Customer Success Story
ALSTOM Transport Ltd.
Deltek Open Plan™ and Deltek Cobra™ Help ALSTOM Transport Ltd. Stay on Track
Deltek enhanced its ability to provide critical earned value management (EVM) offerings to its broad project-focused customer base with the acquisition of Welcom in March 2006.
Overview
ALSTOM Transport Ltd. needed a consolidated project management system that would help with the planning and production of trains, components and transport systems. Open Plan Professional, Open Plan Desktop and Cobra were chosen for their flexibility and more advanced reporting capabilities. ALSTOM has not only simplified its business with the use of Deltek’s tools, but plans to roll out Open Plan across sister companies worldwide. With more than 1,000 power cars, 5,700 carriages, 1,600 light rail vehicles, 30,000 electric locomotives and 4,500 double-check train sets operating in seven countries, ALSTOM has chosen project management tools by Deltek to help them stay on track.
The Need
ALSTOM Transport Ltd. not only manufactures rolling stock, but also provides full rail transport signaling systems, sub-systems and equipment components. At ALSTOM’s plant in Birmingham, United Kingdom, trains are assembled for customers worldwide. Currently it supplies trains for the Virgin Trains West Coast Main Line and London Underground’s new Jubilee Line.
“Business has changed since the days of British Rail,” says Matt Bowman, finance manager at ALSTOM Transport Ltd. “Today, customers are concerned with quick turnarounds, faster deliveries, higher train specifications and customized appearances.”
Because each customer has specific design requirements in mind, it is impossible to build up a stock of trains. The Birmingham facility’s main role is to assemble the trains with parts manufactured by ALSTOM’s sister company in France and various third-party manufacturers.
With ALSTOM producing one in four trains operating in over 50 metropolitan cities worldwide, producing trains is no longer all about heavy machinery and manufacturing methods. More and more, planning is a key component.
ALSTOM’s biggest production challenge is coordinating the activities involved so the trains can be assembled efficiently and delivered on time. To coordinate its activities, ALSTOM uses a matrix management system consisting of a functional axis and project axis.
“The functional axis consists of standard departments, including finance, human resources and engineering, while the project axis assigns team members from each department to the project,” says Bowman.
This keeps the long-term traditional department structure and skills in place throughout relatively short-term projects.
The ALSTOM matrix system is complex enough to manage, but as Bowman has learned in the past, factoring different project management solutions into the equation at the same time can create a nightmare.
“Traditionally, departments had their own planning systems,” explains Bowman. “Each department used a different project management tool. Consequently, the planners, engineers, sourcing people and operations personnel would have their own individual plans for the project, and all those plans never really dovetailed. The result was complete chaos.“
The Benefit
“Implementing a single project management package was the solution. After evaluating several project management packages, ALSTOM chose Welcom’s Open Plan for its flexibility and reporting capabilities. Open Plan was more flexible,” says Bowman. “More importantly, its reporting capabilities are more advanced than other software programs in its league. “
“Open Plan has replaced all other planning tools in the organization, giving the staff one system to use and allowing them to have a single plan that is accessible to everyone. Teams can still manage their part of the plan, but now that part is integrated into one global plan for the project.”
The FutureALSTOM selected a package made up of three Deltek products. Open Plan Professional (OPP) helps planners establish and manage whole projects, as well as resources across multiple projects. Open Plan Desktop (OPD) allows auxiliary staff to view the parts of the project in which they are involved, and to modify selected areas. Cobra integrates with Open Plan and is used for financial reporting and modeling projects.
Deltek products were also chosen for their integration capabilities with popular enterprise systems. “The other big system we use is Materials Requirement Planning (MRP),” says Bowman. “Baan is our MRP vendor, and we are very pleased that the Welcom and Baan systems work together.”
| The Problem | The Solution | The Deltek Advantage |
| ALSTOM Transport Ltd. needed a consolidated project management system that would help with the planning and production of trains, components, and transport systems. | ALSTOM has chosen project management tools by Deltek to help them stay on track. |
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To ALSTOM’s surprise, Open Plan made the MRP system easier to use. “Baan MRP has a ‘planning board,’ which enables us to schedule deliveries so we can operate ‘just in time’ manufacturing if we need to,” says Bowman. “But Baan’s planning board can be difficult to use. As a result, much of our material delivery systems were rather inefficient. The good news is that Open Plan interfaces with MRP, making the Baan system much easier to update. This will greatly benefit our organization in scheduling deliveries.”
With the success of this implementation, Bowman looks forward to having Open Plan rolled out across ALSTOM’s sister companies worldwide. ALSTOM Birmingham has already worked with another Open Plan user, Fiat, on the Virgin Trains rolling stock and can see the enormous operational benefits of standardizing across the company.
“When we show how well the system is working here, other countries will be interested in its advantages,” he says. “By establishing the groundwork, designing the system correctly and understanding our business needs as well as the needs of the users, implementing Welcom’s products was simple. If only all things in life were that simple.”
With high-speed rails on three continents, ALSTOM relies on tools, such as Open Plan and Cobra, to help keep life simple. After all, the ultimate goal is to keep approximately 70,000+ ALSTOM-built trains on track worldwide.