The rail industry in Australia and New Zealand is undergoing a transformation as it moves beyond one of the largest capital investments in rail infrastructure and assets in recent years to focus on the operational spend connected to progress.
This has led operators to seek out ways to harness the power of data and innovative service solutions to enhance the efficiency, reliability, and longevity of their assets.
Siemens Mobility stands at the forefront of this shift, offering a flexible and customer-centric approach that combines cutting-edge data intelligence with tailored support.
We spoke to Gonzalo Martinez Delgado, Siemens Mobility’s Head of Customer Service for Australia and New Zealand, and Andrew Cooke, Customer Service Manager for Rail Infrastructure at Siemens Mobility Australia and New Zealand to find out more.
Flexible support
Today’s rail industry is in the midst of a transition from manpower-driven maintenance to data-driven maintenance to improve reliability and efficiency.
Operators are keen to reap the benefits of high-tech condition monitoring and predictive maintenance solutions – from lower maintenance costs to more efficient and longer-lasting assets, as well as increased safety and an improved passenger experience.
But before they can benefit from the data gathered by these solutions, they need to know how to extract it, interpret it, and translate it into actionable next steps.
“We work in collaboration with our customers, to make sure they know what data is available to them and understand how to gain insights from that data,” said Cooke.
“We also help them clarify what their goals are – what do they want to gain, or what challenges do they want to mitigate?
“Many of our customers are looking for ways to improve maintenance schedules, processes, and gain more from their investment in maintenance solutions to ensure their systems are always available whilst improving the passenger experience and throughput of their services.”
To achieve this, Siemens Mobility emphasises a flexible approach, from remote monitoring and diagnostics tools and offering a 24/7 local Support Centre for remote support to embedding engineers and support staff within customers’ operations.
“Embedding our service engineers into our clients’ organisations means our engineers really understand the day-to-day of their operations,” said Cooke.
“We can flag that an issue is forming sooner with a customer, or proactively resolve that issue for them on-site or remotely.”
Cooke shared an example of this, in which Siemens Mobility identified a problem with the communications network of a heavy haul customer. Network congestion was resulting in unexpected behaviour on the Train Control System solution Siemens Mobility had implemented for them, as the bandwidth was continuously beingconsumed.
“Thankfully, with our team there on site using remote monitoring and diagnostic tools to continuously monitor the system, we realised this was going to cause an issue before it occurred,” Cooke explained.
“We informed the customer of what we noticed, and they identified that they had inadvertently connected another service to the dedicated communications network for their train control. They were able to remove that before their train control system went down.”
Martinez Delgado said that if the customer’s train control system had gone down, the trains would have completely stopped running until the problem could be fixed – leading to a potential $1 million loss of revenue per hour for the customer.
He said Siemens Mobility’s support is scalable, depending on what the customer needs.
“Sometimes the customer just has a quick question that can be answered via our Support Centre, and sometimes they need a full service.
“For one of our customers, we are planning to provide a large team of 45 Siemens employees in addition to our Railigent X solution (an artificial-intelligence-powered digital platform) to maintain the full scope of works, from train maintenance to traction power and SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition), signalling, train control and platform screen doors.”
Cooke said Siemens Mobility’s dedicated 24/7 Support Centre is based in Australia, and ensures customers have the immediate expert local support needed to maintain their critical services effectively on a global scale.
“You can call the support centre any time of the day or night and you’ll get through to a local subject matter expert – a real, qualified person on the other end of the phone, not a Chatbot or an automated service – who is ready to help solve your problem,” he said.
“Because the team is supporting customers throughout Australia and New Zealand, as well as globally in countries such as Finland, they can take learnings from one customer and apply them to benefit another.”
Customised training
Siemens Mobility also has a dedicated training team within its customer service department, which works directly with customers as well as project teams when new products and systems are deployed.
“The training team makes sure our customers have the required knowledge and understanding of maintenance procedures and how the system works, so they’re fully prepared before they go into operation,” said Cooke.
“But they also have the opportunity to come back to us and receive continuous training updates. Whether we have made some small changes and need to make sure they’re informed, or they need refresher training to keep up with the competencies of their role, we’re there to support them with that.”
Cooke said that training can also be tailored for the customer, based on what is needed.
“For one of our customers in Adelaide, we were able to run a number of workshops through our support team, to connect their maintenance organisation with their operations organisation and give them a holistic picture of how the different Siemens systems were interacting,” he shared.
“We were then able to define each person’s role in relation to the system, and run very specific, dedicated training for them.”
Easing transitions
When it comes to financial transitions, like moving from CapEx (capital expenditure) to OpEx (operational expenditure), Siemens Mobility offers support every step of the way.
“It’s common that the organisation that has funded a rail project isn’t the operator that will eventually take ownership of and use the system,” Cooke said. “We carefully ensure that through our service offering, we’re able to engage early with the operator.
“We go beyond standard training to make sure that they not only understand our products but start to work more hand-in-hand with their maintainers prior to the system going live, to make sure that those maintainers are ready to do their jobs.”
Martinez Delgado added that Siemens Mobility acts as a go-between for the body funding the project and the operator/maintainer, but it can also help even when the same company has funded the project and then goes on to operate and maintain it.
“When it’s the same company, they typically have a specific department in charge of new projects, and a different department later doing operations and maintenance,” he explained. “For one of our customers in Queensland, the project team that had been working together for more than four years had to slowly transition to the future operators.
“The operators were not involved in the renewal of the assets or the upgrades that took place as part of this project, and a change like that can be stressful.
“We had to build trust with the operations and maintenance team, to overcome any scepticism and make sure they understood and were comfortable with the new system.”
Data-driven future
The rail industry in Australia is increasingly reliant on data intelligence to drive efficiency and extend asset life. As a result, Siemens Mobility has seen a direct and growing demand from customers and rail operators for actionable data insights to support their maintenance strategies and operational decision-making due to rising costs for asset management and service maintenance of rail networks.
One of Siemens Mobility’s solutions to this is Railigent X, a suite of applications that advances sustainable transportation by digitally increasing the capacity of rail systems with less resources. The specially curated, open ecosystem enables rail operators, maintainers, and asset owners to better understand data, analyse assets, and derive actions, resulting in enhanced operation and maintenance for full system availability.
“Railigent X is used in 400 projects by over 80 customers across 35 countries to help rail operators deliver added value across their processes and networks, and will soon be implemented in Australia,” said Martinez Delgado.
In addition to embedded engineers within customers’ operations, Siemens Mobility’s Railigent X platform ensures the reliability and availability of assets.
“One of the main benefits is the impact of lifecycle cost. Operators can become more sustainable through the optimisation of cost investment by maintaining assets proactively rather than reactively.”
Cooke added that the future of customer service in rail is progressing towards expertise that is supported by dedicated, data-driven maintenance models.
“As a team and organisation, we are committed to adding value and highly specific support for our customers, now and in the future. The way to do that is through a balanced blend of people, expertise and data.”
