Customer Spotlight: Chiltern Railways

We sat down with Train Presentation Manager Denis O’Sullivan to find out how his teams have used mpro5 to transform their train cleanliness audits and reporting. 

 
Hi Denis, could you start by giving us an idea of the challenges you faced before using mpro5? 

Cleaning trains brings about a series of challenges, ranging from limited time due to quick turning around of services to train availability due to maintenance priorities.  

We are very fortunate to have incredibly strong collaboration with our fleet planners who plan in need trains into favourable location where work can take place.  

Once work is complete however, we recognise it is essential that work is checked for quality by management and findings fed back to those who carried out the work.  

How do you use mpro5 for Train Presentation? 

Firstly we use mpro5 to conduct random management audits that permit us to closely scrutinize the quality of cleans. 

Government requirements under a National Rail Contract (NRC), in which Chiltern Railways are signed up, and a Service Quality Regime (SQR) within, mean it’s crucial we rightly meet standards for passenger experience.   

The management audit has been engineered to mirror the questions and criteria that an SQR inspector would be working to, giving us not only a view of standards and the inspector might see them, but also a chance to pick up on any deficiency before anyone else does. 

How has this new approach impacted operations? 

In terms of the Team Leader After Cleaning Checks, writing a line or two on a piece of paper for feedback was far from adequate, however today we get far more detail and even photos we didn’t have before.   

Using a digital auditing tool means we can share detailed performance reports easily with our whole department, so that every team can learn from them. 

It’s also been a great motivator, because we now also have the evidence to celebrate great work and congratulate our teams for their efforts. This is critical due to the demands we place onto the Train Cleaners regarding standards and expectations. 

Have you seen benefits from a compliance perspective as well? 

Being able to benchmark our performance against our SLAs has been really valuable. We’ve been able to review how appropriate these expectations are. 

The strength of the evidence we can now produce is the biggest benefit of our new digital solution: we can not only demonstrate if SLAs are set correctly, but why we’ve changed them. 

Photos, signatures, time and date stamps, these different kinds of evidence work together to give us the strongest explanation of our Train Presentation performance – and this is vital for satisfying our obligations under the NRC.  

We can show the Department for Transport (DFT) that we’ve viewed and are aware of trends and can demonstrate what we’ve done about them, and then hopefully show them how the stats have improved later down the line. 

Would you recommend mpro5 to your colleagues in other Passenger Operators? 

Absolutely, I think it’s worth saying that even without the new DFT requirements, we would be benefiting from the use of mpro5 for Train Presentation , in the interests of the customer. 

Being able to report in detail on our performance has really changed things for us and we’ve been able to learn things from other mpro5 customers in terms of making our processes more efficient. 

Chris Chinnapan (mpro5’s Transport Sector Director), has been excellent at both advising us on our use of the tool and in helping to get us further modifications to the system as quickly as possible. 

I’m confident the solution will grow with us in Train Presentation and we will be looking to MPRO5 for more positive solutions that will continue to help us evolve to fit the needs of our customers.