Queensland Rail: Mobility Solution Drives Efficiencies in Railway Maintenance
Client:
Queensland RailChallenge:
- Manual planning procedures for maintenance work orders
- Poor recording of time and materials used in the field
- Inventory management and procurement processes affected by lack of maintenance planning
Solution:
- Design and implement SAP Work Manager solution and deploy to 600+ mobile users
- Enable a single source of truth for raising corrective work requests straight off a work order
- Implement improved linear information such as geotagging
Results:
- Enhanced quality of field information for better executive decision making
- Improved time and cost savings through better work order planning
- Enhanced economies of scale due to ability to group work orders by geography
A New Approach
Queensland Rail’s itinerant workforce operates across 8,000 kilometers (approximately 5,000 miles) of critical railway infrastructure. The company needed a new approach to creating, sending and executing work orders for corrective and preventive maintenance. “The old way was very inefficient,” says Takis. “There was no real-time reporting and hours weren’t recorded correctly or allocated to the correct job. While everything was maintained, the time capture and information recording was very weak, which created inefficiencies in our procurement and inventory management processes.” As an existing SAP customer, Queensland Rail opted for an SAP enterprise asset management solution and selected DXC Oxygen as its systems integrator for the project. “DXC Oxygen had a good attitude and good subject matter expertise and continuity of resources — everything a systems integrator should bring,” says Takis.
Exceptional Oversight
Implementing SAP Work Manager has equipped Queensland Rail mobile devices with WiFi, SIM card and hot-spot capabilities that allow complete in-the-field reporting, with GPS stamping and uploading of photo and digital attachments. The new solution has given Queensland Rail exceptional compliance oversight, as employees can now validate exactly where maintenance activity has been undertaken. “It has automated the whole work order process. I now have a lot more detailed and reliable information at my fingertips, which I can share with senior management,” says Takis. When a worker encounters an issue, they can use SAP Work Manager on a tablet to raise a notification, take a photo of the problem and send it to the scheduler. Then the scheduler compiles and coordinates these notifications, raises the work order and sends out the maintenance crew to do the repairs.
Efficient Maintenance Planning
“The solution allows us to plan maintenance work more efficiently, particularly when that work involves cross-discipline teams,” says Takis. “It’s a costly exercise to take a bridge out of service for repairs, so it is important that you execute all the maintenance in and around the bridge location at the same time. Using SAP Work Manager, we can schedule that activity much better and minimize one-off maintenance exercises.”