ASSETS, INFRASTRUCTURE & INNOVATION
The Digital Rail Engineer and Customer
Howard Wilson-Morissette,,Director of Business Development for transport at Tata Consultancy Services, explains the need for an optimised approach to asset maintenance.
W
ith the separation of infrastructure management from train operations,
there has been a shift in power and demand for greater transparency of costs. The growth of rail traffi c across Europe, combined with increasing speed demands, the seven-day railway and the economic climate are all putting increased pressure on the assets.
Commercially, the operational requirement for downward pressure on costs, total cost of ownership and return on investment is a daily challenge and, where the railway is nearing capacity – frequently on ageing infrastructure – the nature of maintenance and repair is changing.
There is new infrastructure, but future rail and train maintenance is focused on using a predictive / optimised service based maintenance approach. The increasing pressure on possession times makes it ineffi cient to work separately on assets by functional type, e.g. signalling, tunnels and bridges, electrifi cation and track.
Once a possession is taken, all engineering functions must optimise downtime with workforces that must be mobile, with devices that enable the download of appropriate and real-time information to enable work to be undertaken at the right time. Engineers require information about the assets, such as where it is, how to get access to it, its condition, engineering drawings and technical data, and report completion using upload and download video and data.
Infrastructure failures lead to delays and cancellations, which generate fi nes on the infrastructure provider. The amount of information pressure that passengers place on operating companies through their use of social media is increasing, creating a further power shift and placing pressure not only on the service providers but government as well.
As fuel prices continue to rise, train and freight usage increases. More traffi c leads to greater wear on the permanent way. Failures, when they occur, have a greater impact and more work has to be carried out in the very limited possessions that are available. Asset owners need to know what needs to be fi xed and when
it needs repairing, in order to keep the railway running safely.
Asset Lifecycle Information Repository
A time-based preventative approach is no longer affordable and a need for predictive and ‘reliability centred maintenance’ (RCM) approaches increases. The advent of high speed monitoring trains has enabled asset owners to understand the current state of the system.
The increased use of remote monitoring can provide indications of impending problems. Simulations can predict the likely wear due to changing train formats. However, to realise the full benefi ts of this information, it needs collation in an Asset Lifecycle Information Repository, which provides a single source of the truth for all assets in a geographic location, enabling the planning of work in an integrated and coordinated way.
It is critical to identify simulation and forecasting of rail degradation with changing of load factors and traffi c along the network, with provision of appropriate rail to optimise full lifetime cost.
Providing a factory to digitise the many millions of drawings that are held enables their use with mobile working devices and will become increasingly important for cost reductions to be realised.
With an holistic view of the various EAM products, there is need to upgrade and provide maintenance support for EAM software products. Integrating EAM software products with a myriad of technologies and applications – legacy systems, ERP, PM applications, BIM, mobile devices, GIS, RFID, remote asset monitoring and timetabling – rather than working in isolation, is increasingly important to improve the commercial and operational key performance indicators.
Mobile devices
Predictions for the next ten years show that the number of rail passengers will increase, making the need for greater understanding of customer behaviours, and effi ciency gains through increased automation, essential for the future.
212 | rail technology magazine Apr/May 13 ADVERTISING FEATURE
It is these agencies who indirectly own the customer relationship by virtue of the insight they are able to collect. The challenge for TOCs is to better understand the end-to-end customer experience or they risk that experience being owned and managed by others.
Society is facing signifi cant culture change with the adoption of mobile devices increasing information and content, with increasing use of a variety of social applications (not only Facebook and Twitter) hosted in the ‘cloud’. Consumers now have more power and infl uence, and this is driving industries to understand and redefi ne the experience that customers receive and expect.
Rail professionals must appreciate the
difference between what they can control and what they can infl uence in this fast-changing technology revolution, as this will enable them to engage customers and build relationships using new insights into behaviours that will be key to commercial success.
There is a new opportunity to actively engage passengers in contributing to improvements and decisions TOCs make, by harnessing the power of the crowd (both your passengers and prospects). There are many examples of organisations using social applications, not only to listen to the voice of the customer (VOC), but engage with them. It is this ability to engage and respond that will develop consumer advocacy gained through a sense of being valued. Engaging customers must not be taken for granted and it is important that customer contributions are recognised and potentially rewarded. Giffgaff, a telecommunications company, maintains a low headcount by incentivising its customers to provide customer support to one another.
Overall utilisation in the UK is signifi cantly lower than the rest of Europe, so what is it that will get customers to use the rail network as an alternative to their car or other forms of transport?
Agencies like thetrainline, redspottedhanky etc have created alliances and ecosystems to extend the customer convenience beyond the train journey, with the ability to book hotels, bus tickets, theatre tickets in one place.
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