Railway: Industrial methods
ALTEN has teams of engineers dedicated to industrial methods activities. The methods department intervenes just after the engineering activities and enables the designs defined during the engineering study phase to be applied in production.
They are responsible for the application of the engineering studies on manufacturing lines, for the modifications coming from customer’s change requests and delivery assembly diagrams as well as instruction sheets.
“Generally speaking,” says Quentin Delangre, Project Leader at ALTEN in France, “my department – the methods department – sits between the design office and production. We’re the link between what the engineering/design department plans to build, whether it’s a regional train, a commuter or a metro, and the teams that actually manufacture or assemble the trains.”
“They define whether what has been planned by engineering is feasible in manufacturing, and are also responsible for defining the how,” explains Benjamin Le Fablec, Project Manager in France. “Internally, manufacturing is the ‘customer’ of methods, and methods are ‘customers’ of engineering. Engineering delivers a product, i.e. a train design. Methods delivers a process to go with it. And manufacturing executes the plan.”
Quentin’s team is also involved in engineering work on fitting the vehicles with interior elements, such as seats, ceilings, stairs, electrical installations etc. This happens at the outset of the construction phase and their job is to ensure that the documentation containing the installation instructions is clear, and then to monitor compliance.
Eventually, there is also feedback from the field on profitability, quality, etc. This feedback follows the opposite route, through methods back to the design office, to determine whether the problem is an anomaly, what corrections need to be made, and how to achieve them.
Many variants
Unlike the automotive industry, which operates on large series with well-defined variants and options, the railway industry designs trains that incorporate clients’ requirements into standard products.
A series of regional trains intended for a given region, for example, may require numerous modifications to the same train, depending on the client and the intended use. This means that even after production has begun, there are changes to be monitored and dealt with. Modifications are related to the different options and configurations available via the wide range of regional trains. As the link between the production unit and the design office, the methods department has to consider and integrate all these constraints and complexities.
“To give you an idea,” says Quentin, regional express trains in France come with different interior configurations – one with more seats and one with less seats to allow for more standing passengers. In the case of metros, there can be even more variants – more diversity. “It’s almost a case of ‘made-to-measure’ for each customer,” says Quentin.
Skills where needed
To ensure its consultants have the skills they need, ALTEN has set up a training school for railway technologies. This helps engineers from other backgrounds, such as the automotive industry, to come up to speed quickly. Consultants from a railway background may also be interested in moving, for example, from engineering to methods.
Because projects often have a transnational dimension, ALTEN also relies on its multinational teams throughout the Group as well as its near shore and offshore Delivery Centers, such as Morocco. Many of the people working there came to ALTEN with no railway background at all. ALTEN trains them first on railways in general, then on the specific product.
“We give them context and content,” says Benjamin. “These are things you learn on the job. We’re actually asking our engineers to grasp subjects that go beyond them, beyond their functions at the time,” he continues. “The advantage is that engineers have a general, industrial culture that enables them to adapt – for an engineer, this is a prerequisite.”
