NR NR/L3/MTC/MG0231 ISSUE 2 PDF

This Network Rail standard specifies the process for introducing a hosting arrangement between Delivery Units or specialist suppliers for maintenance and life extension or renewals activities.

Purpose

Since maintenance was brought in-house during 2004, there have been two significant organisation changes called Phase 2 and Phase 2A. These two organisation changes reviewed and standardised the Maintenance management structure from the centre to Section Manager level.

The direct organisation below the Section Manager was largely unaffected by the Phase 2 and Phase 2A organisation changes. It therefore remained unchanged from what was in-sourced from the different Infrastructure Maintenance Contractors (IMC).

The impact of having different (ex-IMC) organisations between Delivery Units was:

a) inconsistencies in the size of teams. There was little correlation between the number of assets, workload and organisation size;

b) inconsistent approach to delivery of tasks. Team size, team make-up and delivery methods were different for the same activity from one Delivery Unit to another;

c) limited flexibility to be able to deal with changes in workload and demands.

The main objectives behind Maintenance Restructure (Phase 2BC) are:

a) to create a maintenance organisation that meets the business needs for Control Period 4;

b) to have a standard Maintenance organisation across all Delivery Units;

c) to create an organisation sized on assets, workload and task frequency with a response structure aligned to business performance requirements;

d) to create an organisation able to deliver core maintenance, incident response, life extension and renewals work safely and more efficiently.

Some aspects of maintenance delivery cannot be economically delivered by each Delivery Unit (DU). This can happen when the volume of work does not support the creation of an organisation to deliver such activities or the work is specialist in nature. In such cases, it might be possible to utilise the skills and expertise of adjacent delivery units or specialist national groups to undertake this work. This is known as "hosting".