Electronic Competence Management for the Middle East
The railway industry in the Middle East is a fledgling market.
Governments across the region have an ambitious drive to diversify economies away from the reliance on oil and gas by developing the extraction of other abundant natural minerals and the diversification into other industry sectors, such as tourism, finance and media.
This has resulted in many high-profile capital projects being made across the region, including the building of thousands of kilometres of new rail infrastructure. The highly impressive Haramain high-speed railway, also known as the Western railway or Mecca–Medina high-speed railway, was opened in October 2018 and travels at speeds up to 186 mph (299 km/h).
The new 1,600km North/South Wa’ad Al Shammal project in Saudi Arabia not only links the capital Riyadh with other major conurbations in the country for passenger services but allows the heavy haul of minerals and other bulk commodities from mines and factory installations to port for export.
Competence Management is evolving in the region. The Passenger Transport Authority, who provides the regulatory framework, stipulate that the management of competence is a fundamental requirement in obtaining a license to run these services.
New Sales Consultant for the Middle East
We recently appointed Kirt Barooah as the sales consultant to develop new business and manage clients in the Middle East.
Kirt previously worked as a consultant to Saudi Arabia Rail helping the scope and manage the implementation of their competence management requirements.
ACMS provides SAR with a digital platform and beyond the existing deployment in freight is looking to extend the standardised competence management framework to other areas of the business, including passenger, control, engineering and infrastructure as well as developing and integrating ACMS with wider digital solutions.
Saudi Arabia Rail (SAR) is one of the leading rail organisations in the region and are pioneering competence management through the adoption of AssessTech’s electronic competence management technology, ACMS.
SAR has amazing systems and technology infrastructure in place; however, the drive to set up and deliver services quickly has resulted in many processes being managed using paperwork.
ACMS provides SAR with a digital platform and beyond the existing deployment in freight is looking to extend the standardised competence management framework to other areas of the business, including passenger, control, engineering and infrastructure as well as developing and integrating ACMS with wider digital solutions.
There are many challenges facing SAR in the rollout of digital solutions. With a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural environment it is a challenge to meet the training requirements for such a large and diverse workforce. Using the standardised framework in ACMS has for the first time given clear visibility to management at SAR on the competence of similarly graded staff at different locations and has enabled management to rapidly focus on areas of concern and maintain a duty of care to staff.
Kirt commented, “Working in the Middle East presents a whole set of new challenges with a diverse ethnic workforce and multiple working cultures in a new fledgling railway network.
“Introducing ACMS to SAR provided the perfect framework to align standards across the whole organisation and build an integrated competence management system for train crews, ground staff, terminal staff, depot staff and train controllers.
“The use of mobile technology was absolutely ideal as the size of the network was enormous with many key places of work in remote areas. The capture of competence data on tablet devices and subsequent transfer to the main system meant that all records were kept up to date and immediately available for business intelligence to management and the planning teams.
“Assesstech were very flexible in helping to optimise the set-up configuration for this demanding environment and innovative in their approach, with many suggested improvements feeding back into a better product and greater productivity.
“I am excited about introducing the opportunity for electronic competence management to other railway organisations across the Middle East and helping them implement a developmental competence management approach.”
Kirt Barooah
