Business profile
Robert Hopkin, executive director of the Rail Alliance explains why it is UK rail’s largest and fastest growing networking organisation
T
he Rail Alliance is the UK’s largest, fastest growing networking organisation supporting the rail sector and boasts a membership in excess of 2000 registered members from more than 1,900 companies. The alliance supports, informs and assists companies (large and small) to better understand the rail sector and the opportunities within it. Importantly, you do not need to be a ‘rail company’ per se to join the Rail Alliance; indeed, many of its members would not classify themselves as traditional rail companies – they are companies already operating in the automotive, aerospace, marine or manufacturing sectors (for example); or those companies looking to diversify into rail; or those who have traded in rail before and are looking to re-engage with the sector. Within the Rail Alliance membership there are plenty of rail companies including Toc's as well as Tier 1 or Tier 2 companies.
What does the Rail Alliance do? To answer the question – 'So, what does the Rail Alliance do?' – well, we work with companies of all sizes from sole traders through to large multi-national enterprises to help them to 'do business better' in, and for , the rail sector. Additionally, as highlighted above, we welcome member companies from outside the rail industry as we have a strong record in assisting those companies looking to diversify into rail, and it is not unusual for business to be conducted across several sectors at any one of our meetings! Our strapline is simple and effective too, namely: 'network collaborate innovate thrive' and we make no apology for the grammatically incorrect nature of the strapline as we do see ourselves as verbs on the business development landscape – there are too many adjectives being bandied about sometimes and as an organisation, we are all about doing things.
Membership Membership of the Rail Alliance is available at two levels; Registered Members can register free with the Rail Alliance and this enables a company to populate its profile in the Rail Alliance CRM database and to receive newsletters and details of forthcoming meetings and events. However, the real added value comes from full membership; some 250+ members have so far upgraded their membership to Affiliate or Full Member status (at annual
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cost of £500+VAT for an organisation or £150+VAT for sole traders). The benefits of full membership are considerable as they enable members to attend all networking events, all seminars and to benefit from the various support packages for conferences and exhibitions (home and abroad) as well as benefiting from any third party discounts or concessions that the Rail Alliance has negotiated.
Networking Networking is still our main focus and we have worked extremely hard to maintain our strong reputation for providing our members with worthwhile events – events that combine opportunities to hear visiting speakers from the industry as well as providing a vehicle for networking to take place. Each of our networking events has at least one senior or influential presenter from the rail sector – wherever possible we source speakers with procurement or commercial roles. In particular, we have recently been concentrating on Product Acceptance as a major theme as it is one of the areas where our membership has expressed a need for more information. This has led to us working directly with Network Rail’s Product Acceptance and Supplier Quality Assurance perrsonnel to produce a series of seminars and workshops for our members. This theme will be further developed over the next 18-24 months as we embark on providing real support to SME's looking to take product to market through the Rail Alliance Testing Voucher Scheme – see
www.futurerailway.org/eit/Pages/ NRTestingVoucher.aspx for more details.
Exhibitions The Rail Alliance also assists its members to exhibit at the major industry exhibitions (Railtex and Infrarail in alternate years). The advantages of co-exhibiting with the Rail Alliance are significant; by block- booking hundreds of square metres of space, there is a much better chance of securing prime positions for the members as well as providing a more flexible canvas with which to operate. Additionally, the Rail Alliance will pass on any discounts (as much as 40 per cent in some cases) to its members, as well as being able to allocate down to three square metres for those members who find the cost of buying the minimum quantity of space from an exhibition organiser too daunting (the minimum is often set at nine square
metres). Exhibiting with the Rail Alliance for an SME is not just common sense – it can be cost effective too; small businesses that cannot afford to take nine square metres at each of three major exhibitions in the calendar can, by taking three square metres at a time, treble their exposure to potential customers by attending three exhibitions for – in effect – the price of one – such a saving can often pay for their membership fee.
Media We work with trusted partners in the specialist rail media publications and we are delighted to recommend such organisations to our members; we use our relationship with the rail specialist media to help raise the profile of our member companies or to take advantage of any discounted card rates for advertisement space that may be available. Each month, we will be informing the readers of Rail Professional about: our forthcoming events, our new members and any special opportunities available to our members. As 'collaborate' is part of our strapline,
we take our responsibilities seriously when it comes to collaborative business relationships – that said, ‘partnering’ as an activity comes naturally to us and we have in-house, trained and experienced BS11000 facilitators (monthly BS11000 Awareness Courses are run at our Long Marston headquarters). In case you were wondering, BS11000 is the world’s first national standard for Collaborative Business Relationships and we have had a long and fruitful relationship with the
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