Getting Ready for CP7: Modernising Maintenance and Beyond

As CP6 comes to a close and you prepare for CP7, you will be acutely aware of the pressures on budgets and the need to drive up safety and train performance.

At the same time, you juggle the needs of modernising maintenance and operations programmes. For example, you may be feeling the strain of the competing needs of the railway on a day-to day basis, balancing the need for compliance and efficiency while ensuring the safety of the line and those working on it.

Power Distribution Integrity Monitoring

CP6 has seen significant changes in the railway, but the constants remain. Running a safe and efficient railway for passengers and freight is always at the heart of the industry, regardless of what other issues may come and go. The need to do this with less money and people, find new ways of working and introduce new technology adds to these daily pressures.

Choosing the right technology and new working methods can take time and effort. How to know which ones will give the best bang for the buck? How to achieve objectives without the pain barrier of trial and error with new suppliers and a whole host of tech that may or may not give you what you need? What happens if you blow the budget on tech that doesn’t perform?

The need to deal, in fact, using hard evidence of improved KPIs, closing the loop on investment and improvement is the key to solving your technology dilemmas whilst reducing workload, risk and effort. Picking a technology that can provide for your needs both now and in the future, that is malleable, open and comes with collaborative service, is essential to future-proof you against costly technology misfires that will eat into your budget, time and reputation.

Loss of signalling power supplies is one of the highest-impact failures on the railway, with the potential to cause perturbation over multiple days. It’s also one of the most challenging assets to perform the required standards-based and statutory maintenance due to the impact of having to power down to deliver a time-consuming invasive, and potentially risky activity. Viper Innovations’ CableGuardian system offers you the chance to improve safety and avoid failures and the need to perform many of the range of maintenance activities stipulated in standards and regulations, avoiding costly contractor fees and allowing you to reprioritise your resources into delivering KPI improvements instead.

Viper’s award-winning technology is already in operation across many regions of the UK, providing demonstrably outstanding results. CableGuardian has already saved in excess of 30,000 delay minutes and counting, over £5m in penalty payments and hundreds of thousands in OPEX from avoided incident management alone, with far more to come in the near future as deployments grow.

cableguardian sales
CableGuardian is helping to drive the railway forward in terms of safety, cost and performance.

CableGuardian also significantly reduces delay minutes and costs caused by incident management and recovery in addition to up to 80% reduction in maintenance effort. This is due to the multitude of additional failure modes the system can find, providing a matchless service that differentiates the system from its competitors. This impressive list of failure modes is continually being added to due to the depth and range the system can monitor and the learning being enabled by Viper’s collaborative service model, working in close partnership with customers to develop machine learning algorithms, identify new failure modes and mould the product and service to better suit your needs.

In the project and asset management space, being able to monitor, detect and act many months before failure, you can also use CableGuardian to achieve RAMS targets on projects where you don’t have the budget to install Auto-Reconfiguration Systems. This has the potential of saving millions of pounds in capital and achieving Minimum Viable Product, supporting the PACE process. You can also monitor your assets in very close detail over a long period of time, providing an insight into a system where previously you would only have a single snapshot taken at a point in time on a 5-yearly cycle. This allows the Asset Manager to enable spot-replacement of failing assets, minimising capital requirements by a considerable margin, cutting complexity and effort in managing the asset. This is a step-change in approach and can support both life-extension works and smooth capital spend profile over multiple control periods.

With CableGuardian, safety is significantly improved across projects and maintenance, with reduced electric shock risk to members of the public and staff; far fewer failures; simplified remediation work and reduced-in-scope renewals meaning less need to travel to and from site and work on-or-near the line in a pressured environment of project delivery or standing trains.

Digital Railway Maintenance CableGuardian

Viper have already done the work to integrate the system into Intelligent Infrastructure, and the RADAR implementations are already done and planned. It’s the first cable monitoring system fully approved for Tier 3, 2 and 1 use. They have benefitted from collaborating with forward-thinking engineers across Network Rail and contract organisations and have been able to mould the product and service to fit like a glove into the way you want to work now and in the future.

So, if you want to get a head start on CP7 KPIs, improve safety, hit modernising maintenance head-on, reduce your budgets and take the stress out of everyday management of the railway, Viper Innovations and CableGuardian are looking forward to working with you.

Visit viperinnovations.com/cableguardian to find out more.

This article was originally published by Viper Innovations.

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