3B infra - Future Rail | Issue 96

Let's talk about digitalisation in railway infrastructure asset management!

3B infra is an innovative IT company based in Vienna, Austria. It manufactures and delivers the INFRALIFE® software, which is a specially designed solution for railway infrastructure, to railway infrastructure operators.”

Why INFRALIFE?

Benefits - Why Asset Management Solution

Life Cycle Management

Visualisation example - Asset Performance Management Reinvest

About 3B infra - Get in touch!

Why INFRALIFE?

INFRALIFE is an integrated software solution for linear asset management (LAM), facilitating the holistic management of integrated railway networks, assets, maintenance, forecasting, life cycle management, as well as reporting and visualisation. INFRALIFE integrates infrastructure-expertise and the latest- information technology. The software is based on a strictly modular concept. Customers profit from a best-practice approach that derives from close collaboration and development together with railway infrastructure companies. The software can be used to manage aspects such as railway network and organisation, asset data and performance, incidents, and asset failure. The system can also monitor asset-based conditions and provide alerts for time-based or predictive maintenance.

INFRALIFE is the right choice if you encounter any of these issues:

Organisational Changes: Tasks from vertical technical departments are transferred to newly established asset management organisations. Cross-over information on all assets is needed.

Brain Drain: Changing jobs between railway companies, industry & service providers has become the norm. Employees are leaving more than ever before. The age curve also challenges your organisation.

Compliance & Reporting: Information on assets must be sent to authorities both digitally & in real time. Authorities make use of audits to check if regulations are complied with. False data costs time & money.

Cost transparency: Keeping track of costs is sometimes overlooked when it comes to maintenance. Those who make decisions are increasing the pressure to identify cost drivers.

IT Consolidation: Old individual software solutions have reached the end of their life cycle & must be replaced. The number of applications has to be reduced to make the complexity manageable.

Smart Assets: Digitisation platforms with valuable data shall be introduced.

Life Cycle Management

Maintenance: INFRALIFE supports both time and condition-based maintenance strategies. For effective work planning and execution, the software follows a lean approach: disposition can be automatised. All work tickets are recorded in service backlogs. Service teams have direct access to these backlogs and record the state of work execution. The software also provides defect and failure management across all assets.

Operation: The daily routine is constantly interrupted by unplanned incidents and failures. INFRALIFE provides a module for managing such operational incidents. Dispatchers log the information they receive and pass failure tickets to maintenance. Capacity limitations such as construction sites and slow speed sections are also registered centralised. The software allows implementation of approval and endorsement of work flows.

Condition Monitoring: Safety has to be ensured by regularly measuring track, switches and other components. At the same time, intelligent sensor technology is progressing rapidly. INFRALIFE is designed to integrate and present such data. Through this, asset anomalies and emerging disruptions can be detected in advance. Alarms can be processed to maintenance management.

Mobile Field Service: The INFRALIFE mobile app supports asset technicians and service staff in their daily field work. Users are enabled to access work tickets, asset data, maintenance history and documents while on the go. The app also allows recording of defects and failures, work execution status and time consumption. The mobile app is available for both IOS and Android.

Why Asset Management Solution – benefits

Reduction or deferral of capital expenditure, often based on an asset criticality and risk-based optimisation of investment across the asset portfolio
Optimisation of operational expenditure through refining maintenance regimes away from traditional time or manufacturer-based approaches to a risk-based approach and reduction in rework or reactive requirements
Improved performance and reliability of the network through the justified adoption of conditioning monitoring, focusing of maintenance and investment on the most critical assets and parts of the network, and better asset information to inform the optimal management of the network
Greater ability to justify expenditure to regulators and funders.
Better engagement with customers and other stakeholders through the ability to develop scenarios which map differing levels of funding input to forecast output performance
Improved governance in terms of demonstrably consistent management of risk and transparent compliance with regulatory and legislative requirements
Reputation enhancement as a result of better reliability and availability of the network, increased customer satisfaction and greater stakeholder confidence
Incremental improvement of the efficacy of asset performance and asset management capability
Reduced Capex resulting in extended asset lives and reduction of capital spend by around 20%
Reduced Opex and maintenance costs per vehicle kilometre by around 50%

Visualisation example – Asset Performance Management Reinvest (APM-R)

For management reporting purposes, INFRALIFE provides dedicated modules. They follow our best practices from railway industry and definitions of “Asset Performance Management”. We aim to improve these modules constantly in collaboration with railway customers.

Information on asset condition is a prerequisite for improving availability and reliability. The APM-R module provides network health metrics for asset managers. This module also fulfils the requirements of annual network condition reporting which is mandatory in many countries.

Asset performance management (APM) encompasses the capabilities of data capture, integration, visualisation and analytics tied together for the explicit purpose of improving the reliability and availability of physical assets. APM includes the concepts of condition monitoring, predictive forecasting and reliability-centered maintenance (RCM).

About 3B infra

3B infra is an innovative ITcompany based in Vienna, Austria. It manufactures and deliversthe INFRALIFE software solution, which is especially designed for railway infrastructure, to railway infrastructure operators. Precise knowledge of technical railway assets and their condition are necessary requirements for the optimised management of cost-intensive infrastructure. Here lies the core competence of 3B infra.