Since using an Agility CMMS, downtime for failures has reduced from an average of 10 days to 1 day.
The Agility CMMS helps to reduce costs, avoid service disruption and improve work completion for tram network.
Since implementing Agility, the asset management tool is used extensively throughout the tram network by 135 users across a 24/7 shift pattern. Passengers now benefit from a smoother running service with asset availability running at 98%. The transition has also improved Nottingham Trams’ work completion times from 20% overdue to just 7%.
Nottingham Trams Ltd were awarded the contract in 2012 by Nottingham Council to take over the original tram network and complete ambitious £570M expansion plans. The expanded network now spans Nottingham City Centre and includes 31.5km of track, a system covered by 37 trams with 51 tram stops and connecting 7 park and ride sites with over 5000 spaces.
The tram network is operated and maintained by Nottingham Trams Ltd, a subsidiary of Keolis (80%) and Wellglade (20%).
The new contract included an obligation to replace the existing maintenance management system to one that would offer:
These requirements had a significant bearing on determining the choice of system.
Various systems were investigated including Keolis’ own asset management system. In comparison to the other systems, Agility matched the full set of requirements and offered significant value so the decision was made in early 2012 to migrate to Agility.
Agility manages all planned and reactive maintenance of the infrastructure including tracks, tram stops, platforms and overhead lines and controls the inventory and purchasing of stock and spares.
Any reactive maintenance required on the trams is also recorded in Agility and then allocated to the sub-contractor to allow Nottingham Trams to maintain visibility of asset data.
Agility is used extensively throughout the tram network by 135 users across a 24/7 shift pattern. It manages 500 reactive and 400 planned work orders per month and coordinates over 400 inventory movements. The team have seen a real shift in the amount of planned vs the amount of reactive work orders since using Agility with the number of planned significantly increasing, and the number of reactive decreasing.
Chris Harper, Engineering Asset Manager at Nottingham Trams.
“Agility is used to allocate work internally and across a network of contractors. The contractors receive an automatic email notification detailing the work order, and Nottingham Trams can monitor each individual contractor’s performance. The labour utilisation of the internal team has increased massively as work is allocated directly to the most relevant and available resource.”
Through using Agility, asset availability now runs at an average of 98% and downtime for failures has reduced from an average of 10 days to 1 day.
The transition to Agility has provided Nottingham Trams with a Performance Measurement System (PMS), enabling them to automatically produce 15 reports, illustrating performance to the Council and Transport Executive. The reports include labour utilisation and completion of work to show resource usage and response times, which can influence payment from the Council. On average, Agility saves 40 hours per month in manually generating these reports.
Beyond managing assets, maintenance and people, Agility is also used to manage the Control Room Log.
Chris added, “Agility acts as the Control Room Log which is the central reference point for all information for any operational events that could affect service such as; late trams, withdrawn services, tracing issues, weather, shift handover, accidents, city events and road traffic. Agility captures all this information, approximately 600 entries per month, which are monitored and used to demonstrate performance and then generate any corrective work that might be needed.”
After a period, Nottingham Trams moved to take advantage of the benefits of SSG Insight’s hosted Agility solution, which includes access to the Customer Support Portal and automatic Agility upgrades. This move has seen Nottingham Trams improve work completion times from 20% overdue to just 7%, against a target of 10%, as Agility can now be easily accessed by all devices.
The team then began to use Agility to perform predictive maintenance based on track wear rates from high stress points, such as bends, to then schedule repairs and plan replacements, helping to reduce costs and avoid service disruption.
Chris added: “We already have a plan in place to embed Agility Live Dashboards and Agility Connect later in 2023. We will do something similar to Keolis Amey in terms of our reporting, and we’re excited at the powerful reporting capabilities on offer to help us interpret our data more easily, and enable us to make informed decisions quickly.
Agility Connect will also enable us to integrate other systems through the API which will be really useful. We are currently looking at this to link our new cleaning contractors system with Agility, and it will be exciting to see this progress in 2023.
In addition, we are looking to implement Agility Mobile. We’ve recently spoken to other Agility Mobile users and seen how easy and quick it makes life for their staff. We are looking forward to staff being able to quickly access the dedicated, easy-to-use Agility Mobile app. Staff will be able to see the reactive and more urgent work orders, but once complete, they will have the ability to see if there are other work orders in that area and action those as well. This will save valuable time and help us to complete work orders more efficiently. In addition, moving into 2024, we will be looking to work with the SSG Insight team to progress our app usage further and incorporate the planned routine maintenance via Agility checklists, cutting down paper usage and further increasing efficiency. Due to the nature of our work, we have quite complex checklists with various diagrams and data input methods which will make this change quite a challenging one, however, we are confident that the Agility product and our relationship with the SSG Insight team will enable us to achieve this goal.
Myself and the team at Nottingham Trams are looking forward to continuing to work in partnership with the team at SSG Insight, to enable us to progress even further on our asset and maintenance management journey with Agility.”
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