The Challenge
Alstom, like many other players in the rail sector, have used traditional paper processes and excel based reporting for years. Auditing paper copies and manually inputting data into spreadsheets is uncontrolled, open to error, time consuming and most importantly costly. Huge amounts of time, effort, and cost were wasted through missing data, inefficient processes, lack of transparency, spreadsheet reporting, and siloed data sets.
Poor roll out of other technologies has previously led to resistance across all role types in a project team. Taking the ‘if it’s not broken, don’t fix it’ mantra, any adoption of a new digital system was initially met with opposition.
Although digitising projects would be of huge benefit to those working on the ground, generally, some attitudes towards technology are hard to change. It’s human nature to have a reactive approach to introducing new processes or systems once an issue has arisen, rather than proactively looking for things which could make time-consuming jobs easier.
However, it became clear after a particularly challenging signalling project in the summer of 2021 that paper copies and excel databases located away from the site were simply not reliable enough for projects of this importance and scale – adding to the ever-increasing amount of admin needed to complete jobs.
This demonstrated to key stakeholders that digital was the answer. Alstom needed a system to digitise all signalling asset types, installation processes in a single field tool, and data in one place, making it easy to audit efforts and report directly from the site – especially after winning the UK’s biggest signalling frameworks in this control period.
Alstom required a digital platform that was specific and catered to signalling projects, rather than retro-fitting other incompatible systems already in place within the company.