ASSETS MANAGEMENT AROUND URBAN RAIL TRANSIT

Huiqi Liu and Minmin Xiao

School of Economic and Management, Beijing Jiaotong University, Beijing, China

Keywords: Assets, Rail transit business, Life cycle management, Enterprise Asset Management Information System.

Abstract: In this article the common characters of urban rail transit industry are analysed and summarised. Based on

this analysis, this article lists the characters in assets management which are different from other traffic

industry, and explains how to apply the lifecycle theory for assets management in rail transit business.

Firstly, we analyze the transaction requirements in rail industry. Then, the framework of Management

Information System (MIS) for rail transit company has been proposed. Through the analysis and introducing

of workflow in rail transit business, this article elaborated on the essentiality of the assets MIS which was

important to the safely and economical running as well as the efficient and thinning management. Finally,

the article give some suggestions for assets management in urban rail transit.

1 INTRODUCTION

We all know that the public transport is a important

component of the people mobility infrastructure,

specially in the city area (Aele Caltabiano, 2000).

Nowadays, the pace of development of the urban rail

transit in our country is accelerating. There are more

than 800 km railways by 2010 -- especially in

Beijing and Shanghai which boast more than 200 km

in each(ZhuTao, 2010). According to the Chinese

rail transport planning, about 1733 km would be

built over next decade. It is obviously that China has

already formed the largest-scale as well as the fastest

growing urban rail transit market in the world (Chen

and Wang, 2010).

The requirements of assets management in Rail

Company have been increasingly becoming strict

and severe with the continuous development of

urban rail transit. It is well known to all that the

urban rail transit construction, the greatest nonprofits

communication infrastructure facilities (Peters, 2010)

in China ever, is one of the projects of construction

for next hundred years. Therefore, once the city

roadway traffic projects are putted to running, the

core of supervisory is contacting all parts of the

system in order to ensure the safety and efficiency

(Abrahamsson and Soder 2011). Only on the basis of

security can improve the efficiency and

effectiveness (Alegre, 2010) for the system.

However, the normal operation of the system

depends on the high stability and reliability of the

devices. Consequently, it is a huge problem for

assets management (Khurshid et al., 2011) to break

down departmental barriers, realize controllable

management, and improve the analysis capability of

benefits. In this article, from the angle of assets

management informationization (Xie et al., 2007),

we mainly discuss the questions mentioned above.

2 LITERATURE REVIEW

Asset management, broadly defined, refers to any

system whereby things that are of value to an entity

or group are monitored and maintained. Based on

this definition, the business processes and enabling

information systems that support management of an

organization's assets, both physical (such as

buildings, equipment, infrastructure etc.) and non-

physical such as information and business practice

management.

Currently, the state of assets management study

(Meyer et al., 2010) is comparative maturity. But for

traffic industry, it is not the case. As is known to all,

China is presently enjoying constructing the rail

transit and has become the biggest market for the

construction of rail transit. And, safety, effective

operations and serving societies are the primary

goals of rail transit business (Dashti et al., 2010).

Even though, there are still plenty of problems in its

management information system (Kliewer and Suhl,

2011). Having consulting the literature, we found

439

Liu H. and Xiao M..

ASSETS MANAGEMENT AROUND URBAN RAIL TRANSIT .

DOI: 10.5220/0003590404390443

In Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems (EIT-2011), pages 439-443

ISBN: 978-989-8425-55-3

 2011 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)

out that most of the lectures in the field are not quite

complete the goal of assets management in urban

rail transit business. Some are just deal with the

physical part, developing a information system to

cope with the physical asset management

(QuZhiling, 2010). And some are concentrating

efforts on non-physical assets, they usually give

some theoretical suggestions. For both parts, the

assets management is not perfect integrated (Bagchi

and Kumar, 2009).

In order to achieving the goal of assets

management in urban traffic, this article furthers the

study of rail transit industry. This ongoing and kind

of exploratory work proposes a novel model that

fulfils the system targets, such as break down

departmental barriers, realize controllable

management, and improve the analysis capability of

benefits.

This paper is organized as followings. Firstly, we

analyze the transaction requirements in rail industry.

Then, the framework of Management Information

System (MIS) for rail transit company has been

proposed. Through the analysis and introducing of

workflow in rail transit business, this article

elaborated on the essentiality of the assets MIS

which was important to the safely and economical

running as well as the efficient and thinning

management. Finally, the article gives some

suggestions for assets management in urban rail

transit.

3 THE CHARACTERS OF

ASSETS MANAGEMENT OF

RAIL TRANSIT INDUSTRY

From the view of assets management (Ratnayake et

al. 2010), urban rail transit is an intensive enterprise,

which has a large-scale of infrastructure construction

and investment with typical property. Therefore, the

goal of assets management, based on the life cycle

management, is to pay more attention to the devices,

whether in the project construction or the running

phase. Much emphasis should be putted on the

devices, such as scheduled and preventive

maintenance, since those measures are good for

assets (Loo et al, 2010). Only in this method can the

company offer good traffic services and control the

operation costs effectively. In order to reaching the

target of assets management, the following

requirements should be taken into account:

z Life cycle management of assets. Based on

the theory, it is important to realize the assets

management in accordance with workflow

from one stage to another, such as planning,

design, manufacture, purchase, instalment,

application, maintenance, update and so on.

In this way can the company avoid capital

run off and achieve cost-optimal.

z Different levels and types of properties

supervisory. Given the principles of economy

and security, the different management and

maintenance models should be in accordance

with the different levels and types of the

apparatus.

z Master budget. Since the amount of rail

transit assets is huge, the maintenance

management should adopt budget model.

