The Channel Tunnel Rail Link provides the high speed railway infrastructure for Eurostar trains to operate on. The objective of the assignment was to configure an enterprise engineering document management system (based upon Documentum) to the needs of the client and migrate all business and safety critical documents into the new system.
Channel Tunnel Rail Link (CTRL) is effectively a ‘private railway’ that complies with Strategic Rail Authorities and HM Inspector of Railways safety and operating requirements. One of the key considerations to operating in any safety regulated environment is ensuring that all staff, especially the engineering workforce, have access to a single, consistent source of information. An Engineering Document Management System (DMS) is invariably at the heart of this. “This is the first time that a digitally designed railway has had all its critical documents stored in a digital Document Management System. I can now rest assured that they are stored safely.” - Head of CTRL
The solution
Our team spent time understanding the information management needs of staff and worked closely with the Head of Safety. We established an information architecture, taxonomy and retention policy for all the key engineering and operating documents for CTRL. By working closely with key Document Managers, we ensured that their best practice was configured into the workflow of the new system.
An important project phase for any Engineering Document Management System is the loading of existing information into the new system. Our Business Change Manager employed a web crawler to audit shared and local drives in the client’s offices in order to survey the legacy data sets. We subsequently configured and used document bulk-loading scripts in order to data cleanse and migrate documents into the newly configured system.
“You under promised and over delivered” - Head of Channel Tunnel Rail Link Key to maximising the business benefits from newly deployed software systems is the need to employ specialists in business change. Our Business Change Managers worked with all staff to train them in how to gain the most from the system. We designed and provided e-learning material for staff to use, which is especially useful as part of an induction pack for new starters.
The Head of CTRL at the time commented: “This is the first time that a digitally designed railway has had all its critical documents stored in a digital Engineering Document Management System. I can now rest assured that they are stored safely.”
The Project Services Manager added: "Having been a veteran of may systems roll-outs over the years in BR, Railtrack and Network Rail I have to put on record my thanks to the team for the thoroughly professional and effieceint way in which they managed the roll-out. Not one document was mislaid or lost, training was tweaked to reflect the 'special' requirements of our organisation and their positive attitude was a credit to them."
You can find more information on our work with this organisation and on similar initiatives by contacting us
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