Megatrend digitalization – competitive advantages for workshops

Increasing demands on productivity and vehicle availability, strict quality and safety regulations: Rapidly changing conditions put rail transport companies under pressure. The digital workshop offers new possibilities and solutions.

Higher passenger numbers, increased passenger kilometres and the same level of punctuality of trains – the European rail transport companies were confronted with rapid growth in the past year, but this year the “CoVid19 pandemic” has changed everything: Due to the emergence of the pandemic, the beginning of the year is characterized by a complete breakdown, especially in the area of passenger numbers. Rail freight traffic continued to operate despite restrictions, but the changed situation required increased planning efforts. The pressure on rail transport companies to innovate is greater than ever before. Digital concepts promise a remedy – especially in the maintenance hangars. This is where the foundation stone is laid for successful railway traffic. We have summarized the five essential advantages for you:

1. Continuous documentation

A digital workshop enables consistent, complete documentation – this is achieved by partially automatic recording, but also through facilitated work documentation by workshop employees. Transparent operating and diagnostic data enable the highest process effectiveness in workshops. Maintenance efforts can thus be minimized and costs reduced. This also means: Processes such as planning, preparation, order execution and operational release are fully mapped – in real time.

2. Paperless and plausible

Digital workshop management puts an end to paper work: working papers, order documents, parts lists, building instructions, signatures, etc. can be easily recorded, archived and retrieved at any time. Digital checklists, such as those found in our standard software solution for workshop management, offer great advantages: While manually filled checklists often led to a non-interpretable documentation in the past, the digital tool not only guarantees continuous evaluability, but also technical plausibility of the entered data.

3. Less Overhead

Industrial tablets, PC or even Smartphone? Digital workshop management is tailored to the individual needs of workshop employees. The information that is currently needed to perform the tasks is available – this reduces the number of potential sources of error and reduces total overhead. By the way: The warehouse will also thank you for the step towards digital workshop management in the form of lower costs.

4. Shopfloor Management

Through appropriate networking and transparency on the information level, decisions can be made quickly and comprehensibly on the basis of the status of the stabling. Deviations from the target status can be easily identified in the course of shop floor management, which allows the early initiation of countermeasures.

5. Guaranteed transfer of knowledge

In every company there are key people to whom significant know-how is linked. Digitization brings individual processes and workflows into the system, to which the responsible persons have access. The risk of losing valuable know-how within the company is thus minimized.

Our standard software solution Rail Workshop for workshop management guarantees these five advantages – and many more. We have been mapping workshop processes for leading global railway companies such as ÖBB Technische Services GmbH since 1999. Convince yourself of our many years of international expertise.