The Williams-Shapps Plan for Rail is set to shake up everything from passenger fares to commercial models, and with new incentives and penalties for performance, train operating companies (TOCs) will face greater pressure to maintain standards.
Northern Trains found their SQR solution was missing key functionality, flexibility and, crucially, was unable to deliver accurate scoring to RNP. As a result of this, Northern were struggling to deliver on their committed obligations within their franchise agreement with RNP, which was causing a great deal of strain with stakeholders. No meaningful data was available without a huge amount of manual intervention and compliance reporting was cumbersome and time consuming. Worst of all, the data was no longer trustworthy, causing further conflict within the business and external stakeholders.
Chris Chinnapan, Sector Director at mpro5, discussed mpro5’s seamless integration with Northern Rail: “These new standards will measure the whole passenger experience from station to carriage. Checking cleanliness, lighting and up to date signage amongst other things is essential to delivering a customer experience that makes people want to take the train.
We configured Northern’s platform to deliver a seamless, easy to use interface for the auditing team that delivers against all the SQ Regime committed obligations for RNP and internal stakeholders. Every fault is automatically reported out to the relevant contractor or internal teams for resolution, with evidence provided against the original fault. Tags are installed in every carriage in the fleet so that staff can tap-in and easily confirm the carriage they are auditing at that time. Ultimately, every step of the process is logged, reported, and visualised for management and stakeholders – and easily accessible through interactive live dashboards.”
Chris continued: “Northern Trains are the first franchise to adopt this system and having a fully digital, smart compliance platform alongside them has made this possible. Auditors and operational staff at Northern use their devices to follow instructions, record their work and conduct audits via the mpro5 app.
Saved man hours and increased efficiency have empowered staff to deliver the best customer experience possible. Northern have restored trust in the SQR data they provide to Rail North Partnership (RNP) and have since been able to make a marked improvement on these scores.
Visit www.mpro5.com for more details.
Photo credit: Northern
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