According to history data to draw up the

financial plan and budget target for

equipment repair.

z Safely operation and reasonable maintenance

management. In order to ensure the reliability

and economy of the system, the management

of devices should take standard and

integrated manner. As for outsourcing

maintenance management, it is needed to

evaluate the performance, for the sake of

providing proof for outsourcing maintenance

in the future.

z Material management. A specification

workflow of material management can

contribute to the company enormously, such

as timely completion of production plan and

largely reduction of the cost of purchase and

storage.

z Integrated management of assets. Assets MIS

means an administration platform for

companies. It should meet the needs of

various management levels. To be specific,

an assets MIS should conclude those basic

functions, which are, implementing standard

transaction workflow, building appraisal

targets for different transaction layers,

satisfying the demands from diverse

management levels.

ICEIS 2011 - 13th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems

440

Figure 1: The Assets MIS framework.

4 THE FRAMEWORK OF

ASSETS MANAGEMENT

INFORMATION SYSTEM

In the angel of capital management, rail transit is a

huge and complex material system, including

physical and non-physical parts, made of such

subsystems like rails, locomotives, power,

telecommunications, signals, business information,

operation planning and so on. In order to satisfy the

need for assets management, the structure of the

MIS as figure 1.

Generally speaking, the whole system consists of

four subsystems, namely, equipment management,

maintenance management, outsourcing management

and material management subsystem. Next, we are

to give the detail information for each subsystem.

4.1 Equipment Management

Subsystem

The main task of equipment management subsystem

involves pre-management, subsequent management

and professional device management. To be specific,

pre-management means the basic and static

information for the device, including the

management of basic information, failure,

maintenance, technical data, etc. Subsequence

management of equipment takes in charge of the

dynamic information, which being used by the

device. The subsequence management mainly

including quantity insurance management, device

updating management, and scraping management,

etc. Professional device management provides the

management of non-productive device, professional

device, and specific equipment.

4.2 Maintenance Management

Subsystem

Subsystem of maintenance management is designed

to conduct the planned, malfunctioned and

preventive maintenance management. Specifically

speaking, planned maintenance management mainly

involves the budget, planning, inspection, inquiry

and other transaction managements. In this

subsystem, the data of labor hour, material

consumption, and other maintenance records can be

recorded and queried. Those statistics are important

to the company. Malfunction maintenance

management concludes the transactions like

information posting, reports processing and mission

generating. From the view of function, this part of

the subsystem mainly implements the automatic

transaction process, and the inspection, inquiry,

track management. And for the preventive

maintenance management, it includes features like

building predictive and maintenance models,

analyzing maintenance data, and proposing

recommendations of the management of

maintenance programs and other business

management. Through this function can achieve the

goal of accurate calculations of reliable running

time, scientific plan for device maintenance

ASSETS MANAGEMENT AROUND URBAN RAIL TRANSIT

441

schedule, reasonable allocation of maintenance

equipments as well as reducing the sudden abnormal

failure of the serious impact during operation.

4.3 Outsourcing Management

Subsystem

Outsourcing management subsystem is responsible

for the outsource operation of the asset, mainly

including maintenance unit and contract

management. The functions like distribution,

repairing, evaluation, and performance appraisal can

be conducted in the subsystem. Broadly speaking,

maintenance unit management stands for the

fundamental data management such as the basic

information and the quality, credit of the company.

Contract management of outsourcing involves

managements of the operation of the project and the

contract. Maintenance of unit performance appraisal

covers the examination of the system effect

according to the condition of the project. At last,

evaluation of outsource management includes

building the model to evaluate the production to the

company comprehensively.

4.4 Material Management Subsystem

Material management subsystem makes a

contribution to the managements of planning,

procurement, storage, distribution for the material.

There are three management aspects, that is, material

information, procurement and warehouse

management. In this subsystem, material

information management refers to coding rules, the

basic information, supplies and pricing information,

storage, and financial management. It is the

fundament of the entire material management.

Purchase management refers to generate

procurement plan based on the application of some

relevant departments. At the same time, it should

help to form and execute the purchase task. In

addition, warehouse management refers to the one

for storage of goods arrival, material storage,

shipping and inside-dumping, inventory

management and other services.

5 TOP-LEVEL DATA FLOW

DIAGRAM OF REQUIREMENT

MODEL

The data flow diagram dipcits the overall data flow

in this system. This first-level data flow diagram

emphasizes the fundamental data which are

important to relationships among each subsystem. At

the same time, it also stress connection with other

external entity. Through the analysis mentioned

above, the top-level data flow diagram as figure 2:

Figure 2: Top-level data flow diagram of the system.

ICEIS 2011 - 13th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems

442

Operational asset management subsystem mainly

involves such data as followings: the regulations of

maintenance, the technical materials of equipments,

the logbook of equipments and backups, the status

data of devices, the comprehensive planning of

devices’ maintenance, and data of maintenance,

outsourcing management.

To be specific, the maintenance regulations

mainly include rules of assets purchase, transfer,

discard, etc. The the technical materials of

equipments means the documents which supplied by

producer. And the logbook of equipments and

backups involves information like number, name,

pattern, address of the specific device. The detail

information of each part can be seen from figure 2.

Based on the data flow analysis, we would have a

better understanding of the information process in

assets management for rail transit business.

6 CONCLUSIONS

In sum, this article provides a demonstration about

the needs associated with asset management of rail

transit. It also interprets the structure of asset

information management system. For the reason that

this system is a complicated project, it is firmly

recommended to follow the principle of “master

plan, step by step”. The management would be

better to combine with the new-coming management

theories according to the model of life cycle

management. Only when designer put this

consideration at the beginning of the project can the

enterprise achieve the purpose of modernization and

automation.

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