Advisory Consulting

Innovative Scheduling provides advisory consulting services to financial institutions, private investors, transportation holding companies, railroads, and governments. Our executives have offered their opinion on issues ranging from strategic options for labor negotiations to the best geographic location for new terminals. We often use our own software tools to generate one-time solutions or “clean sheet” plans for a railroad’s blocking network, train schedules, or locomotive requirements. Railroads refer to these “clean sheet” plans as they rewrite the service design, set five year operating and capital budgets, purchase new locomotive fleets, set future manpower plans, and calculate return-on-investment for large infrastructure projects. Our models are especially suited to the many large-scale network problems associated with railroad merger analyses. We can evaluate the cost and benefits of many alternatives and scenarios including trackage rights, one-way running, interline blocking agreements, and competitive access regulations. Our models are especially effective tools to objectively facilitate negotiations or disputes. We have offered expert testimony and position papers in arbitration hearings, litigations proceedings, and public policy forums. Innovative Scheduling collaborates with our Senior Consultants and other experts as needed to offer comprehensive advisory services in strategy, policy, economics, technology, performance improvement, and business process re-engineering.