‘The opportunity to drive and encourage collaboration across our railway’
Our guest blog this week is written by Elaine Clark, Chief Executive of Rail Forum. In her piece, Elaine highlights some of the major strategic challenges facing rail in the coming years and outlines how the Global Centre of Rail Excellence can help the industry and businesses confront them.
When we meet with Rail Forum members, a number of common issues or frustrations come up in conversation. We capture these and aim to take action to resolve them where we can.
In no specific order these include:
- Lengthy approval processes across all parts of the industry
- Lack of adoption of new ideas and innovations due to risk aversion
- Majority of purchasing driven by lowest cost rather than whole life value
- Need for better support for those companies looking to export and
- Lack of systems thinking and poor integration of systems across rolling stock/infrastructure
We believe GCRE will provide a great opportunity to work on these together, and with the wider industry, and it’s a key reason why we were delighted to welcome them as our 30th anniversary partner at the start of 2023.
The first two issues on my list can go hand in hand and GCRE, working in partnership with key clients, has the potential to be a gamechanger on approvals if clients will work constructively to facilitate this.
GCRE should provide a unique environment with the opportunity to simulate different operational conditions to prove that the products on test work in all situations and environments. Any additional testing can then be kept to an absolute minimum.
We have the opportunity to fundamentally rethink the approvals processes and hurdles that companies need to jump through to get their products onto the railway. Not to make it less onerous – we don’t want to compromise on several key criteria for success – but to make it more effective for everyone. This could speed up innovation, improve the customer experience and reduce approvals costs and time to market for suppliers.
Surely this is a prize worth striving for if everyone can work together for the best positive outcome for our customers?
The next issue on my list is the preoccupation of UK public procurement on lowest initial cost rather than whole life value. Could GCRE help to change that approach? I really do hope so!
This may be wishful thinking on my part, but I think GCRE can play a role here. If suppliers are able to test their products, understand lifecycle cost, wear and tear issues, optimise maintenance requirements etc., then they should be able to produce better quality offers with real evidence when tendering for new orders.
What better than to be able to show your prospective customers your products in situ after xx miles of wear to demonstrate their quality. All of which could and should drive better decisions and better products onto the railway.
And being able to bring prospective overseas customers to see your products in a real life test environment is, for me, another game changer. Especially if this can be combined with wider exposure to the capabilities of the UK supply chain to create a “Team UK” offer.
Imagine being able to bring overseas customers to see how UK consultants, designers, construction companies manufacturers, rolling stock, digital solutions companies and more have all worked together to deliver exciting new products and services? This approach could give Team UK an edge over other currently more proactive overseas competitors.
And the previous point plays into my last which is around systems and integration.
Looking forward, the question on digital is not ‘if’ but ‘how quickly’. There will be a move to more digital solutions, the importance of cyber security will only grow not diminish and so a facility where we can test how everything ‘works together’ will be crucial.
Perhaps the bigger question is how much we can all work together to maximise the benefit of GCRE when it’s up and running?
Another benefit lies therein; the opportunity to drive and encourage collaboration across our railway.