Safe and clean – Prevent your transportation organization from becoming a carrier of contaminants

The entire transportation industry, whether moving people or not, is under intense pressure from both consumers and government agencies to pursue safe and clean practices. This means that health and safety practices and protocols have become as important to transit and transport organizations safety as equipment maintenance.

Protocols to ensure a clean and safe work environment are built on preventive maintenance schedules, so it’s important that these schedules are constantly updated to reflect new and quickly changing requirements.

Keeping checklists updated

Understanding which of your physical assets are most critical to your operation, and therefore pose the greatest risk to business continuity, is the first step to making your organization safer. Even under normal circumstances, assets should be assigned a criticality ranking based on the impact they would have on your mission if they were to fail. Related factors to consider are user safety, customer satisfaction, and compliance with federal, state, and local regulations.

Any modern asset management plan should record, digitize, and track health and hygiene practices, and be able to answer the following questions about each asset:

• Are they clean?
• When were they cleaned last?
• Who cleaned them?
• Were cleaning personnel trained on new regulations?

Take, for example, New York City, which has instituted a 13-point plan to prevent contamination, and has moved to an “every 24 hour” policy for rail car disinfecting.

Scheduling and assigning tasks is a complex challenge and can’t be done manually, therefore, it needs to be easy for users to record completion in real-time to prevent contamination. Organizations need to be prepared to track, monitor, and analyze any incident, whether that involves answering questions about maintenance frequency or ensuring employee education and qualification.

They need to be ready with the documentation and records outlining their own health and safety practices, and remain in a state of constant preparation in the case of unplanned visits from inspectors and auditors. Having real-time reports and data on safety and cleaning adherence is imperative. Reports should include records of the procedures in place, implementation timelines in real-time reports of adherence, records of staff training and certification, as well as updates on how hazardous materials and activities are being mitigated and avoided.

Safe and clean in the cloud

Smart technologies can revolutionize your transit asset management by applying key analytics and overlaying the system with historical elements that provide deep insights. This can help your organization shift from a preventive mindset to predictive, prescriptive practices that are both safe and clean.

Cloud-based enterprise software provides businesses with a nimble platform that can enable quicker responses to opportunities, customer needs, and rapid changes. Cloud deployment also facilitates complete automation and integration across the enterprise, and supports the implementation of future-forward innovations such as mobility, A.I., and drone technologies. As organizations continue to build data-rich repositories of business-critical information, cloud storage also offers optimal data safety and security.