Railway companies

The activity of the European Railway Agency and of the National Rail Safety Agency, has led to the railway market reform in Europe prompting deep changes within this sector. First of all is the definition of the ECM (Entity in Charge of Maintenance). Such reform imposes for the subjects who operate within the rail area, not just a simple change of the bureaucratic duties, but a totally new approach involving construction, exercise and maintenance of the rolling stocks. New requirements exist and will change the regulatory framework by rationalizing it, as well as the relationships among the operators of the sector.

Little time exists for these deadlines: it is necessary to reorganize, wholly or in part, the management asset, according to the paradigms of the Maintenance Engineering which impose the use of appropriate, efficient and effective tools.

Since long time the literature and the good practices in the maintenance field have been theorizing and suggesting the need to organize the maintenance activities like a proper business unit to provide services, in terms of availability of the rolling-stock fleet, to the "client", represented by the company's exercise (internal or external). Such approach is absolutely valid both for the suppliers of goods and facilities (Constructors, RosCo, Repair workshops, Holders), and for the users (Railways Companies, Railways Construction Companies, Local Authorities, owners of assets).

IB can support the companies along this path, introducing in the workshops a powerful Maintenance Information System, InfoPMS®. The latter can perform at best the new obligations, increasingly stronger and stronger in the years to come.

The particularity of InfoPMS®, IB's maintenance management software, is its adherence to the technical and the operational processes; it allows a maintenance governance leading to a thorough assessment of the workshop activities. To endow oneself with InfoPMS®, means to have a tool able to meet the needs of measurement, analysis, control and tracing, imposed by the progressive implementation of the Railways Safety regulations.

To manage the maintenance in a complex scenario means knowing (and therefore measuring) the processes in relation to any subsystem. For the railway sector, it turns out into the coverage of:

- Rolling Stocks
- Railway Construction
- Electric Traction

- Works of art
- Signalling & safety
- Telecommunications

- Buildings
- Workshops
- Possible bus fleets

The following complementary and synergic elements form the proposal:

InfoPMS® platform, for the full management of fleet of vehicles, facilities, garage equipments, electric lines / construction and real-estate assets (see above). The InfoPMS® solution is modular and scalable in several applicative modules. The continuous research and innovation has always prompted IB to enrich the high added value functionality platform, and to satisfy the most demanding clients through the progressive growth of the application.
designing and optimizing the organizational models of the fleets management (workshop, warehouse, procurement, etc.), centred on the efficacy and the efficiency of the processes and on the accrued best experiences in the field, in cooperation with important partners.
the involvement with the Interest Group finalized at a continuous cultural exchange among the users of InfoPMS®; it gives the opportunity to the technical reporting members and to the system's administrators to share the experiences developed within the various InfoPMS's user companies, on the organizational and computer solutions they adopted, considering both the opportunities of the adoption of such methods, and the problem areas they faced.