Sound Transit oversees several transit services, including express bus service, commuter rail, and light rail, within the Greater Seattle Area.
Partner agencies and vendors throughout the Seattle area help operate and maintain Sound Transit’s assets and bus fleets with each using its own asset management system. Senior management often had to work with multiple reports from different systems, so more standardization was needed to increase efficiency.
“We didn’t always get reports in the form and timely manner to have actionable management information. There was little communication between the different systems and a lack of consistency in terms of reporting,” said Tom Dowling, IT Project Manager, Sound Transit.
It also meant Sound Transit was duplicating its efforts. “We had to have separate subject matter experts to operate and maintain their systems plus have separate training,” said Dowling.
With their previous system, their maintenance staff did not see the benefits of using it. “The maintenance guys weren’t consistently using the software. They would put information on paper and give it to a clerk. It was difficult to use,” said Doug Wolfe, Senior Business Systems Analyst, Sound Transit.
After deploying Trapeze Enterprise Asset Management (EAM), Sound Transit achieved significant efficiency gains in daily work order data capture and management reporting.
Using one system across partner agencies has reduced the time it takes to gather information on their assets.
“A lot of what we were doing was coordinating with external vendors and other agencies. Now, it’s all managed under one system and we can report to management across any maintenance area from one system,” said Dowling. “By tracking in a standard way, the data is more consistent.”
Sound Transit also benefited from automation features that weren’t available with their previous solutions. “Rather than having someone review all the service requests, create work orders and make assignments manually, now it automatically creates a work order, and it's assigned to the appropriate person," Wolfe said.
"We can now report to management across any maintenance area from one system. By tracking in a standard way, the data is more consistent."
Sound Transit has dramatically reduced the amount of time it takes to pull data. “Because of the previous arms-length arrangements with third parties, getting reports was more problematic. We would have to put it in a queue and wait for a developer to be available. Now, we can just run a report and get an answer quickly,” said Dowling.
They can now customize the reporting in ways they were never able to do before. “We created a dashboard that showed the state of every traction motor and every gearbox, what train it’s installed on, what motor truck it’s installed on, or if it’s at the vendor to be overhauled. We then mark it green, yellow or red to identify what stage it’s at. From a management perspective, it’s much easier to see how far along we are in this whole campaign and where the individual pieces of equipment are,” said Dowling.
A year after implementation, the internal adoption rate of the asset management tool is almost at 100%.
Using one asset management system has also reduced internal training time. “Now, we have a single platform to train users on,” said Dowling. “This makes our people more portal. We can have a technician who can go from our central link to the Tacoma link — it’s the same software, so it takes no time to train a person on how to use it.”
Knowing that Trapeze was on the pulse of the future needs of asset management — such as the MAP-21 ruling — put Sound Transit at ease. “We’re starting to work on MAP-21 and now we’ll have a single place to pull data from instead of five or 10. It’s so much easier for us,” he said.
Bus
Rail
Paratransit