LADS on Track to Achieve Savings of USD 190 Million by March 2019 for Network Rail

As a key element of Network Rail’s Offering Rail Better Information Services (ORBIS) program, its Linear Asset Decision Support (LADS) project is the largest implementation of Bentley’s Optram in the world. Bentley Optram is a comprehensive decision support system that enables proactive management of linear railway assets, designed to improve the safety, performance, and reliability of railway networks. 

ORBIS is a USD 500 million business transformation initiative which puts quality asset information at the heart of intelligent decision making. By collecting, collating, analyzing, joining and then exploiting asset information in decision support tools like LADS, Network Rail expects to deliver more than USD 1.1 billion in savings over 10 years. 

LADS allows Network Rail to provide the right information to the right people at the right time by presenting accurately aligned asset data in one place. The solution delivers improved decision making for asset renewals and maintenance enabled through a better understanding of the rates of asset degradation, the effectiveness of interventions, and more timely preventative intervention.  As a result, LADS is helping Network Rail to deliver a safer and more reliable railway.

On target to achieve savings of USD 190 million by the end of Control Period 5 in March 2019, LADS is also contributing significantly to Network Rail’s wider goal of achieving 30 percent efficiency gains in the same period.

Jenna Davis, track maintenance engineer, Network Rail, concluded, "LADS is a huge step forward and a real success story for the UK. No other railway in the world has an engineering decision support capability as advanced as this. The more we can build on this, the more reliable a railway we will have in the UK."