In the darkest hours of August 1, 1999, the Avadh-Assam Express collided with the Brahmaputra Mail in one of the worst rail disasters in India. It killed about 300 people and forced the then railway minister to resign. Inquiries into the accident pinned the blame on human error.
In a whitepaper, the Indian Railways holds human failure accountable for two-thirds of railway accidents. "When an accident occurs, the probability is in 65 percent of such cases, it is on account of staff failures. This ratio has not changed with time, training or technological input," says the paper. In 1999, the number of railway accidents totaled about 400. Fatigue among railway staff is never a reason given for the human error, though it is hard to discount. In its record of what the railways is doing to bring down staff failures, the whitepaper says the organization must reduce 'overwork hours' for train drivers.
That, however, is easier said than done.
But, it was exactly what was needed. Only a crew management system could track the hours crew-members logged, ensure that their duties were handed out evenly and that the entire workforce was employed optimally.
As the second-largest rail network in the world, the Indian Railways runs over 18,000 trains carrying about 18 million passengers (more than the population of Mozambique) -- every single day. To keep this enormous operation chugging, the railways employs 1.4 million employees. Reportedly, the organization is the largest employer in the world.
Its size makes it an easy target for inefficiency. Keeping track of such a large workforce and ensuring that it is being used optimally is hard. In 2003-04, for example, the Indian Railways had an operating ratio of 93 percent (Operating ratio is a measure of a company's efficiency. It compares operating expense to net sales. The smaller the ratio, the better an organization's ability to generate profits.). In railroading, an operating ratio of 80 or below is considered good.
"We were not using our crew optimally. There was a lot of wastage or over-usage of the crew. The first affects performance and the other safety," says R.B. Das, Group GM, FOIS, Center for Railway Information Systems (CRIS).
This state of affairs was due mainly to the fact that Indian Railways worked with chalk and a blackboard, figuratively speaking. Scheduling and assigning duties to a railway staffer everyday and for every single train was done manually by sending messengers or telephone messages to crew-members asking them to report to work. "After the delivery of the message, they would come and report. This was a painfully long process," says Deepak Ganju, GM, Project III, CRIS.
It was also inefficient. In addition, the odds of doing things like they have always been done were not in their favor. As the network added more trains, the time between each train shortened, exposing the drawbacks -- and dangers -- of a manual system. It was only a matter of time before the increased tempo climaxed in a terrible disaster.
Against the Rails
Though initial plans for a railway system were made in 1832, it was only in 1844 that any track was laid. That slow start belied the speed of things to come. Just six years later, the rail network covered 14,500 kilometers. Today, the Indian Railways has over 623,000 km of track linking about 7,000 stations. Driving this growth is the number of passengers and freight that want to use the railway's services.
As more trains rode the rails and new systems evolved, newer and faster trains like the Shatabdi, for example, needed drivers with different grades of skills. Hierarchies became common. Assistant drivers, assistant shunters, assistant everything were born. Positions on trains also became more specialized as brakemen, guards, and other positions etcetera were introduced. And that's only staff on a train. An entire ecosystem was required to maintain tracks, work the signals, man stations, inspect locos, etcetera.
To keep crew fatigue at bay, the Indian Railways introduced rules to ensure that crew members got rest -- complicating the process of assigning duties. Even today, those in-charge of making staff timetables need to guarantee that a driver's mileage is limited to 8,000 kilometers a month. Loco drivers are not permitted to work longer than a six-hour stretch, allowing them to do 'doubles'. Over a fortnight, crews cannot work more than 104 hours. At the same time, each crew-member needs an average of 18 hours of rest at headquarters or eight hours if they are out-station. The railways also state that 'periodic rest each month must include four 30-hour rest periods, or five 22-hour rest periods.'
The assignment of duties also has to account for drivers who are being promoted and require 33 weeks of on-hands or 'road training' or drivers who need to re-familiarize themselves to routes they worked before (they ride shotgun during the re-familiarization process). Railway managers also need to ensure that certain categories of drivers got rotated every 30 days or so to drive the more 'prestigious' trains and remember that drivers for goods trains could double as drivers for passengers trains (only in special cases).
Complexity became the order of the day.
And the situation wasn't getting any better. Not with the railways adding more trains, more routes and more passengers every year.
In 2006, CRIS, the IT arm of the railways, decided to fix the problem. Their brief was to create a Crew Management System (CMS) to automate the workflow for over 14 lakh railway employees. The crew management system also needed to cover the staff for freight services, the cash cow of the railways.
"We had a very rough and ruddy method of calculating how many crew-members we would need for meeting a target of say 'x' million tons of goods. Under the manual system, the expenditure incurred on such a process was abnormally high. When we examined our crew utilization, we found that it was very inefficient," says group GM Das.
