Ride the tube. Rent a bike. Float the Thames. Hop on a bus. There is an extraordinary number of ways to travel about central London. And it’s the job of one agency—Transport for London (TfL)—to keep all of those journeys running smoothly.
“TfL is essentially a combined group of transport companies,” explains Richard Thomas, Senior Product Manager for Asset Management and Engineering Solutions for the organization. “And in the past, each one of those companies had their own asset management solutions, around 60 in total.”
“For example, with the London Underground,” he continues, “we had two distinct maintenance organizations—each with their own maintenance platform—meaning support processes varied depending on the rail line. So if there was a problem on one line that required a replacement, they would go and buy everything new, even though we potentially had a storeroom full of the same part on a different line that the repair team didn’t know about.”
Wanting to simplify its maintenance and repair efforts for the London Underground, TfL consolidated operations to a single asset operations team with a common platform. And based on the success of this initial effort, the organization decided to expand its consolidation efforts above ground, envisioning unified maintenance and repair activities throughout all of its transport modes.
“There’s all of this non-rail stuff we also need to manage—highways, roads, bus shelters, cycle hires, trees, bushes,” notes Nick Hawker, Principal Asset Strategy Manager for Digital Data and Technology at TfL. “And many of these operations—a lot of what’s above ground—are managed through external contractors, who each use their own different systems across their different contracts.”
Ultimately, TfL is responsible for the upkeep of the equipment and materials used to support:
- 402 km of rail
- 427 rail stations (above and below ground)
- 590 km of road
- 675 bus routes
Alongside its general desire for efficiency, TfL was also motivated to find a solution that would help with its sustainability efforts. As Thomas explains: “We have various targets that we have to meet for decarbonization, but most importantly we need to hit net zero by 2040. So as part of the consolidation, we were also trying to achieve improvements in air quality and carbon emission. We needed better information about our assets to predict when they’d fail, as each outage increases our carbon footprint.”