Asset management in the railway industry : status quo and insights on ROI levers

Abstract

Today’s railway industry depends on its assets and their performance. The business model of providing transportation of people and goods barely provides the required capital to sustain the essential parts of the organization – their physical assets. By differentiating the two sides of the business, that is, the operational side and the asset side of a railway organization, a simple relationship or symbiosis appears. Operations earn revenue for their transportation services and use part of this revenue to invest in the asset side. The return of this investment is the availability, safety and reliability of the assets, which subsequently also reduces cost. On limited funds, the return on invested capital (ROIC) will decrease over time. This thesis describes basic levers to improve the ROIC and gives insights in the history of asset management and a status quo of today’s standards and regulations. To facilitate proper returns, organizations in general rely on specific software solutions that help to manage their assets. However, to fully integrate an asset management system that helps to reach specified objectives and strategic goals, the requirements of many stakeholders, such as legal, technical or financial ones, unfortunately add to the already complex landscape of business processes, organizational limits, human capabilities, etc. To help to translate all requirements into a single software solution, a framework has been developed, containing modules that can be discussed individually. Organizational requirements on each module can be defined separately in order to build the entire organizational software landscape. Established software solutions are analyzed and ranked by their capability to comply with all modules of the framework. In addition, different needs of railway infrastructures are discussed to give insights into individual solutions that may be less sophisticated than others, but still meet all requirements of an integrated asset management system.