Overview

London Underground Limited (LUL) was formed in 1985, but its history dates back to 1863 when the first world underground railway opened in London. London Underground operates the underground railway system in London and today, is a major business with over three million passenger journeys per day, 275 stations, and more than 400 trains.

Challenge

London Underground identified a problem with its Incident Reporting process – a process that tracks any operational incident related to the physical system, tracks, stations, and trains. Incidents can range from broken down trains, to a passenger injury, or even faulty escalators – anything that impacts the service or safety of London Underground services must be reported and managed.

In the past, these incidents were recorded on paper forms and passed between relevant London Underground staff and third parties. Unfortunately, the paper forms could be incomplete or inaccurate and movement of paper among staff and third parties was inefficient and error-prone. In addition, this paper-based approach provided no simple aggregate visibility of incidents across London Underground, nor enabled the status of incidents to be quickly determined.

London Underground recognized it needed a way to fix this issue – and track and respond to all incidents more effectively – in order to maximize safety and minimize service interruptions for its three million passengers. From a financial perspective, the paper-based approach also meant that not all incident-related costs were being assessed in a timely manner, meaning that London Underground was carrying excess costs.

Solution

Previous experience using Metastorm BPM software within the London Underground organization gave it the confidence it needed to leverage the solution to automate and manage this mission critical process.

London Underground had already been using Metastorm’s BPM software suite, e-Work, to track and manage its IT Request for Change System – a system that tracks requests for new computers, software and other IT equipment. This particular process was a considerable burden for the Information Management Department of London Underground since requests were manually entered into a home-grown system based on a Microsoft Access database, and responses were handled on a first-come, first-served basis. Without any sound way to prioritize and modify requests, the productivity of staff and the efficiency of the whole organization were limited.

Using Metastorm e-Work to address the mission-critical Incident Reporting process, known internally as EIRF, proved to be the right decision. Racon Software, a Metastorm partner, was engaged to build the system and today, more than 3,000 users across LUL can submit incidents electronically. London Underground’s employees enter incident details in an electronic form and depending on the type of incident – age, status and priority – it is either tracked for reporting purposes or escalated for action. e-Work easily manages the different types of reports and routes them accordingly.

Results

The Incident Reporting system allows London Underground to enforce collection of all information it needs for any given incident and reduces errors in filling out forms manually. e-Work is also used to notify its other systems and electronically transmit needed information on particular incidents. This helps London Underground recover costs from other agencies involved in incidents.

Metastorm e-Work is helping London Underground increase efficiency and productivity of its staff with easy to use electronic forms. As a result, London Underground is processing over 200 incidents per day; representing more than 90% of all recorded incidents. The new automated process has been very well received by users and is a critical operational system for London Underground, enabling the organization to focus on improving service performance to reach its goal of maximizing safety and minimizing service interruptions.

“Our electronic incident reporting process is a critical operational system within London Underground and enables us to focus on improving service performance,” stated Rob Sucher, EIRF Project Manager, London Underground. “The system needs to be available 24x7 and Metastorm e-Work gives us the ability to meet this need.”