Business profile
SET has been active in R&D for more than 13 years and in the last five has developed a successful business supporting electronic and electromechanical maintenance in heavy rail
Innovation at its core W
ith strong technical progress and collaboration with industry partners, SET’s patented
Wheelmotor, a radical new drive concept, may soon be available to the market. An innovative approach to traction control that combines the ability to greatly increase the drivetrain efficiency with the need to reduce operating costs means that it will bring benefits to the whole of the UK Rail Industry.
A radical approach to maintenance As well as design innovation, SET has extended its thinking to repair services, which have grown up alongside its R&D activities. The result is an approach which suggests improvements and performs cost benefit analysis to produce appropriate long-term solutions to maintenance and repair issues.
Information Sharing
Building partnerships with customers has been paramount to SET’s success in its investigation, maintenance and repair offerings. Some important but often neglected aspects of getting to the underlying causes of maintenance problems are good communication, open information sharing and mutual trust among all parties involved, with the joint aim of improving both SET’s service and the reliability of the equipment entrusted to it.
Working on this principle, SET finds
that open discussions between itself, maintenance staff and engineers often
reveal critical information and history that would otherwise be lost if the equipment were simply sent away for routine repair with a standard fault ticket attached.
Identifying failure patterns Through careful logging and classification of repairs, failure patterns in equipment and sub-assemblies can be identified and present opportunities for further investigations. Carrying out these investigations will generally lead to a working solution and a reduction in both direct and indirect costs. However, in
reality maintenance departments working to a tight schedule may be concerned only with doing what is immediately necessary to keep a particular unit operational, which may amount to nothing more than simple component substitution until the problem goes away - an unrewarding and costly task, especially if the problem is intermittent in nature. Utilising various techniques such
as data-logging, statistical analysis and physical modelling, SET works closely with maintenance engineers to get to the root cause of the problems observed. With this approach, the company is able to help eliminate intermittent and long-term repeat faults in both revenue critical and safety critical equipment. A further benefit to this approach is the potential to prolong the life of obsolete/obsolescent equipment.
Is this really a new approach? SET’s maintenance solutions are overseen by the same staff responsible for the development of its traction system, meaning that any necessary changes and upgrades to customers’ equipment are subject to the same levels of rigour regarding testing and certification as a new product development. This is essential where repair and modification is to be carried out on safety-critical sub-systems,
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