Complex rail projects require skilled workers with up-to-date competences, qualifications and licenses. When those projects are coordinated from one location, a low-tech solution for managing the ongoing competence of the workforce is just about sufficient. You record essential information about competence assessments, qualifications and licences in a spreadsheet and check it manually when you need to identify a worker with specific skills. During audits, you consume time accessing office cabinets to find the requested hardcopy documents. But it’s clear why this low-tech, isolated and paper-based system is not fit for purpose as the complexity of the business and workforce increases.
Hitachi Rail Europe’s first major project in the UK, the Class 395 Javelin serving stations between London and East Kent, started in 2009 and was coordinated from one location in Ashford, Kent. We’ve since won major contracts for the Intercity Express Programme and Edinburgh Glasgow Improvement Programme, replacing hundreds of ageing trains with state-of-the-art rolling stock and turnkey Train Maintenance Centres. We manage these complex projects from various maintenance centres around the UK and have been hiring, training and assessing employees nationwide in a range of technical and operational tasks. It was clear that we needed a robust, flexible and above all compliant system to capture the competence of our workforce.
The Competence Management System that we developed in collaboration with RINA is designed to facilitate our workforce training and management systems, streamline our operations and support our audits and compliance procedures. By standardising and centralising all competence-related information and documentation, we’ve been able to significantly improve our efficiency when organising maintenance projects and planning training programmes. And when it comes to audits, it’s a great relief to be able to pull up records and documents in seconds from a central digital system. Based on RINA’s Competentis® tool, the CMS was relatively quick to develop and tailor to our needs, which included harmonisation with Rail Safety and Standards Board (RSSB) standards and best practice guidance.
The paperless aspect alone provides many benefits, and not just in terms of data sharing, storage and consistency. The system demands evidence such as certificates or assessments to support an individual’s skills records. That makes it impossible to bypass requirements or cut corners, giving both us and our auditors confidence that every single person working on our fleet of trains is competent to do their job. With assessment evidence automatically uploaded and stored in real time via tablets, we reduce errors in data entry, vastly ease the job of administrators and can rely on the system always being fully up to date.
While the CMS clearly makes it more efficient to manage competence across the organisation, it also makes it easier for individual team leaders to plan skills development for their team members. We can configure interactive dashboards for each team leader, allowing them to quickly determine what kind of further training or refresher courses are needed. To make this even quicker and more accurate, we can configure specific role “profiles” indicating which tasks, qualifications and licenses a particular role title requires.
All this makes it much more efficient to organise training and assessments. It’s like predictive maintenance for your workforce. Instead of waiting for an individual’s qualification to lapse – only realising when they need to work on an urgent task – you can proactively schedule their training in advance. Of course, the CMS has sophisticated filtering and reporting mechanisms to help with this.
As with any centralised system, we are well aware of data privacy and cyber security concerns. Here again, the CMS has major benefits over low-tech solutions. Configuring permissions allows us to control who can see what, so individuals can only access the information they need to know. Although RINA offers a hosted solution, we chose to store everything on our own servers with strong cyber protections in place. Cybersecurity is a major aspect as we plan our next upgrades, which include a dynamic link to our SAP system and integrating external competence information from Sentinel, a UK “identity card” system for railway workers.
Time- and cost-savings, greater accuracy, better compliance, a safer workforce – and no paper. As Hitachi Rail Europe’s business increases over the UK, we have the challenge of harmonising old and new practices and keeping pace with the constant evolutions in technology and standards. Our Competence Management System is a major step in this direction and we look forward to working with RINA on more exciting projects to come.
