By Andrew McCusker, Director of Rail Logistics, and Dr Mark Ho.
Effective rail systems have major societal and economic impacts on Australia’s competitiveness, liveability and infrastructure resilience. There is a pressing need to enhance the rail transport system to become a viable and sustainable transport option in both cities and regional areas.
As railways are predominantly technical systems of delivery for passenger and freight services an attribute of a successful railway company is the ability to develop effective processes and clear communication to achieve high performance for customers. This is where engineers can differentiate themselves to deliver improved culture and organisational excellence.
Rail systems in Australia have been in operation for a century or more. Initially at the forefront of technology, they were populated by innovative engineers who handled a broad range of issues in addition to engineering. There was a need to consider all aspects that went together to provide efficient rail travel and this is an aspect that modern engineers need to consider if we wish to assist our organisations to achieve higher performance.
Higher performance is often misinterpreted as improving a certain set of performance indices, in terms of cost, time or failure rate. It may refer to delivering bottom-line service with lower cost or reducing failures with a fixed budget. Higher performance also involves the provision of improved levels of customer service.
Indeed, higher performance is more sophisticated and the above may only be one of the many elements in a bigger story. Higher performance is a collective organisational goal which is set around processes and output, which can often be the key determinants of success for the railway community.
As the processes are initiated, managed and facilitated within organisations, a consistent understanding of high performance as a group is pivotal to the success of attaining higher performance as an organisation.
Effective methods of measure high performance can be difficult to establish, but it is possible to define a number of characteristics, particularly for railway organisations, through which high performance may be reached:
Responsiveness – Rail organisations that are continually connected to customers and staff can enable themselves to build the capability and skills base to respond to the changing needs of customers and society.
Relevance – Rail organisations that are appreciated and valued by society and customers,that seek to anticipate the changing needs of customers and proactively address them, rank among the high performance organisations.
Recognition – Rail organisations are considered to have higher performance when they are recognised as best in class in terms of service performance, customer services and efficiency from a user and industry perspective.
Raising performance starts with a vision, which can be a simple statement like ‘put a smile on the customer’s face’ which was exactly the challenge being put to the engineers when reliability levels reached99.9% at Hong Kong MTRIts articulation developed into a number of multi-layered and inter-connected processes within the organisation. Each process contributed to the realisation of the vision and the combined outcome is the delivery of increased customer satisfaction.
The road to higher performing organisations has its foundation in the actions of engineers within the organisation considering how things can be done better. There is a need to utilise their understanding of not only the systems but also the people they are responsible for and a requirement to continually advocate better performance.
Higher performance is a continuous process and not a one-off endeavour. The organisation must refresh itself to adapt to the required changes. For railway operation, customer demands and expectations evolve with economy, technology, culture, social demography and behaviour over time.
Effective and well performing rail organisations do not just keep pace with changes, they attempt to predict and stay ahead of them.
Efficient processes, technologies, individual capabilities and skills, take time to develop and mature before they are ready to successfully contribute to higher performance. Therefore, an on-going process must be in place to allow them to grow in the anticipation of changes in the future. This should become a core part of the organisations corporate culture.
As technologies move at lightning pace, engineers and technologists should subscribe to a continuous learning attitude for both themselves and their staff to build their broad-based and inter-disciplinary competence and engage proactively in the aspiration of a high performance organisation.