Excitement is building ahead of the Rolling Stock Maintenance and Depot Optimisation European Congress taking place later this month from June 28 to 30.
Chris Welford, principal engineering leader of vehicles at Transport for London Engineering, is among several high-profile speakers at the event at London Hilton Paddington, which is also available to view online.
“My session at the conference is Systemising Rolling Stock Asset Management; Productivity & Safety Improvement and I’m going to be speaking from my lived experience of driving value from asset management systems and the benefit of focusing on ensuring buy in from the depot maintenance team that success hinges upon,” he said.
“I attended and presented at this conference for several years up to 2017 which I found most fulfilling. Diary clashes and COVID resulted in it not being possible to attend again until this year. I’m really looking forward to meeting like-minded industry colleagues, hearing about their successes and also about their challenges and the opportunities available through adopting new technology and practices.”
Rolling Stock Maintenance and Depot Optimisation European Congress 2022 is designed to help heads of engineering and depot management ensure they have the most efficient maintenance plans in place and that investment in new technology is justified with tangible benefits.
Chris added: “The biggest challenge affecting UK passenger rail operators at the moment is winning the argument to implement asset management strategies that are most cost-effective.
“Moving individual investments into the future creates peaks, troughs and bottlenecks that’ll take vastly more capital investment to overcome than an approach which focuses on optimal use of what we have available to us as an industry today.”
The conference is packed with case studies delivered by practitioners at train operating companies from around the world, on data derived maintenance strategies and smart monitoring technologies focused on reducing maintenance downtime and cost.
Chris said: “I’m a massive fan of technology and some of the really exciting things we can achieve with robotics, machine vision, self-powered sensors, and many of the other exciting topics.
“What I’ve seen in the longest stretch of my career being focused wholly on Condition Monitoring was a few successes, but mostly a depressing graveyard of white elephants (expensive investments being unused or underused).
“This has led me to a conclusion that there are some real basic factors that are needed in order for it to be possible to confidently invest and drive full value potential, so my presentation focuses on how I’ve practically gone about deriving benefit, and the enablers of this being possible, using technology everyone in the industry has – Asset Management Systems.”
You can join Chris at Rolling Stock Maintenance & Depot Optimisation 2022 by registering on the website. Use code RBD15 to claim a 15% discount. Visit https://www.rolling-stock-maintenance.com/
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