Streamlining critical rail infrastructure planning
Network Rail High Speed manages 109 km of vital high-speed rail infrastructure between St. Pancras and the Eurotunnel in South East England, and approached Egis to design and develop a solution for its planning team. Staff were facing significant productivity-related challenges: the time-consuming manual processes involved in possession planning and notifications, the constraints of coordinating maintenance work within extremely limited windows of time, and using manual spreadsheets to track complex operations which often resulted in duplicated processes and time siphoned away from critical planning activities. With high-speed commuter trains and international services running at 180mph, any planning errors were likely to trigger safety issues or cause costly delays affecting thousands of passengers. As Egis Director of Digital Asset Management Martin Vallance points out, “this is our best connection to the continent through the Eurostar, but it is also a very heavily used commuter line that brings people who live in Kent into London”.
Environmental
Working within strict time constraints to maintain the United Kingdom's most sustainable connection to Europe, the aim was to support the team in managing maintenance activities with minimal environmental disruption. In streamlining processes that paved the way for greater efficiency and reliability as a direct consequence, Egis’ work on the Network Rail High Speed project helps promote rail travel on a broader UK-wide level, embedding it in minds as a greener solution that commuters and travelers can rely on and trust.
Social
Ensuring seamless service for both international travelers and daily Kent-to-London commuters while coordinating between multiple stakeholders including Eurostar, Southeastern Railway, and maintenance teams, the NRHS team needed a system that would allow them to manage maintenance schedules around major events and peak travel periods, balancing these requirements with the potential impact on local communities and passengers. Egis’ digital solution was designed to support a system that provides local communities and commuters with a smooth service.
Innovation
The NRHS team were aiming to shift manual-based processes over to new, digital solutions within existing IT infrastructure constraints, prompting Egis to hone solutions that non-technical staff could easily adopt, embrace and use. Egis prioritized folding in automation that would not require extensive technical support or create ongoing technical debt: a series of manageable, easy-to-grasp changes that had zero disruptive impact on critical daily operations.
Economic
One of the team’s top-most priorities was avoiding costly overruns that could impact on international services, all while juggling multiple maintenance activities within limited time-frames to maximize efficiency. It was crucial that any changes Egis ushered in prevent schedule conflicts that could waste valuable maintenance opportunities. All work needed to be completed within these strict windows of time to prevent revenue-draining disruptions to service.