"The CMS [was envisioned] to provide information about crew-members at all times, facilitate the booking of staff on freight trains and passenger trains, both for long journeys and short movements within terminals and yards," says Ganju who heads the mammoth project. The railways, he adds, wanted a "system to manage and control crew movement that also assists managers to optimize crew utilization."
Manning their Stations
Pegged between Rs 14 crore (US$2,988) and Rs 16 crore, the CMS is a huge project by any standards. Despite this, it's a pretty straightforward concept. At its heart, is a database that holds information of all the crew-members. After, say, a train guard is selected for a journey or 'link', the system sends him an SMS, which he acknowledges. The guard then reports to the lobby (in railway parlance the lobby is where crew-members gather. It is a control center for the crew).
At the railway lobby, the CMS is present in the form of kiosks or thin clients that the guard logs into with the help of a biometric scanner. The CMS authenticates him, tells him which train he's working that day and informs him at which point on the route he needs to disembark. (See Crews Control)
When he gets off his shift, the guard stops by a kiosk, logs himself in, tells the CMS that he has ended his shift and reports any abnormalities he has observed like a patch of bad track or an unscheduled stop. The abnormality-reporting feature has an in-built dictionary, much like the one built into mobile phones, that helps crew-members file their reports by suggesting common words.
With the CMS, much of the brainwork that was done by divisional heads in tracking crew-members and assigning them duties is now done by algorithms. The focus is on freeing staff from the drudgery of calculating everything manually. More importantly, the system can assure that railway staff are employed optimally. "Crew optimization is enabled by CMS as the system keeps track of a crew's duty hours. It ensures that those who have served the requisite hours are given rest while those who haven't are called to report to duty," says Das.
In a few areas, the CMS can summon railway staff via SMS. The Indian Railways is trying to provide mobile phones to all of its train facing staff. In the meanwhile, crew-members are allowed to use their personal mobile phones.
To ensure its success, the CMS was mapped to the processes used by the railways. The kiosks, for example, were only placed at 144 (out of 306) crew booking stations. These are stations that offer railway men accommodation or 'running rooms' between working sets (the only places it make sense to have kiosks since crewmen getting off a train need to rest.) These stations can normally be found at busy junctions or where a new division starts or there is a large loco shed.
Deciding where a crew-member disembarks a train for rest has to take into account where the next running room is -- complicating the CMS' job. Sometimes however, like on the Nagpur-Bilaspur route, crewmen work 7.5 hours -- 90 minutes more than the six-hour rule -- before they can access a running room. These delays have to be accounted for. "The CMS handles these. Overtime details are now recorded by the CMS," says Das.
The CMS also has to monitor training, medical and competency check-ups. Crew-staff cannot be scheduled on a 'link' if they are supposed to be in training or at an internal exam. The CMS will also block employees from going on duty if they are not medically fit or not properly trained. "Earlier there was a mechanism to find out whether a crew-member's training and medical reports were up-to-date but it was not a foolproof system. Since it was manual there was always scope for error," recalls Ganju.
Introducing this level of automation, however, did not come easy.
Railroading Is Not an Option
Given the heterogeneous environment of the Indian Railways, even the thought of attempting a project on this scale can give the most experienced project manager the jitters. The CMS concept demanded that over 350 kiosks be connected and over 1,000 data-entry nodes be provided. In its first phase, the project is linking 144 crew-booking points spread across nine zones and 30 divisions in central, western, and north India. "Before we decided to roll out the CMS in its full strength, we thought it was necessary to conduct a few pilots with zonal divisions. The rules for the CMS were consolidated from what cannot really be called a pilot project but more a proof-of-concept (POC) exercise," says Ganju.
While designing the software, the team consulted with railway staff from all over India. They found huge differences in practices and a lack of common standards. During the development stage, the team at CRIS ensured that the software could accommodate these variations, including language. "In the future, we will have more languages added to the system so that the crew belonging to different regions can use the system easily," says Ganju.
The outlines of the pilot were defined based on the feedback from the POC. Members of CRIS acknowledge that the POC exercise was not very successful, but the experience and the issues it brought to light would take phase one a long way. "Based on this experience, we designed and conceived the pilot project, which started with the Ratlam and Baroda divisions," says G.K. Maishi, group GM/OAEW, CRIS. But when you're among the largest employers in the world, even pilots are sizeable. In its first phase, the project targeted 35,000 railway workers.
Although this forms a small percentage of the total number of railway employees, the buy-in of this group was essential if the project was to take off. But they had been weaned on the manual system and in some cases the manual system went back to the days of their fathers. They had learnt to work the system and were not ready to adopt systemic changes. The biometric readers, for example, made it impossible for them to sign in by proxy.
