Delighted To Have Joined The UKTram Quarterly Meeting

• Published date: 22 October 2020

With several strong customer partnerships within Light Rail across the world, we were delighted to have been invited to run a session within the UKTram quarterly meeting on 22nd October 2020.

Our theme of ‘delivering insight’ is one that is relevant not just to Light Rail but across all sectors. We discussed how to make the best out of relevant data to ensure the impacts are measurable and real.  Often data is one of those things that everyone has a lot of but, driving valuable and visible insight from it is not always easy.

For Light Rail specifically, delivering insight that looks at capturing asset availability, reducing downtime for failures, ensures work completion times against targets, as well as management reports, are all key.  Insight must measure everything that is of significance to making operations more effective and efficient.  Everyone knows that anything that is measured or watched tends to improve, and when you see insight in the form of key metrics, you intuitively start turning data into actions and actions into results.

We discussed that when trying to drive insight it is imperative that there is high speed integration coupled with consistently accurate data flows across existing systems. For Light Rail in the UK, this tends to be systems connectivity such as the CMMS, cleaning management systems, finance systems, as well as specific such as CAF and Siemens, and more.  Integration of systems enables actions based on intelligence which can then deliver quantifiable business outcomes.

It was interesting to see that everyone seemed to agree, be it referred to as insight or business intelligence, being able to visualise and analysis your data is vital.  As part of the session with the members of UKTram, we talked about how people receive their data and best practice.  Again, there was a consensus that ideally, data needs to be in a consolidated and simple format which enables people to make sense of it quickly and easily. Only then can it be used to drive valuable actions and business improvements.

Really positive session with UKTram and some interesting questions within the discussion. Thanks to all involved for welcoming us, Amber & I really enjoyed it.

Mike Edwards, Group Chief Executive Officer at SSG Insight

We would like to thank the organisers and members of UKTram for welcoming us and for a great session. It’s always so good to bring thought-provoking discussion to sessions like this one and help to spark ideas among the attendee’s, as well as to network with so many familiar faces.

If you’d like to understand more about our partnerships with Light Rail organisations across the world and/or how we help our customers in this and other sectors to drive insight from their data, contact one of our global teams today.