Network Rail Civils Structures Asset Management System

Design+Data acted as technical analyst and led the data specification and  migration for a Network Rail (NR) transformation project to migrate civil structures data and processes to a new asset management system based on the Ellipse enterprise asset management COTS product.

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Network Rail relies heavily on high quality asset information to safely and efficiently plan, design, change, manage and operate its asset base. As part of the Network Rail ORBIS programme the aim was to incoporate the civil structures and geotechnical asset management systems into the main asset management system used for other disciplines such as track and signalling.

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This was a hugely challenging project. Civils structures assets are hugely varied ranging from multi-span viaducts through metal lattice bridges through to brick culverts. Each behave differently and have different asset management requirements and processes. These processes include regular visual and detailed inspections, structural assessments, intervention works and specialist processes such as scour assessments.

Similarly, geotechnical assets have bespoke algorithms to assess risk of failure potentially leading to landslips and incidents.

The project required working closely with users and stakeholders from Network Rail while also collaborating with the system integrators, AMT-Sybex and DXC.

Data was used to inform the design of the new system and migrate data from fifty legacy data sets based on various technologies ranging from offline Excel spreadsheets to Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle production systems.

Design+Data's data Director, Nick Lewis, led the migration team that, at its peak, consisted of twenty migration experts.

Informatica Power Centre was used to develop complex migration routines and quality center for the profiling and reporting of data quality.