Govia Thameslink Railway (GTR) is the largest UK railway franchise accounting for over 24% of all rail journeys across the country.
Operating under four brands (Gatwick Express, Southern Railway, Thameslink and Great Northern), it employs over 7,400 people and manages 239 stations from Brighton to Cambridge.
GTR had been facing some significant challenges around competence management. One of the biggest challenges the company faced was that there was a single over-arching competency management standard across the four operators, but different legacy electronic systems to deliver this (Gatwick Express and Southern have one Management Board, and Thameslink and Great Northern have a separate one). Gatwick Express & Southern, and Thameslink & Great Northern, also have their own Head of Safety, and in some cases, legacy standards and processes for managing specific areas of the competency management system. This led to challenges for GTR due to different processes and legacy approaches.
At the end of 2019, Justin Willet joined GTR as Head of Safety & Environmental Standards (Professional Head of Ops)and started to explore synergies across the business. Working collaboratively with the Heads of Safety and the Management Boards, the objective was to bring the 2 safety management approaches together in harmony. In addition to the different approaches, there were also 3 different electronic competence management systems being used across the various divisions within the business, which Justin wanted to streamline. This would give the business a single electronic competence management solution, with a single competence management standard and set of criteria.
So, bringing together some key individuals from across the business, from IT, safety experts, to the assessors and other end users, the team identified the need for change. They created a high-level specification and went out to open tender, through a fair and transparent process, to look for a system to overcome challenges and best align with the business needs.
AssessTech were successful in the tender bid as their proposal stood out from the other bidders as being quality-driven but cost-competitive.
From the outset, GTR knew there would be some internal challenges as the legacy systems would no longer be centrally coordinated or controlled. These systems were also being used locally to resolve local problems without considering the bigger impact on the business. Limitations with the legacy systems resulted in lots of inconsistencies across the business, e.g. how an incident or event is described, route descriptions and titles for assessments. This resulted in inconsistencies across reports, which required significant manual manipulation to get the information GTR was looking for.
A huge opportunity identified in the submission from AssessTech to support GTR was around the ability to capture competence management data in real-time using a mobile solution. This would be hugely beneficial to GTR.
AssessTech’s system brings several benefits to GTR, most notably:
- Structured around a developmental competence management approach
- Smooth transition of data
- Quality-driven solution
- Cost-Effective
- Excellent training
- It’s a one stop shop for competence
GTR are currently working closely with the team at AssessTech to migrate the data across from all parts of the business and is hoping to have this completed by the end of the Summer of 2021.
