient goods transportation is dispatching of cars and the control over their movement. How are these processes adjusted in your company?

Carrying out round-the-clock dispatcher control became one of the advantages of PTC. Due to such control, we can make decisions operatively and shorten goods delivery time. Specialists of our company carry out both the global dispatching and the main dispatcher control. The former provides the synergy effect of projects that are the same according to their characteristics, but are not connected to each other. Particularly, experience accumulated with the wood delivery to pulp and paper plants is quite suitable for the forecast of seasonal irregularity of delivery of raw materials to plants manufacturing chipboards. Within detected periods of delivery slump, a part of rolling stock intended for a specific service, may be re-oriented for other one time transportations, and in a period of delivery growth, outsourced rolling stock may be, on the contrary, added operatively to the main rolling stock.

The round-the-clock dispatcher control, the use of state-of-the-art software, and close coopera-tion with Head data-computing center of RZD OJSC are components of the highest level service that we render to our customers.

Now, such large Russian enterprises as Izhora Pipe Plant OJSC, CHELPIPE OJSC, Siberian Coal Energy Company (SUEK) OJSC, Volga Pipe Plant OJSC, Metalloinvesttrans LLC, Mechel-Trans LLC, and many others entrust us the transportation of their products.

Can you tell us in detail about software to be used in your company?

To optimize our work, the standardization of business processes and automation of railway transportation control, a corporate information system based on the Microsoft Dynamics AX has been implemented in PTC. We also use in our job the ЭТРАН automated system and an in-tegrated in this system network consisting of automated work places that are remote modules installed at customer’s plants. The operation of such a system enables real-time control of qual-ity of services to be rendered from any point worldwide. Due to this approach, we are always informed about location of vehicles, loading/unloading area state, and raw material (product) stock at suppliers (customers).

THE CUSTOMER IS ALWAYS RIGHT

Oleg, what are, in your opinion, components of successful business of a transport company in the modern railway transportation market?

A company that is able to hold to comprehensive approach combining the availability of state-of-the-art rolling stock, implementation of effective method of logistics and software can rely upon quite successful business. However, to become a company that is able to be a leader in the market, it is not enough. Another necessary component, the most important to my mind, is a high skilled and united team. Customer-oriented activities are the most important competi-tive advantages of any modern company.

RZD-Partner journal