INDUSTRY INSIGHTS
HOW SYDNEY TRAINS ACHIEVED
ISO RECERTIFICATION When Sydney Trains won two of the five awards at the Asset Management Council Excellence Awards earlier this year, host Peter Rowsthorn of Kath and Kim fame, quipped, “Sydney Trains, really?” Winning awards for excellence in managing its $40 billion of assets may be a surprise to some, but for the last few years, Sydney Trains has been working away behind the scenes to overhaul entrenched working practices and business systems in the pursuit of becoming a worldclass asset management organisation.
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ydney Trains Deputy Executive Director Asset Management Division, Grant Burton, recalls when the journey began in 2014. “Our first step in this whole process was to undertake a self-assessment to identify methods to improve our asset management system, including a new framework, new policy, procedures and processes to better manage our assets and asset lifecycle,” Mr Burton said. “2014 was also the year that the International Organization for Standardisation released its certification for asset management, ISO 55001, the international gold standard for asset management. “We identified very early on back then that this presented an opportunity for us to become the first Australian public sector organisation to achieve this certification, which we managed to do in June 2017.” ACHIEVING ISO RECERTIFICATION Mr Burton said Sydney Trains has just notched up some more ‘firsts’ by becoming the first rail organisation and the first public sector organisation in Australia to achieve integrated, aligned ISO 55001 and ISO 9001 (achieved in 1992) recertification. Getting to this point hasn’t been easy and there are a number of factors that add to the complexity of Australia’s biggest and busiest rail operator, where 1.4 million journeys are made every day on the 165-year-old network. One major complexity is Sydney Trains’ 11,000-strong workforce, which is as diverse and dispersed as the community it serves; as are the billions of dollars of assets it manages, from train stations to overhead wiring, as well as signals, bridges and turnouts across 1,600km of track. But change was, and continues to be, vital. “In this time we also delivered the Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) system, which meant for the first time in Sydney Trains’ history we had all asset information in one system, providing a single source of truth for planning, execution, recording and reporting of maintenance activity across Sydney Trains’ network,” Mr Burton said. Delivering the EAM system was a huge step for Sydney Trains, but it was just the start. “Receiving ISO 55001 certification in 2017 was confirmation Sydney Trains was and is up to international standards in asset management. But to become a leader in the field and to ensure recertification of both standards (55001 and 9001) in two years’
Grant Burton, Deputy Executive Director, Asset Management Division, Sydney Trains.
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September 2019 // Issue 12
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