The modern era with its approach to simplify human effort has brought along subsequent complexities in the passenger light rail industry. The modern transit system has increasingly turned automated and thus complex. Automated operational processes have reduced their dependency on human effort; maintenance too has remained system driven, more so by technology than on priority. The lean has been towards advancing technology rather than restructuring the existing light rail maintenance system that could bring about excellence in vehicle maintenance.
Maintenance management has been a key area of analysis. William Edward Deming on “Total Quality Management”, states that management must “substitute aids and helpful leadership.”[1] Similarly John Day’s Maintenance Management philosophy states, “maintenance should be treated as an investment rather than a cost” and at the same time, he points out that “people would much rather work on what they enjoy, what they are good at or what they think is important—before working on what is actually important.”[2]
Factors I see influencing the level of maintenance on light rail vehicles are as follows:
· Operating environment
· Type of vehicle
· Experience of manufacturer
· Labor constraints
· Staff experience
· Budget constraints
· Spare ratios[3]
It is generally seen that priority issues take a backseat when the weekly scheduling efforts for light rail maintenance begin, and the backlogs get conveniently forgotten. This concept of priority system is gaining momentum, as its purpose is to drive scheduling and also mark priorities in the context of coordinating. There is an ever-increasing number of maintenance tracking software programs being introduced that offer this maintenance priority system built in however, it is up to the users to embrace the benefits deciding that they out way the time spent incorporating them.
There are many great systems available and my experience is with Asset Works and other Trapeze products; prior to this a Unix based custom system and Navigator an Aviation maintenance tracking software. All these systems had built in priority systems but none fully utilized to improve maintenance. The last system I used had priority system default settings and when data was extracted it was found that over 97% of the time this default setting was the recorded priority.
Companies spend an enormous about of money on these systems expecting to be able to gain more insight into their current maintenance requirements. I believe that prior to analyzing data we should be turning our attention to training. We should first map out concrete objectives. After these objectives are detailed our desired results should be outlined and goals set. The processes and procedures are put into writing driving the next step to implement system and company specific training. With this training it is key to explain what the goals, objectives and where the benchmarks are. Personal who understand “why” will generally work towards these same goals. Display regularly your progress and take feed back on ways to improve the system. Make your decisions on how your system and priority’s will be utilized and do not back down from this. Resistance is to be expected and will be overcome but wavering from your plan will only increase resistance to the change.
Your companies priority system can be designed in a complex or simple way, where generally five levels are considered a prerequisite to plan and schedule vehicle maintenance or any process for that matter. A simple system could use the choices of safety, emergency, urgent, routine or scheduled, operations defect and service delay on-line-outage, but on the other hand, a complex priority system can use up to 15 or more choices.
According to Doc Palmer there is “nothing wrong with using either an adjective or time-based [priority] system (or some combination of the two), but the system should facilitate communication.” The last two decades have seen resurgence in the light rail industry and it is our responsibility to build efficient systems. Operating costs are directly related to system maintenance, which would include adequate staffing for light rail vehicles, fleet maintenance, wayside maintenance [Maintenance-of-Way (MOW)], and facilities and equipment maintenance.
George Sifri has an interesting insight on the need for project selection and priority system. According to him, any organization with a multitude of projects working concurrently will have “number of small and large projects in a portfolio exceed[s] the available resources such as funds, equipment, and competencies.” Secondly, he also brings into light the politics within an organization, playing a major role in priority system management and uses the terminology of “sacred cows” to describe certain projects gaining or losing significance, accordingly.
Implementation of a new and defined priority system to the passenger light rail industry is important to avoid capacity overload, and this coupled with project politics would subsequently lead to frustration, confusion, and an inefficient use of resources. The system’s basic maintenance philosophy, its practice regarding contracted maintenance, labor issues, vehicles, wayside and facilities issues have to be delved deeply into, before these questions aimed to bring about an efficient priority system to industry, get an answer:
· How can the power of politics be minimized?
· How can projects be consistently prioritized to support the organizational strategy?
· How can a prioritized list of projects be used to allocate scarce organizational resources?
· How can the process encourage bottom-up initiation of projects, which support organizational goals and strategies?[4]
The answer is not a sophisticated and fancy priority system but the right maintenance adopted and utilized at the right time. A systematic process with carefully selected projects and allocated resources will benefit the light rail industry and accelerate its development and growth.
[3] http://books.google.co.in/books?id=tsK2DarqNiMC&pg=PA3&lpg=PA3&dq=light+rail+maintenance+analysis&source=bl&ots=Sazul3vhta&sig=IKM-VMEIvtpxiBqEtlnelQQ9SBg&hl=en&ei=As-2TKOoHtCPcY7IxfYJ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CBUQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=light%20rail%20maintenance%20analysis&f=false
Posts
0 comments:
Post a Comment