Car Hire: Digital Transformation
Automating Workflows to Drive Efficiency and Reduce Operational Cost.
Direction(Context)
Current Car Hire application model is unsustainable. Heavy reliance on managed services means scaling requires proportional increases in manpower, training, and overhead in turn driving up cost of goods sold (COGS) and limiting the ability to onboard new customers. Manual processes such as claims/reclaims, liability reconciliation, and receivable conditioning are time-consuming, error-prone, and dependent on back-and-forth communication via phone or email. This not only slows down settlements but also risks leaving revenue uncollected.
In addition to this legacy systems built on AS-400 and COBOL constrain innovation and efficiency. These platforms require specialized knowledge, are difficult to integrate with modern analytics, and force managed service staff to manually condition customer requests.
Automating workflows transforms car hire into a scalable, exception-based system where routine tasks are handled seamlessly, reducing costs while opening new revenue streams through self-service capabilities and enhance user experience.
What is Car Hire? Car hire in the American railroad industry refers to the rental payments that railroads make to railcar owners for the use of their equipment. It’s essentially a system that allows railroads to share and interchange cars across the network, ensuring efficient movement of freight without every railroad needing to own all the cars it uses. For simplicity, let say there is a receivable railroad (the one who owe the car hire, most likely they are the railcar fleet owners or a leasing company) and then there is a payable railroad (the one who hire a car and use it to move goods, could be any railroad/shipper).
Research goal
The research started with some key question that what are the opportunities area with in the car hire product portfolio that can drive impactful operational efficiencies for both our customer and internal managed service personas. Surfacing these workflows that are manual/redundant and repetitive in nature and dive deep into the user actions and needs using JTBD framework became core to this research. Hence improving workflow efficiency, eliminating manual errors, and making the system more exception based.
Discover & Define
During the discovery phase, I carried out a series of sessions to capture perspectives across the car hire ecosystem. I conducted four site visits at key railroad customers, including leasing companies, private car owners, Class I railroads, and shortline operators, where I observed workflows firsthand and gathered insights into operational challenges. To broaden engagement, I also hosted three virtual workshops with customers, which allowed me to validate findings and explore common pain points across a wider audience.
Finally, I brought these insights into strategy workshops with internal stakeholders that included architects, engineers, product management, and customer support to align technical feasibility with user needs and shape clear modernization priorities.
This process helped me identify and prioritize workflows on the scale of high user & business impact and feasibility. This includes - Car Hire Receivable workflows like Claims Management, Fleet Management, Reclaims & Error Processing.
Figure 3:
Top Left image shows the example of the discovery workshops conducted with the customer.
Top Right Image shows the feature mapping and prioritization exercise that resulted in the strategic roadmap.
Bottom Right & Left are the Personas defined used Jobs To Be Done framework.
Claims Management
The claims management process in railroad car hire is the formal mechanism by which railroads or car owners dispute, correct, or reclaim charges related to the use of railcars. It ensures that errors in billing, liability assignment, or rate application are identified and resolved so that payments between railroads and car owners are accurate and fair.
Identification of Discrepancy: A railroad or car owner detects an error in charges (e.g., incorrect mileage rate, wrong liability assignment, missing payment).
Claim Submission: The claimant create and send a formal claim through email to the payable railroad.
Validation & Review: The claim is checked against official records (e.g., Liability Continuity System for responsibility, CHARM for rates).
Resolution: If validated, adjustments are made to payable/receivable balances. If disputed, the claim may go through arbitration or further review.
Settlement: Railinc acts as a clearinghouse, netting out balances between railroads to simplify payments. Corrected amounts are reflected in the next settlement cycle.
Figure 4
AS-IS Car Hire Claims Management Process. The red boxes indicate the opportunity areas for workflow efficiency and automation.
Figure 5
Top Left image shows the example of Blue Print created for the Claims Management to understand system actions corresponding to user actions on the green screen. This includes both AS-IS and TO-BE workflows to identify the delta change-that inturn helped the architecture team to bridge the gaps for the new underline platform.
Top Right and Botton Right are the examples of the green screen legacy system used by the user to mange claims.
Result
Automating workflows with better system integrations and data normalization aligned the previously disjointed receivable and payable journeys, creating a seamless end-to-end user experience. Customers now benefit from intuitive dashboards to quickly review exceptions and extract reports, while inbuilt AI agents enable self-service querying and custom report generation. This transformation reduced operational costs, streamlined claims management, and cut managed service expenses by 60%, driving faster adoption and scalable growth.
