Romanian National Railways
Romanian National Railways (CFR S.A.) is the fourth largest railway network in Europe in terms of total line length and traffic volume, covering the entire Romanian territory with 11,430 km of public infrastructure. It employs a workforce of over 110,000 across several different companies (infrastructure, freight operators, passenger operator, railway management and assets management). In Romania, 45% of the rail network is electrified, and there are two important trans-European corridors (routes 4 and 9) passing through.
CFR recently sought an overseas loan from the World Bank for reconstruction and development. This included a management information system and infrastructure as well as rolling stock refurbishment, traffic management, and commercial freight. The organization estimates that it will spend $4.5 billion on investment projects in the period 1997 – 2015 ($50 million of which is on IT technology).
These changes are part of an ambitious plan to modernize the existing infrastructure. Using new equipment and special railway construction solutions, CFR plans to increase the traffic speed to between 160 and 200 km/h over the next few years. In its effort to become a profit-oriented company, CFR has focused on the development of an information technology system for company management. The IT applications are developed in the Integrated Railway Information System (IRIS).
CFR Eye An Opportunity
Based in the Railway IT Company in Bucharest, the main objectives of IRIS was to assist the rail operational and tactical management and to supply CFR’s management team with the necessary strategic data. The phased development of the IRIS system had to take into account the priorities of the organization and the evolution and integration strategy of the transport market.
CFR needed to prioritize the IT applications to cover various areas, including financial management, railway infrastructure and rolling-stock maintenance, freight shipping administration, and train traffic planning and monitoring.
Two Become One
To facilitate IRIS, the Romanian Railways selected Datastream as the solution provider to implement Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) for all its infrastructure assets. The Datastream EAM system enables CFR to manage its entire infrastructure, including track, signals, and interlockings, electrical systems, telecommunications, and real estate holdings. Romanian Railways had already implemented Datastream's solution in a 166 km pilot area in order to manage 15 sites (with 3 users in each maintenance unit), central headquarters, and 2 regional headquarters on the Romanian side of Europe’s rail corridor network from Germany to the Black Sea.
Prior to this project, Datastream already had a broad base of successful software implementations for equipment tracking, purchasing control, and preventive maintenance management. In this particular case, the infrastructure maintenance project is based on an integrated system between Datastream’s solution and Intergraph’s GeoRail application, a Geographic Information System (GIS), to support all the users from the pilot area. The application that integrates the two packages is called the Infrastructure Management Application (IMA). The IMA:
- Provides geographical and relational inventory for all infrastructure assets
- Maintains geographic maps and survey plans for the railway network
- Manages work, maintenance, and other projects
- Manages the materials stocks
- Monitors and helps control costs
CFR selected Oracle as the central database technology and awarded the overall contract for IRIS system integration to Fujitsu Services, formerly International Computers Ltd. (ICL) of Romania.
Romanian Railway IT Company Chief Operations Officer, Gabriel Mitroi, says, “IRIS is the first and only IT rail project of its type in the world. Our team implements one of the most up-to-the-minute railway IT systems. As a result of the IMA project with Datastream, we maintain cost controls, optimize track maintenance machine management, and improve overall customer service. This is not an information system – it is our lifeblood. IRIS’s main target is to assist the dynamic transport market’s operational and tactical management. Datastream supplies the necessary strategic data according to our requirements. On average, we process 150 work orders per day, and Datastream is integral in helping maintain the railway and establishing the correct maintenance costs.”
Working together
With an expected rollout date in 2003, one of the most important achievements in the IMA has been the integration between Datastream’s and GeoRail’s applications. The central database, located in Romania, is kept up-to-date by infrastructure maintenance crews around the country communicating with the head office in Bucharest. This preventive maintenance approach enables personnel to have one user-friendly interface for tasks such as managing an asset register, logging work orders, analyzing data, and integrating information projects.
“The IMA is a powerful turnkey tool since it combines Datastream’s solution, which handles the information relating to infrastructure, and the GeoRail solution, which manages the geo-spatial information," comments Dorina Mironescu, IRIS project director and head of the CFR Information Technology Centre. "They are integrated to share and update data between them and with the centralized database.”
“This is a remarkable achievement for Romanian Railways and a noteworthy project for Datastream,” adds Datastream General Manager, Mark Dolphin. “The benefits are quite simply that the user can access equipment records through the Datastream solution and see the actual geographical location of that equipment in GeoRail. Similarly, the user can select the equipment from the GeoRail view and see the equipment records, history, and so on. In addition to this, the user can create Datastream records from the GeoRail record and vice versa. This technical partnership truly revolutionizes maintenance management.”
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