Implementation of performance based maintenance contracting in railway industries

The achievement of maintenance objectives to support the overall business objectives is the pursuit of any maintenance department. Using in-house or outsourced maintenance service provider is a decision which poses challenge in the management of maintenance function. Should the decision be for outsourcing, the next concern is the selection of the most appropriate strategy suitable for the business environment, structure and philosophy. In an effort to improve maintenance function so as to deliver set objectives, some infrastructure managers adopted the approach of outsourcing maintenance function, giving larger responsibilities to maintenance service providers called contractors. Moreover, such change requires adequate attention to meet the pressing need of achieving the designed capacity of the existing railway infrastructure and also support a competitive and sustainable transport system. This paper discusses performance based railway infrastructure maintenance contracting with its issues and challenges. The approach of this article is review of literature and as well as synthesis of practices. A framework to facilitate the successful implementation of performance based railway infrastructure maintenance is presented. Also a performance monitoring system is proposed to assess the outcome and identify improvement potentials of the maintenance outsourcing strategy. A case study is given to demonstrate the monitoring of a typical maintenance activity that can be outsourced using this outsourcing strategy.