Maintenance Assessment of Light Rail Industry: A Case Study of Auditing Metrolink

Abstract

The massive business globalization the world is witnessing and the increasing demand on transport systems especially in heavy and light rail sectors caused many challenges to raise. The increasing complexity in light rail industries forced companies to change their maintenance structures to adopt and satisfy the different business requirements. Metrolink, being the largest light rail company in UK with 147 trams and 50 million passengers to serve per year by 2022 looks towards satisfying the increasing demands of the customers. However, as the demand increases so does the costs. Maintenance forms a significant amount of these costs. Therefore, it became essential to assess the maintenance functions and practices to increase the reliability, extend asset’s life cycle, improve the trams health condition, enhance safety and decrease failures. Thus, one mean of assessing maintenance performance is maintenance auditing. The purpose of this work is to assess and evaluate the efficiency and effectiveness of the maintenance practices performed in Metrolink with an approach to improving the current activities to reach World class performance. The objectives were identified to be; evaluate current maintenance performance and determine highlights and threats, quantify improvement potentials and evaluate the proposed improvement program. Methodologies used in the study were the EFQM business excellence model to determine the 10 elements of good maintenance practices. A plant visit was conducted to perform the auditing from 4th March until 8th March 2019. In addition, an audit checklist was used to score the maintenance performance through a simple mathematical approach. Furthermore, an audit framework was proposed in this study. Based on the audit scoring guide results of maintenance performance in Metrolink were; strategy & policy (2.8), organisation (2.8), communication (3), employee involvement (2.5), workload management (2.25), maintenance regime (2.5), safety health & environment (4), materials management (2.5), value focus (1.75) and measures of performance (2.5). Next, a S.W.O.T analysis have been used to determine the highlights and threats. Improvement plans were driven from the S.W.O.T matrices following a PDCA improvement method. Finally, the study discusses the advantages of the proposed program and an approximate cost/benefit analysis is presented.