Improving the safety and reliability of a national railway

A national railway infrastructure agency responsible for over 10,000 kilometers of tracks was seeking to improve the reliability and safety of its infrastructure and the availability of its services.

McKinsey supported the railway agency in developing a maintenance strategy that optimizes infrastructure risk reduction through advanced analytics and reallocation of maintenance expenditures to higher-risk assets.

• Optimizing maintenance plans to improve the network’s availability and reduce delays. The optimized plan prioritizes the repair of high-impact assets that are more likely to fail; these assets receive more frequent maintenance, helping to prevent accidents and enhance overall safety.
• Developing a visualization tool with maintenance, business, and engineering teams to help users access reliable information, test different maintenance scenarios, and create the most optimal maintenance plan for all assets.
• Creating a capacity-building program for the client’s data lab, ensuring new ways of working will be sustained.

• Simulated scenarios showed potential to:
  • Safety improvements: Proactive risk-based maintenance may capture up to 2.5x more failures before they happen compared to previous inspections
  • Better rail experience: Improve rail availability by 40 percent, resulting in reduced delays and improved rail customer experience
• Upskilled on advanced analytics: 500 employees from technical and maintenance departments, as well as the data science team, were upskilled on using advanced analytics for maintenance optimization

Through this work, the agency embraced new opportunities from advanced analytics, delivering on a new standard of safety and customer experience for all.