At the time of taking over the Northern franchise, Arriva was, and still currently is, supporting paper-based processes for competence management.  It presents a challenge to the business, as paper-based competence management is time-consuming and there are issues with data collection, integrity, and storage, as well as variances in handwriting, and assessors travelling all over the country to assess the wide expanse of Northern colleagues.  Discrepancies in the management of the process would only be highlighted to the safety team during an audit.

As part of the bid delivery plan, an audit was conducted that highlighted the need to implement an electronic competence management system across the business.

Before tendering for an appropriate solution, Northern spoke to 60 stakeholders internally (including safety and customer-focused teams) to determine their requirements.  They sought a high-quality, industry-tailored solution that met their requirements and could demonstrate this. They knew a railway supplier could create a software solution that would be ring-fenced for Northern that wouldn’t evolve as the industry and their business changed.

The outcomes of adopting AssessTech’s electronic competence management platform have resulted in Northern having a fully digitised process that met all their internal stakeholders’ requirements.  Their assessors have a streamlined, efficient process to electronically capture competence management data across the organisation from their base and submit assessments digitally.   From a safety and data management perspective, Northern requires that all processes are centrally managed, ACMS provides this and allows them to connect their legacy systems.

Future plans include improving the integration with internal systems, particularly Office 365 and their learning management system.  Their end users can be challenging as they have been in a similar role within Northern for several years; however, ACMS is straightforward to use, accessible on a tablet and is user-friendly.

James Waddington

IS Programme Manager, Northern

“AssessTech delivered us the perfect solution.  As a software solutions provider focused on the Railway industry, their model met our requirements exactly.  We can contribute to the design and development of the product alongside our industry peers, and the platform continuously improves and evolves in line with broader industry input.  They also provided full training for all our assessors.  From an IT perspective, we have migrated all our systems to the cloud, so ACMS, as a SaaS-based platform, aligns with our thinking.  It is critically important to Northern that the system programmatically connects to the data and provides data automation as well as linking seamlessly to internal systems.  For example, when new staff members join, we need to automatically create a new competence management record for that individual, which AssessTech’s ACMS solution provides.”

“AssessTech are easy to work with, responsive and reliable.  They are eager to accommodate our requirements and often lead on new development opportunities from their own ability to identify new added-value opportunities.  Their knowledge of the IT infrastructure within TOCs is excellent and they understand our challenges, providing solutions well ahead of the game.  What really stands out for me is that they are an IT company that has developed a software SaaS solution with in-depth Railway knowledge, rather than a Railway supplier who build software on the side.  We look forward to working with them on our next integration project.”