Lycopodium has strong asset management experience across multiple sectors and is working closely with a range of rail operators.
With a strong background in asset management thanks to previous experience at the Australian Rail Track Corporation (ARTC) and his time at Lycopodium Infrastructure (Lycopodium), Dale Smith brings a wealth of knowledge and experience to his current role at Lycopodium and is using it to the organisation’s benefit.
Lycopodium focuses on below rail assets and Smith’s role as engineering manager is to ensure this is managed successfully.
Lycopodium’s asset management specialists operate across a host of sectors, including utilities, mining, manufacturing, rail and government infrastructure.
It applies best-in-class asset management and maintenance processes and principles to manage costs, risk and performance from concept planning to asset creation, operations and maintenance, right through to removal or renewal.
How it works
Smith said Lycopodium’s proactive asset management planning ethos is rooted in the development and delivery phases of a project. It’s an integrated approach that enables the organisation to identify potential management and maintenance issues and create plans that streamline ongoing maintenance, minimising operational risks and management costs in the long run.
“What we have done is create a bottom-up maintenance cost model that allows asset owners to effectively understand the resources required to manage their assets effectively,” Smith said.
“It allows the asset owner to benchmark their network and identify any efficiencies and inefficiencies. We can then take that information and roll it out across the network.
“Additionally, the asset owner can effectively model different strategies, either CAPEX (capital expenditure) or OPEX (operating expenditure) focused, and understand how this looks from an asset condition and fiscal sense across the whole life cycle.
“This allows asset owners to make informed decisions around balancing the resources needed for the assets and to maximise the efficiency and effectiveness of asset management.”
Lycopodium has been operating its asset management division for 13 years and has been consistently improving its offerings.
“Into our life cycle cost model, we have incorporated maintenance effectiveness and an asset degradation component,” Smith said. “We can take the work history and identify particular maintenance activities that are working well and others that are not.
“It provides us a snapshot of the network in terms of cost model perspective, how much funding and resourcing is needed moving forward and what works.”
Customisation
Lycopodium’s life cycle cost model has been developed to incorporate data relating to track assets to understand its existing condition. Smith said that recording data from pre- and post-works allows the organisation to track activity and better understand the effectiveness of maintenance practices, the current life cycle position of the asset and when works are needed.
Ballast, he said, is a prime example of an area where data can be used to track its effectiveness.
“As ballast ages, we can track when certain maintenance activities stop being effective and establish when intervention is required and a new layer of ballast should be added,” Smith said.
Smith said Lycopodium’s preference is always to use real data available from the network it is working on because each network is unique with its own characteristics.
“We typically utilise real data to determine what works well rather than turning to academic papers specific to a network or location for our knowledge,” he said.
“Where this data may be missing or there are gaps, our team takes the principles that we know work across rail networks in Australia and bring that knowledge to our work.”
Smith and his team will then determine exactly what the client is looking for from their asset management. Some operators are looking for a fit-for-purpose solution, others may be wanting to improve track condition to step up performance.
Smith said it is about understanding what clients are looking for in terms of improvement and identifying a range of solutions to meet that need.
Lycopodium has worked across diverse train lines ranging from lower tonnage to higher tonnage lines. It has also worked with small clients, for which rail is not the main focus, and major organisations for which rail is a critical component of the work they do. This cross-section of clients has given the company experience and knowledge of diverse networks and an understanding of the importance of clear communication.
“It is a combination of looking at track performance, the client’s requirements around reliability and speed and then tailoring the maintenance response to that,” Smith said. “It is all about finding the right balance for each line, everyone wants something a little bit different, so it is important to manage those expectations.
“With smaller clients where rail is not their core business, we are extremely transparent with what work we are doing so they have clear visibility across all the work that is required. We deliver this in a clear concise way, aligned to core asset management strategies that is easy to understand, with a recommendation on the suggested approach to meet their needs” he said.
“Larger network owners typically have more resources and more in depth understanding of rail specific asset management, so we tailor our response to provide options and scenarios to enable them to make an informed maintenance decision.”
Lycopodium’s life cycle cost model allows it to provide insights into where a network owner can optimise their network. Operators have the freedom to explore and simulate potential upgrades or configuration changes available to them and understand what downstream maintenance and resourcing requirements look like.
“Most large clients have got a wealth of information on their assets, as they are often retrieving data in real time across their network” Smith said.
“We can use data in our analysis in different ways and different scales to provide solutions that fit our client’s needs. An example is we can use actual asset data to inform assessments for upgrade solutions to help understand project benefits clearer.
“A key area of opportunity I see in the rail industry is predictive maintenance. As network operators aim to be less reactive to issues and operate more efficiently and safer.”
Smith said generally assets are managed to an intervention limit but as information becomes more readily available, there is an opportunity to move more into the predictive maintenance space.
“The amount of information being captured in the rail space is growing rapidly, it can give us a real-time view of how the asset is degrading and the user can be a lot more informed about how an asset is performing. We can embrace ideas and practices from other industries such as machine learning to improve how we manage assets.”
digging deeper to uncover problems
Smith outlined how Lycopodium’s bottom-up life cycle cost model allows the identification of outlier variables which may be leading to additional cost or time associated with maintenance activities.
“Often we will identify issues on a network, for example locations where it is inherently difficult to get in and do the required maintenance that is required due to the location or configuration of the area,” he said.
“The bottom-up cost model allows us to better inform the customer and show exactly where the inefficiencies are occurring on the network and allow us to investigate any potential fixes and amendments that can be made to improve efficiency.
‘It allows the asset owner to quickly identify issues and where they can gain the most bang for their buck in maintenance.”
Working through climate challenges
Recently, Australia’s rail networks have faced unprecedented climate events that have caused multiple critical lines to be shut down for repair works. Smith said it is critical that asset management strategies for the nation’s assets consider and build in resilience to these unpredictable events to prepare networks for these challenges.
“It is a complex problem and something that needs to be considered in the whole of asset life cycle,” he said.
“We need to consider the changing climate and the need to build in resilience considering the need to have reliable freight links from a design perspective through to the operations and maintenance phases. The whole life cycle of the network must be considered.”
Smith also noted the importance of technology in the future of rail and using it for asset management.
“There is an opportunity to progress so that asset management philosophies are more of a predictive state and having real time information and predictions to the point where we constantly have an instant picture of where the asset is, how it’s acting, how it’s reacting, and most importantly, predict where issues are likely before they arise,” he said.
“With the ongoing evolution and continued introduction of new of technologies and the information that’s already been gathered, I think it’s an exciting place with a lot of opportunity for the industry as a whole.”
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