Amtrak's high-tech asset management: software helps Amtrak manage infrastructure on its unique Northeast Corridor, where high-speed trains cohabit with commuter runs and freights

Railway Track and Structures, August, 2008 by Tom Judge

Amtrak's Northeast Corridor between Washington, D.C., and Boston handles the fastest trains in the nation, but also hundreds of commuter trains and a fair number of freight trains. Asset management is a challenge in unique territory such as this, so Amtrak adopted a sophisticated software system to get the job done.

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"The Enterprise Asset Management System is one of the primary software tools that we use here," said Bill Broughton, director of Enterprise Asset Management for Amtrak engineering, based in Philadelphia. "To us, EAM is not just the software. It's a structured business practice, the methodologies by which we can make the way that inspections are done in the south the same as they are done in the north. It's information being available that day and next day reporting. What we have done over the past few years is work diligently to get a foundation to support those kinds of things. We had to make computer technology available to our foremen and our supervisors working in dispersed places and to build structured repeatability into the work."

Amtrak's EAM work with Maximo Software from IBM won the railroad an IBM Maximo Maintenance Best Practices Award. The awards are based on several criteria, including return on investment, organizational acceptance, cost savings, improvements in efficiency and output and creativity.

FRA-required inspections

"What we do is take an FRA requirement for inspections and build standard job plans to model those inspections," Broughton noted. "We take those job plans and leverage them against specific assets. For example, there may be a daily track walking assignment where someone has to walk that track twice within a week, with two days between those inspections. We build a structured plan schedule that generates a work order. The inspector would get that work order in his inbox each day.

"If we have cooperative inspections between disciplines such as c&s and the track department, we work with both deputy chief engineers of those disciplines and we take the requirements and we model them so the system can support the operations," he noted.

"IBM's Maximo has been a platform by which we have modeled track inspections throughout the Northeast Corridor for the past couple of years," Broughton pointed out. "We have just fully implemented that all track inspections are generated through Maximo. Track inspectors go into the system on a daily basis to report their accomplishments."

Matching labor to tasks

"One of the most challenging aspects is to record labor against the specific activities that we do, then link it to the cost of the asset that is being inspected or maintained," said Amtrak's Willem Ebersohn, program director, engineering systems. "Maximo has given us the opportunity to know not only that the inspection or the work was done, but also the cost associated with that inspection or work against the asset. You don't have a separate system where you record your time and your maintenance information. It's really important from a management perspective that we know the cost associated with our operating expenses and our capital expenses to the asset."

Broughton continued: "One of our first challenges was that we wanted to cost against the inspection, as well as the cost against the asset. So we originally tried to procure a cost system that would be able to handle our labor data. We had some unique cultural challenges. We have quite a few different unions throughout the corridor, so we had different rules to comply with. We also had what I consider a unique challenge in the sense that we wanted to enter time from a number of people such as a gang or a large crew. We wanted to have a full audit system, we wanted to have a full electronic approval system and we wanted to enforce some of the business rules so that when people submitted their time, they didn't encounter rejections, that the system would enforce the rules and help them along.

"Prior to our implementation of time management, it generally was a paper-based system," Broughton said. "There were some electronic systems in place, but it was not conformed universally across the corridor. We still had people filling out time sheets and Fed Exing them in every day.

"We took an application within Maximo and we customized it to fit our culture," he said. "That is the labor entry system that is used for our entire unionized work force within engineering. On a regular basis, the foremen will go in to Maximo and enter the information for their gangs in bulk. The system enforces the approval hierarchy as a supervisor has to review and approve that before it goes to the payroll group. If a supervisor edits it, it forces it to a higher level. This is an example of enforcing a business rule. No longer do we have to send out documents on changes to labor rates. It's all automated within the system.

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"Once we had our labor management in the system, we set up the system to deal with reimbursable work," Broughton added. "The reimbursable process was, again, paper based. There was a very high potential for mistakes. If we integrated this into our Maximo system, we knew the work that we were doing and we knew the labor that was going against it. We knew if the work was reimbursable and we could force additional information requirements. We now have that same system working throughout the corridor. Our reimbursable work is automated through Maximo and sent through to Finance. It's now all electronic."