Analysis

Today’s passenger railways and transit systems are run on data.  Data is collected on almost anything: passenger counts, train movements, ticket sales, parking, maintenance activities, work orders, asset condition and location, organizational performance, schedules, run-cuts and vehicle assignments, system statistics and demographics, payroll, financial data, contracts, project chargeouts, near-miss incidents, employee injuries, crime, customer surveys, and even hard-to-observe items like rule compliance or fare evasion.  The data can be big or small, statistical or universal, mostly accurate or ballpark estimates.  We have extensive experience working with all different types of transit data—turning your data into models, information, and insight, based upon which you can make management decisions.  We help you interpret your data, understand what it is really telling you, or indeed what data is not available or inaccurate.  Our science background helps you to be objective with your data through rigourous hypothesis testing.  We can help you decide what data to collect.  Our statistics pushes the veracity and granularity of your data as far as it can go.  Our data processing algorithms help you automatically detect (and maybe correct) bad or missing data.  Our knowledge of technology helps you unearth new data sources or novel ways of collecting data.  Our auditing and data detective work looks beyond limits of current data.  We give you an answer that’s well-supported by data where many others can’t.

Planning

Planning is the art of figuring out what to do: generating feasible alternatives, and forecasting consequences of each option—at a sufficiently detailed level to know that it would work, but at a high enough level not to preclude flexibility down the road.  This is applied to rail and transit systems at many levels: strategic planning to decide on which markets to pursue, how to fund the vision, and keeping options open in an uncertain world; investment programming to balance expansion, state of good repair, productivity-based cost reduction, and resource availability; operations planning to figure out what service to operate and how to do it efficiently; maintenance planning to balance work windows with service and ensure resources are available to get things done; production planning to maximize utilization of limited plant capacity and manpower.  Atypical for a small consulting firm, we have experience in all of those areas.  Furthermore, we can predict, using mathematically rigourous analytical methods, the consequences of today’s decisions well into the future, whether those results be in economic, financial, performance, or operational terms.  We provide sufficiently detailed service, operating, or maintenance plans that proves what you propose is achievable with a defined set of resources and requirements, whilst retaining sufficient flexibility to give you room to negotiate or react to unforeseen circumstances.   We describe and help you visualize and communicate a vision.  We build scenarios that are realistic, feasible, but also illustrative, to help you make the best decision you can today.  We craft strategies that help you attain your long-range goals even when operating in an uncertain environment.  Our plans help you think through your future—whether that’s on an operational, programmatic, or strategic timescale.

Management

You have probably experienced that “crunch time” when you wish you could “borrow” a project manager from somewhere—preferably with specific skills that you need for the situation at hand, someone who can hit the ground running with minimum fuss, can figure out what to do with the issues, make reasonable decisions that you can live with, and generally leave the place better than how they found it.  We’ve been there, too.  So, we are here to help you with your management task du jour.  We can perform a variety of support tasks in a passenger railway or public transit environment, because we have done something similar as agency employees before.  Whether you need a benchmarking or research study to explore different technology or policy options, an audit to further understand an operations issue, a program plan to help implement a project, to deal with a specific compliance or regulatory reporting issue, need scope development services to support a procurement action, developing a business case to determine investment potential, or operations planning support while preparing a bid for a passenger railway concession, you would be drawing on our practical experience in these areas.  We are no strangers to a 24/7 operations environment, have been roadway-worker and operating rules* qualified, and are always prepared to go to the field wherever and whenever required to make your project successful.  We are here to get the work done for you—to be an extension of your staff, without adding to your organization’s overhead.

Note: * If we are not currently qualified on your system, we will obtain qualifications as required for each project.

Sectors

Although our primary focus is on railways and rail transit, here are some of the transport sectors we work with.  Please click on a link to see our past projects.

Specialities

While we are capable of, and look forward to, learning the specifics of your data and working with your operational processes, below are some of our core competencies in which we have extensive experience: