Southeastern finalists in Rail awards following team-up with Gael

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One of Britain’s largest commuter rail organisations were nominated for a prestigious industry award – after they teamed up with a Scottish software company to enhance safety.

Southeastern were finalists in the Safety and Security Excellence category of the Rail Business Awards following their work with Gael Ltd, developers of the safety and quality management solution Q-Pulse.

The company, which carries around 570,000 passengers daily during services in London, Kent and east Sussex, implemented Q-Pulse to improve engagement and ownership of safety at the frontline of the business, enhancing management awareness of both accidents and incidents.

The success of the project, known internally as the Key Safety Manager (KSM) project – a concept which was embedded and reinforced through Q-Pulse – led to Southeastern creating a direct link between their internal Accident Incident Management System (AIMS) and the industry mandated SMIS database.

By being accessible remotely, it allowed the KSM’s to input accidents and investigations into the system as and when they happened.

The company’s achievements in transforming their safety management were recognised by the coveted Rail Business Awards, who nominated Southeastern after identifying their successful rail safety improvements.

Colin Clifton, Head of Safety at Southeastern, said:

“To be a finalist was an excellent achievement and one that was made possible by the support of Q-Pulse and Gael. The use of Q-Pulse to embed and reinforce the KSM concept has created better engagement and win-win relationships across the business.

“Gael Ltd has worked with Southeastern in a genuinely collaborative manner to understand our business requirement and develop a product which fully reflects our organisation and workflows.

“The end result is a powerful tool that has significantly reduced our need to re-key data into the industry SMIS database as well as providing us with electronic record-keeping, workflow tracking and a full range of analytical tools in respect of accidents and incidents.

“Southeastern now finds there’s increased awareness of accidents and incidents across the whole organisation as all data is now readily available to Local Managers through Q-Pulse.”

By using Q-Pulse to improve safety performance via its KSM project, Southeastern aimed to sharpen safety accountabilities at the frontline so that engagement and ownership were achieved locally.

Taking advantage of Q-Pulse’s Mandatory Reporting System (MRS) functionality – which can be accessed remotely – a direct link between AIMS and the SMIS database was created, implementing a modified and rail specific version of the Q-Pulse MRS module to enhance safety across the organisation.

The project saw all safety data becoming readily available to Local Managers, something that wasn’t previously the case, and resulted in increased awareness of accidents and incidents throughout the business.

The Rail Business Awards are open to any company associated with the UK passenger and freight rail industry, recognising and rewarding excellence in business, technology and engineering, safety and security, stations and trains and in creativity and individual achievement.

The Safety and Security Excellence category assesses a number of improvements within a business, including evidence of safety improvements and enhancement through the introduction of new products, services and systems to improve company safety performance.

At the awards ceremony, which took place at the London Hilton Hotel on Thursday, February 16th, Southeastern were finalists alongside 11 other organisations which included the likes of Network Rail, RSSB, Southern Railway, First Capital Connect, Mersey Rail and Lorol.

And Donald Maciver, Founder at Gael Ltd, said:

“We at Gael are extremely pleased to have helped Southeastern achieve both empowerment and staff engagement through their Key Safety Manager project. The fact that this project has been nominated for an industry safety award is testament to its ability to not only impact the organisation, but also the safety activities of the entire industry.”

Gael Ltd are sponsoring the Rail Safety Summit this April in Loughborough.

1 COMMENT

  1. Terrific endorsement of how a systems like Q-Pulse can make all the difference to a continuous improvement strategy. Well done South Eastern and all at Gael Ltd. In particular well done to Brendan Cairns and the technical team for doing such a great job that resulted in the nomination.

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