Asia
ORAIL, Korea’s national railway operator, made another leap in the quality of its safety management in the first half of this year, on top of a significant improvement last year. This is thanks largely to the tangible results produced by its so-called Omnibearing Proactive Safety Management System (OPSMS). After posting the lowest accident and incident rate in its history in 2012, Korail achieved a further 7.1% reduction in the first half of 2013, compared with the same period the previous year, while the failure rate of the high-speed train fleet dropped by 24% during the same period. Lloyd’s Register Rail, an international risk management organisation which reviewed and audited Korail’s safety management system, confirmed that it generally complies with international practice for safety management systems, and that there are many examples of good safety practice within Korail. OPSMS is designed to improve the safety of train operations by expanding the scope of safety management. This includes monitoring and eliminating the minor signs of potential risk as well as the risks associated with large
Attention to detail drives u K
A concerted effort by Korail to improve safety management and reduce train failures and human error has been hailed a major success. As Lee Min-cheor of Korail’s International Cooperation Department explains, the performance of flagship high-speed services has improved markedly.
projects and important policies, and taking effective precautionary measures to minimise all types of risk that could lead to accidents or incidents. Korail’s system of consistent safety assessment by a third party has proven to be highly effective in managing the safety of many projects. Korail’s Advanced Safety Assessment system makes an advanced diagnosis of the factors undermining the safety of train operation through an objective assessment process from the planning stage.
Before this system was introduced, Korail incurred unnecessary costs and safety risks because safety reviews were performed at the project execution stage. However, the new system introduced a mandatory process of assessing risk factors associated with major projects from the planning stage, so that they could be detected in advance and action taken before project execution. In 2012, Korail performed a safety assessment of 414 projects and eliminated 2598 risk factors. Korail encouraged its employees to identify, analyse and assess potential risk factors at different sites and devised customised safety measures
appropriate to each site. This helped to foster a safety culture among employees and laid the foundation for Korail’s safety management system. The Enterprise Safety Task is a system
where employees with the strongest knowledge of their site take the initiative to identify and assess risk factors, such as site safety risks and facilities vulnerable to safety issues. They then manage the risk factors by designating them as safety tasks classified by risk level, field, and period. When implementing the tasks, the sites report their progress to regional headquarters, which in turn report to the head office. The status of tasks is analysed and monitored each month. In 2012, 8125 tasks were developed, out of which 6779 were completed. This system was developed by Korail to ensure the safe operation of trains by systematically analysing and managing the minor signs of potential risks that could lead to accidents and incidents. In 2012, 13,616 items of data were gathered. Out of these, 44 risk factors requiring urgent attention were detected and removed. A concerted effort to tackle human error has also been taken along with
Korail has managed to improve the performance of its original KTX fleet, and its newer KTX-Sancheon trains (right). 32
IRJ August 2013
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52