MTMC PAYS FIRST AUTOMATED RAIL SERVICES BILL

MTMC PAYS FIRST AUTOMATED RAIL SERVICES BILL    The U.S. Military Traffic Management Command has started using automation to pay railroads for their freight services.
   The agency, which manages the ocean and overland logistics services for the armed forces, recently made the electronic payment to Burlington Northern Santa Fe for a shipment of 27 railcars carrying 136 pieces of military equipment to Fort Hood, Texas, for training operations.
      MTMC uses an online software, PowerTrack, developed by Minneapolis-based USBank. The system is paying an estimated 52 percent of the Defense Department’s domestic freight bills. USBank charges a fee on a sliding scale of up to 2 percent of the freight bill.
   Both the military and transportation industry praise PowerTrack for reducing compensation times from 44 to 77 days under the paper-intensive Defense Finance and Accounting Service process to less than three days.
   The adoption of PowerTrack is part of the Management Reform Memorandum No. 15, a Defense Department initiative to use electronic systems to automate and standardize military processes with industry.
   “This is a new way of doing business,” said Kiazan Moneypenny, a system specialist at MTMC. “This is just another indication of how we are moving toward the use of commercial procedures in all the transportation processes.”