Railway Track & Structures - August 2008 - (Page 42)

Amtrak asset management for the individual leaders, as well as the higher-level leaders about overtime, information about their staffing and information about compliance such as was it done on time, were we compliant. That readily available information was critical to us.” “We went through in the past couple of years and surveyed all the assets that we have to maintain in all four of our disciplines: track, signaling, electrification and structures departments,” Ebersohn said. “We identified all of our functional assets against which we now record all or our condition measurements, our use of the assets (trains, traffic carried), and all the Maximo-generated information about type and cost of maintenance (labor, equipment and material). What we’ve now established is a system where we can look at an asset and see its condition, see how much it’s used and how much we spent in terms of effort on maintaining it, all the information that you need to manage the life cycle of that asset and make our decisions at the right time. We’ve provided a good system that will help us optimally maintain the infrastructure.” Amtrak’s Enterprise Asset Management System works in a variety of tasks in the Northeast Corridor, ranging from timekeeping to inspection and compliance. labor rates. It’s all automated within the system. “Once we had our labor management in the system, we set up the system to deal with reimbursable work,” Broughton added. “The reimbursable process was, again, paper based. There was a very high potential for mistakes. If we integrated this into our Maximo system, we knew the work that we were doing and we knew the labor that was going against it. We knew if the work was reimbursable and we could force additional information requirements. We now have that same system working throughout the corridor. Our reimbursable work is automated through Maximo and sent through to Finance. It’s now all electronic.” “From a layman’s point of view, from a business point of view, what engineering, and, therefore, Amtrak, is attempting to achieve is what I call knowledge and order,” said Bill Bates, senior director of business operations at Amtrak. “Knowledge relates to the need to know and understand events, the cost of those events, decisions surrounding those events and information about the events. The order is to be able to rely upon the information, to know it has been created and captured the same way every time, so when one makes a decision, it’s based on a good solid foundation. Knowledge and order is really the overall driving benefit that we derive from this system.” 42 Railway Track & Structures August 2008 Bates continued: “From a business perspective, if you’re in a capitalintensive business, which we are, if you are not able to accurately determine the optimum point where you should stop maintaining and you should replace a capital asset, you can do one of two things: You can either have higher maintenance costs or you can be investing prematurely, using up scarce capital resources. So driving toward that optimum point, which is what we are doing here with these systems, is crucially important to us.” Making thing work “There were challenges in making this work within the existing culture, Broughton noted. “Our Number One challenge was to make sure the application was very simple to use and, Number Two, to supply plenty of support for the people in the field. Using the Maximo product, we were able to tailor the screens to individuals. When a foreman logs in to the system, whether it’s for inspection, work orders or time entry, the information is tailored to that individual. The screens are simple and easy to use.” “When you start dealing with people on the shop floor or in the field, the last thing you want is for them to spend more than five or 10 minutes giving you their administrative information,” Ebersohn said. “In that sense, being an asset-management system, obviously Maximo has encountered that problem and addressed it in the past to make the user interface a lot more palatable. That really assisted us.” Timely information “One of our original design concepts was that information needed to be available the next day,” Broughton said. “We wanted to know what our overtime was or our staffing levels, our full-time equivalency right now instead of waiting for a paper-based reporting system that could take quite a while to supply the information. Or we might be looking at inspection compliance, e.g., were we able to do the inspection that was required yesterday, was it done on time. When it was a paper system, it could take time to achieve full organizational awareness. What we have done is taken Maximo and put it in the hands of our executive leadership, as well as our field staff so we’re all viewing and using the same information. Now in our system every morning we generate information Implementing the system System implementation started in www.rtands.com http://www.rtands.com

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Railway Track & Structures - August 2008 Contents On Track Industry Today Supplier News AREMA News NRC News TTCI R&D Wish List: What Chief Engineers Really Want in M/W Machinery Keeping Ballast in Shape Amtrak Turns to Sophisticated System to Manage NEC Assets Supplier Profiles Products and Literature People Calendar Sales Representatives Website Directory Advertisers Index Professional Directory Classified Advertising Chicago Perspective

Railway Track & Structures - August 2008

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