And the situation wasn't getting any better. Not with the railways adding more trains, more routes and more passengers every year.

In 2006, CRIS, the IT arm of the railways, decided to fix the problem. Their brief was to create a Crew Management System (CMS) to automate the workflow for over 14 lakh railway employees. The crew management system also needed to cover the staff for freight services, the cash cow of the railways.

"We had a very rough and ruddy method of calculating how many crew-members we would need for meeting a target of say 'x' million tons of goods. Under the manual system, the expenditure incurred on such a process was abnormally high. When we examined our crew utilization, we found that it was very inefficient," says group GM Das.

"The CMS [was envisioned] to provide information about crew-members at all times, facilitate the booking of staff on freight trains and passenger trains, both for long journeys and short movements within terminals and yards," says Ganju who heads the mammoth project. The railways, he adds, wanted a "system to manage and control crew movement that also assists managers to optimize crew utilization."

Manning their Stations