Customer Story
How Pinnacle Rail Services Cut FRA Audit Prep from 3 Days to 2 Hours
A 22-person RWIC contractor in Kansas City replaced spreadsheets and paper DFRs with Railflagging Pro. Here’s what changed.
Pinnacle Rail Services is a composite customer scenario based on common operational patterns in the RWIC flagging industry.
The Situation
22 Crew Members. 4 Job Sites. A Spreadsheet for Everything.
Pinnacle Rail Services ran RWIC flagging operations across four active job sites in Missouri, Kansas, and Nebraska. Their operations manager kept everything in three separate spreadsheets — one for timecards, one for the DFR log, one for RWIC cert expiration dates. The crew schedule lived in a shared Google Sheet that nobody trusted. Every Friday afternoon, payroll got pieced together from whatever had made it to the inbox by noon. And every week without fail, the BNSF project manager would call asking for DFRs from a job site she couldn’t access herself.
It worked — until FRA sent an audit notice. What followed was three days of pulling paper forms from binders, calling crew members to confirm hours, and scanning handwritten reports from truck cabs. That’s when they started looking for something built for this work.
3 Separate Spreadsheets
Timekeeping, DFRs, and cert tracking — none connected
18+ Hours / Week
Admin time burned by the operations manager
3-Day Scramble
To produce documentation for an FRA audit
The Transition
Onboarded in One Week. Running in Two.
Data Migration
Imported crew roster, job sites, and RWIC cert records. Configured multi-state payroll for MO/KS/NE wage allocation.
Field Go-Live
Crew issued tablets. First DFRs submitted digitally from the field. Dispatch using the Operations Console for the first time.
First Payroll Run
Timecards approved through the two-step flow. RFL activity codes auto-populated. Payroll export generated in 12 minutes.
The Results — 6 Months In
The Numbers That Changed How They Run the Business
2 Hours
FRA audit documentation produced on demand, down from a 3-day scramble
Zero Missed Certs
Automated cert expiry alerts caught 3 expirations before they became violations
12 Minutes
Weekly payroll export time, down from a half-day of manual entry
0 Phone Calls
BNSF project manager pulls DFRs directly from the Client Portal — no more chasing
In Their Words
What the Operations Manager Said After 6 Months
The FRA audit used to mean three days of pulling spreadsheets and calling crew members to confirm hours. Now I run a report and it’s done. I don’t know how we did it the old way.
— Operations Manager, Pinnacle Rail Services (Kansas City, MO)
Quote is representative of outcomes reported by RWIC flagging contractors using Railflagging Pro.
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