Transnet Engineering – Return on Investment

Technology Category

Functional Applications - Enterprise Resource Planning Systems (ERP)

Applicable Industries

Railway & Metro

Applicable Functions

Business Operation
Quality Assurance

Use Cases

Predictive Maintenance

Services

System Integration

The Challenge

Transnet Engineering, a company with eight different business units, 132 depots, and six factories spread across South Africa, had allowed each of its entities to develop their own approach to ISO 14001 and OHSAS 18001. This resulted in inconsistencies in practices, confusion, and despondency from the implementers together with a high number of findings experienced during audits. The systems remained largely manual, and pressing issues included the difficulty in managing historical data, the inability to easily trace the movement of documents, the lack of notifications over expiry dates and actions, and the inability to link documents to the last person to have modified them.

About The Customer

Transnet Engineering is a company that consists of eight different business units, which contain 132 depots and six factories spread across South Africa. The different depots and branches had been permitted to develop their own approach to ISO 14001 and OHSAS 18001, which diverged significantly over time. This was done for the purpose of accountability, and to ensure that each site should be independently ISO certified. In effect there were around 80 entities that had their own way of working within the standards.

The Solution

The first phase of the solution was to standardize the EHS framework across the organization. This took two years, during which period Mirriam Tenyane, Divisional Executive: Compliance and Regulatory Affairs at Transnet Engineering, invested her time in ascertaining best practice and engaging with stakeholders to ensure their buy-in. The second phase was to automate the standardized framework Transnet Engineering had developed. IsoMetrix was chosen as the preferred solution for automating EHS, due to the agility it offered, the strong dashboards, and the fact that it had been successfully rolled out at Transnet Engineering’s sister company, Transnet Freight Rail.

Operational Impact

Reports that previously took senior staff members days to compile were now available instantly. Dashboards gave a clear visual understanding of trends and exceptions.
One particular dashboard highlighted the extent to which injuries to hands occurred in the organization, a fact that had been rendered invisible under the previous manual systems.
Improved visibility and access to information has also reduced the effort and time required for internal audits, and greatly reduced the extent of audit findings.

Quantitative Benefit

The costs of external audits over a three-year period dropped from USD 1.6 million to USD 1.2 million.
The overall Disabling Injury Frequency Rate (DIFR) had come down from 1.02 per 200 000 hours in 2012 to 0.42 by the end of March 2016.
There has been an overall decline of 20% in Off Ill cases in the business since 2013.