Multi-company fleet management: moving towards smoother communication & maintenance planning in rail
Proactive, timely and well-planned maintenance of railway assets helps reduce the risk of service disruptions and cost escalations. The key to achieve this type of maintenance (proactive, timely and well-planned) is clear communication between all involved parties:
- Proactive: be informed (and inform others) about abnormal behaviour on your rolling stock so you can act or plan for maintenance upfront
- Timely: share real-time data and operational statuses with partners and colleagues anywhere and anytime so you can act in time
- Well-planned: communicate maintenance planning in an easy, fast and clear way with all stakeholders
That last part might not seem that much of an issue, but we see that communication between stakeholders to plan maintenance is often not as optimised as it could be.
Unstructured, time-consuming communication processes get you nowhere
Maintenance planning and scheduling often happens over the phone or via email, with the help of Excel, ERP tools and maintenance management systems. The multitude of tools that are being used cause a chaotic way of managing maintenance communication and planning.
The constant exchange of long email threads or incomplete Excel sheets also make it hard to keep track of the fleet availability and maintenance planning. Fleet managers risk being on the phone all day, and (unintentionally) leaving people out of important communication. Because of this they’re not able to easily build any internal knowledge that’s accessible to everyone (or those concerned) within the company.
The same goes for following up on the status of assets in real-time and being informed about abnormal behaviour: the lack of access to data and files, and the multi-channel chaotic communication make it difficult and time-consuming to manage operations. Sounds familiar?
A multi-company fleet management platform simplifies communication & collaboration
One way you can optimise the communication between colleagues, teams and partners is by centralising it on one unified, multi-company platform, instead of relying on multiple separate tools.
With a unified fleet management platform (like e.g. Railfleet) you can efficiently streamline communication with all your stakeholders:
1. Communicate about abnormal behaviour on your assets
Safely share real-time asset data with partners and decide which information should be sent to them at which time. Inform teams and partners when any abnormalities are detected by setting up custom notifications and alerts and help them take action. All relevant information about the abnormal behaviour is gathered in a detailed overview per asset.
2. Share information about the status of your assets
Show colleagues, partners and other stakeholders if there are any restrictions on assets and give them access to the operational status of your assets in real time on a central dashboard. Any changes are immediately visible on the platform and via notifications, making sure nobody misses any information and everyone is always up-to-date.
3. Plan maintenance interventions online
Notify your maintainer about new defects on assets and newly planned interventions so they can start preparing and make sure they have all the right resources in place when the asset arrives in the workshop. Easily connect with ERP and MMS to manage resources and scheduling. Know when an asset enters and leaves the workshop right away.
The benefit of multi-company fleet management tools is that you, as the asset owner, are able to collaborate with both internal and external parties, while keeping full control over who has access to which information and for how long. You define who can see what, which notifications should be sent to whom and when people should no longer have access to your data on the platform.
Thanks to the collaboration with partners on a shared platform you’re also able to gradually build and share more knowledge about your fleet, and thus ensure that making the right decisions and acting faster becomes easier in the future.
How Lineas & Railpool automated maintenance planning with Railfleet
At Lineas and Railpool they also believe that a central, shared platform removes collaboration barriers and enables them to act faster and communicate more smoothly with people both inside and outside of their organisation.
By sharing the assets that are maintained by Railpool with Railpool, Lineas is able to smoothly collaborate with them for maintenance activities. They use Railfleet as the primary way of communication to be informed of changes on the assets in question and to plan maintenance interventions. Thanks to Railfleet, Lineas and Railpool were able to eliminate a constant exchange of emails and move their preventive and corrective maintenance planning to a central platform, accessible to teams from both companies.
Through the use of notifications and alerts the right people are always informed of any new actions and defects. With the help of geolocation alerts they also know exactly when assets enter and leave the workshop, giving Lineas a real-time overview of their asset availability and Railpool a timely notification about the arrival of an asset for an intervention.
Want to know more about how Lineas and Railpool streamlined maintenance planning and communication? Get in touch with us, we’d be happy to share their story with you!