"Change management is a challenge we have faced in every project that we have done for the Indian Railways. We have overcome this by designing applications properly so that everyone who interacts with a system benefits from it. There are IT implementations in which the people who interact with a system do not benefit at all. Not so with the CMS," says Vikram Chopra, Director Operations, CRIS.
Employee resistance created a parallel system. Currently the profiles of 51,000 crew-members have been entered into the CMS database and over 15,000 actively access it everyday.It helps that the CMS is a browser-based, user-friendly, 24/7 application that is run on the railways' internal WAN. The thin clients and kiosks used by crew-members are linked to a central location, where edge servers have been installed for load balancing. Using thin clients not only lowered the project's cost but were also the right choice because of their longer lifespan (they do not have moving parts). And the centralized architecture simplifies software updates, for example. "If anything goes wrong, it can be corrected from the central command center," points out Ganju. Since Indian Railways trusts Open Source, yet another challenge was to create user-friendly thin-clients that ran on Linux. "We overcame this problem by training end users," says Ganju.
Creating the software and managing the project in-house was a huge task. The team had an 18-month deadline to launch in December of 2007 and with the amount of work that needed to be done on different fronts, the project team grew from three to 35. "The essence of our success was proper planning and timely contribution by each team. It is teamwork which made the most difference," says Ganju.
Their teamwork paid off. Today, the CMS provides global tracking of the railway's crew in real time, immaterial of whether they are on a train, resting at HQ, resting outstation, on leave or in training. "With the CMS there is a ready account of available crew," says Das. Armed with that data, supervisors can plan and allocate crew-members for trains.
And, if the number of crewmen available for the day falls below a critical level, a message is sent to authorities to do the needful.
Profit Express
The CMS has brought other benefits. For one it has made the railways a safer place. By reporting an abnormality like a defective signal as soon as he gets off his shift, a crew-member can save lives. The CMS passes on his observations quickly ensuring that the problem is fixed. "Earlier this was done manually. A crew-member would record an abnormality on a register, which a supervisor checked later. In the CMS, once an abnormality is reported, an SMS is immediately sent to the concerned authorities," says Ganju. The CMS has also made life easier for railway staff. Now they can check their PME (Periodical Medical Examination) and training dates on their mobiles.
The CMS is also environment friendly. By using thin clients instead of regular PCs, the Indian Railway saves between 50 percent to 85 percent in power. The kiosks use TFT instead of CRT monitors and that saves between 40 percent to 65 in power. In addition, the kiosks have led to reduced paper consumption at the lobbies.
"Economy is one of the reasons for implementing the CMS. The other is improving efficiency. In fact, it is operational efficiency that is more important than economics," say Chopra, director, CRIS.
Still, the CMS is a CFO's dream. CRIS has invested between Rs 8 crore and Rs 9 crore in phase one and Ganju says, "we're likely to see payback within one year by way of overtime control alone. The other benefits like a reduction in crew, reduction in cost because of faster decisions and greater railway safety cannot be evaluated at this point."
With the CMS, the Indian Railways' operational efficiency has increased. "It has ensured that crew is put to optimum use. With the CMS taking care of crew allocation, there is no scope for under utilization of any crew-member and the opposite is also avoided," says Ganju.
It's effect is already beginning to show. In his 2008-2009 Railway Budget speech, Railway Minister Lalu Prasad Yadav announced that the organization's operating ratio improved to 76 percent.
CRIS is eager to spread the goodness. Phase two is already underway and Ganju says that by September 2008, 140 more locations will come up in the eastern, southern and north frontier regions of the Indian Railways.
In the coming days, CRIS plans to integrate the CMS with other systems like the Freight Operating Information System (FOIS) and the Coach Management System. They also plan to integrate a breath analyzer with the system. These are already placed in the driver cabins of many trains but work on a standalone basis.
"We also have plans to develop flexi-reporting systems. This will enable management to design their own reports, according to convenient formats, which will further enable the improvement of services and performance," informs Ganju.
And importantly, the CMS will help streamline the organization, making it more able to take on its biggest competitor, the low cost airlines. "The purpose of the CMS is not to cut down the number of crew-members," says Chopra. "It's to use crew members on our rolls to run more trains efficiently. Every year we increase the number of trains. This is not about saving man-power, it's about using manpower better because we are in a growing market."
The Indian Railways isn't the only one that sees benefit in the CMS. Transnet (South African Railways) has shown interest in using the CMS. Transnet Freight Rail, a division of Transnet, is the largest mover of freight in Africa.
But perhaps most importantly railway safety has improved. In his 2008-2009 Railway Budget speech, Lalu Prasad announced that railway mishaps have reduced. "The number of train accidents has come down from 234 in 2005-06 to an all time minimum of 195 in 2006-07."
There's no price on that.