Why we are thrilled to attend the London Rolling Stock Maintenance Summit on 7–8 December
At Railnova we are wary of marketing expenses. In recent posts, Hacktrain and RailwayInnovation.com cited marketing expenses as a major obstacle to innovation in the Railway industry. Attending a railway event is always a careful decision for a small company like us, as it easily adds up to 10000 Euros or more.
Although these events always remain biased (vendors usually have to pay to attend and speak, while operators can come for free) we feel that it’s getting closer to a joint effort within the industry, just like the Web Summit or Business-of-Software in the tech world. We all want to make progress in fleet maintenance and asset condition monitoring.
Here is why we’re thrilled to attend the London Rolling Stock Maintenance Summit :
1. Last year’s edition (2015) was great
London Underground, SNCB, SNCF and Trenitalia, among others, were able to demonstrate amazing progress in their fleet operations by using telematics, asset condition monitoring and big data software stacks. (See our dropbox link of last year’s presentation here.)
Some operators took a DIY approach: collecting diagnostics data on USB sticks, concatenating fleet wide fault code history on a local database, and generating up to 100 rules based on the maintenance teams feedback (while achieving up to 60% accurate prediction on corrective faults). Others brute forced the problem by retrofitting 600 trains with expensive OEM telematics, pushing the data in SAP Hana and using an army of consultants to extract value.
There are solutions for all budgets, but in the end of the day, what matters is value and whether your life as a fleet manager is improving.
The key outcome from last year’s edition for us at Railnova , was that the railway fleet management industry is finally getting ready for telematics and asset condition monitoring. Many early pitfalls have now been identified, such as doing RFPs (request for price) instead of doing a POC (proof of concepts). Many Operators now understand it’s about discovering value together with a technology vendor rather than doing an I-know-it-in-advance-and-will-specify-you-how-to-innovate RFP process. These POCs often have a higher chance at success: Railnova has successfully converted all its POCs since 2010 and helped its Clients take their fleet management to the next level.
2. It’s targeted on fleet management progress
Only Fleet Operators, Maintenance and specialised vendors in the predictive maintenance and asset condition monitoring area are present.
There are no widget manufacturers, no suppliers that only work on specification or wait for RFPs that someone else decided for them. The participants are all innovators and have come a long way to solve fleet management problems.
Some take it from a hardware perspective, connecting to new sources of data on the fleets, other from a software perspective by specialising in machine learning, big data, predictive analytics. At Railnova, we do both hardware and software to unlock new train data, generate pertinent diagnostics and push works orders to clients existing systems through APIs.
The Rolling Stock Maintenance Summit is the perfect opportunity to learn how to successfully implement and improve condition-based maintenance from all these perspectives. The Summit also provides us with answers to business questions regarding investments in condition-based monitoring, efficient asset data analysis and getting the right data to improve your maintenance regimes.
Overall it shows that the industry wants to progress. And we wouldn’t want to miss it for the world!
3. Regulation is (nearly) absent
This is perhaps the greatest thing about this conference. People are not trying to comply with regulation and tender processes at this conference. They are trying to make progress.
At Railnova we see complying with EN55xxx and ethical purchasing processes as a foundation of our business, but we never consider the work done until we have unlocked value for our Clients. We don’t stop at the regulations, but go far beyond.
At the time the UK is deploying ERTMS country wide, people should be reminded that compliance to regulation and purchasing processes is not a goal in itself. Awarding a contract and getting a compliant solution delivered doesn’t guarantee that your life as Fleet Manager will be better.
The goal remains to collect crucial data in a breeze, to diagnose your faults efficiently, and to plan maintenance works swiftly.
4. This year we’re telling the Railnova story
This year, we also get to share the story of Railnova on stage on December 7, 2016 at 6.15pm.
Back when I managed several hundred leased locomotives in Europe I grew frustrated to not have any information about the locomotives and having to collect data manually. It took up to 2 days to analyse the maintenance history of a single asset to identify unperformed maintenance. I also didn’t known whether assets were running or not, how much fuel and energy they were consuming and when maintenance was due.
I couldn’t find a system on the market to get visibility and control over the entire fleet operations, so I decided to resign from my Fleet Director position and founded Rainova to develop a universal system to tame Fleet Management issues.
Today, everyone at Railnova is doing everything they can to help operators to bridge the knowledge gap with our Railster hardware and Railfleet software. Through the condition monitoring of their mixed fleet, operators are now able to access critical data and transform it into actionable diagnostics, to optimise their maintenance cycles and to automate ECM day-to-day management.
Discover our best-practices for condition-based maintenance during our talk at the Rolling Stock Summit, on December 7, 2016 at 6.15pm.
If you haven’t registered for the summit yet, you can do it by clicking here. Join us at Grange St. Paul’s Hotel, London the 7th & 8th of December 2016.
