In certain cases, as well as designing and building trains and systems,
Operations and maintenance is a new and fairly niche business for
In addition to designing, building, and maintaining rolling stock and signalling,
The solution is about operating and maintaining a rail system on behalf of a customer, often because the customer's core business is not rail or they want a level of performance and risk transfer that a private service provider can deliver. For example, this might be a system where the client (typically public transport authorities, private asset owners, leasing companies), wants a reliable rail link but not the risks and headaches of operating and maintaining the system.
'We have always been successful operating and maintaining in situations where we have sold assets or turnkey solutions,' says Jack. An OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) that builds and installs the trains, signalling and infrastructure is ideally placed to operate and maintain them.
'We bring a lot of organisational synergies combining operations and maintenance, but we can also leverage our technology provider and OEM capabilities, which allow us to be faster in introducing innovative solutions. This is often at a lower price, because we're not providing a solution to an operator that is managing additional technical and logistical interface risks, therefore, adding a margin before selling onto an asset owner. For example, we have been able to quickly introduce plexiglass seat dividers early in the pandemic, implement driver advisory systems to improve energy performance, prevent cybersecurity threats to the system, proactively manage obsolescence to assets and deliver the latest passenger experience upgrades, straight into our train operations. Customers come to us because we can offer that whole-life, total-cost-of-ownership security.'
'When we are responsible for designing and building a system as well as carrying out, say, 30 years of operations and maintenance, we can design the system in a way where we give our customers the best value from the assets, for example, in terms of energy-saving or passenger experience. With
Of course, the market for
'As well as greenfield opportunities, we also look at brownfield - focusing mainly where we already have a presence or products that we can support. This is not a limiting factor,
During the life of a transport network, the client may need to upgrade or extend the existing fleet or infrastructure. As this has the potential to create service-affecting failures, it can fall to the operator and maintainer to manage.
The rail industry varies from country to country and, according to Jack, there has been a paradigm shift in some markets, and a blurring of the lines between operator, maintainer, and technology provider. This change has been accelerated because of COVID, where a lot of operators struggled with record low passenger numbers and revenue, leading to government bailouts alongside changes in contractual arrangements, such as franchise to concession. Some models have been problematic, as they decouple short-term operations and maintenance franchises from asset management, exposing the asset owner to increased total cost of ownership and the travelling public to service disruptions.
Contact:
Tel: +33 (0)6 65 47 40 14
Email: samuel.miller@alstomgroup.com
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