Sanket Nayak discusses Workforce Management and DAS

Trapeze Rail has a strong commitment to the rail sector and is calling on all of its international experience to support Australia’s rail industry.

Trapeze Rail has placed an emphasis on creating software tailored for the rail industry. This focus on rail made Sanket Nayak an obvious choice as Managing Director for the Australia and New Zealand rail business.

Rail Express sat down with Sanket, who has over 16 years’ experience in the sector, to understand his vision for Trapeze Rail and the organisation’s Workforce Management software solution.

Trapeze Rail is part of Trapeze Group, which is a Modaxo company. Modaxo is the home of many of the world’s most used transport technology companies.

Sanket said he was drawn to the role because Trapeze Group’s model effectively treats each stream as its own individual business, allowing it to be hyper focused on the industry it serves.

In his 11 months in the role, he has seen major companies using a ‘LEGO board’ to manage large teams which results in thousands of errors. A drive to reduce mistakes and improve industry has allowed Trapeze Rail to deliver a number of software solutions targeted to the sector.

“The thing I hear from executives is that it is really challenging to get that full visibility across the organisation,” Sanket said.

“Not many vendors have cracked the code on how to apply that. The chain of responsibility is growing with the new Rail Safety National Law (RSNL) so our technology will help improve that.”

The RSNL aims for a seamless and co-ordinated national approach to rail safety regulation in Australia. Previously, each state had a fragmented approach to rail safety and this new law brings it all under one banner.

Sanket explained that technology has a critical role to play in the steady improvement of rail. In areas such as energy efficiency and sustainability it will be vital to support decarbonisation efforts through technology.

For Trapeze Rail, using software technology has been its bread and butter. It has been providing Workforce Management solutions for close to 20 years and understands the vital role technology plays in rail organisations.

The benefit of technology

Sanket said that Trapeze Rail looks at each individual rail company to better understand what their specific needs are.

“Every IT landscape is different,” he said.

“When you deploy a Workforce Management solution, it needs to be open and not proprietary, so it can integrate with an ever-changing IT environment to support a free flow of information and eliminate manual manipulation of data. We want to see a healthy environment where each of the vendor’s software talk to each other to ensure a company’s success.”

Sanket explained that this grand view can sometimes be hard to achieve as not every company knows what its own grand view is.

“People are often going out to market looking for a point solution,” he said.

“In our experience not many are saying that they want to transform their processes because of the cost. We bring global industry best practice and learnings to deploying Workforce Management to top tier rail operators across the Australian market.

“We start with a strong baseline that is built specifically for the unique needs of the rail industry, but we allow for open integration to truly expand it and maximise its benefits.”

For Trapeze Rail, open integration is a key philosophy in everything it does. Sanket noted that this is important, particularly with the further implementation of the RSNL. He explained that Trapeze’s off-the-shelf Workforce Management solution is hyper configurable.

“It is a very tricky thing to balance because every company comes up with a specific set of needs,” he said.

“The industry is constantly changing. What we have seen from more vertical Workforce Management solutions is that for the first year a system is deployed it is really good but after that first year, as things change in the industry, it begins to become less and less effective before eventually becoming obsolete.

“The company then has to go back to the vendor, spend a lot of money to bring the system back up to standard, and then the cycle begins again. This is not the case with the Trapeze Rail solution as it’s constantly evolving with the needs of the rail industry.”

Trapeze Rail uses its local portfolio of users to ensure the system stays up to date with Enterprise Bargaining Agreements (EBA) and other changing parts of the rail workforce. Sanket said the goal is to keep the software aligned with rail best practices, so only very minor changes are needed when required.

“Our guiding principle is software for life,” he said.

“Starting with a very high baseline and then bringing our global expertise in with updates across the life of the product to deliver a solution specifically tailored to that company.”

Working across networks

While the RSNL is going a long way to improving the connectivity of Australia’s rail network, the country still has a fragmented railway system with each state having its own requirements and laws.

Sanket noted that some of the companies Trapeze Rail works with operate across multiple states posing challenges unique to each one.

“While each state may have different laws and EBAs, we do notice common themes and challenges across each,” he said.

“It is not just state borders that matter but also employee preferences. A mistake a lot of companies make is thinking you can only have either operational efficiency by catering to your customers or your workers, but not both.

“This is simply not true. I believe much of the software currently in use has the tail wagging the dog.”

Sanket explained that staff preferences and experience is the main thing to ensure a company is maximising efficiency.

He recalls a program that was rolled out in Queensland. It worked well near the city but as it was rolled out into more remote areas, the only way for team members to clock on and off was by calling the service desk.

This system created a number of overtime leakages, either through intentional or unintentional mistakes.

“We implemented our modular workforce management system which would work in collaboration with inbuilt capabilities to manage attendance and employee self-service on smartphones or tablets to rectify this issue,” he said.

“We began working with the company to understand what was causing the issues and we understood that there was this communication breakdown. We designed a crew communication app which took away the manual part of signing in, enabled push notifications to be sent to the user and allowed users to swap shifts all within the app.

“You now had full visibility of absenteeism, shift swaps being captured, and it could all be collated and put into executive reports to ensure visibility.”

A growth mindset

Trapeze Rail has placed an emphasis on research and development, partnering with The University of South Australia (UniSA) for close to 30 years to develop some of its exciting software portfolio.

UniSA’s academic excellence powers the Trapeze Driving Advice System (DAS), which is used by rail operators worldwide.

The TTG Energymiser algorithm at the heart of Trapeze’s DAS solution was developed by professor of industrial and applied mathematics, Peter Pudney, and the scheduling and control group at UniSA, working with TTG founder Dale Coleman. UniSA is the established global leader in train performance research.

The unique partnership with UniSA goes from strength to strength, building upon 30 years of academic research to deliver a physics-based solution using the optimal speed profile methodology.

The Trapeze DAS considers a broader set of variables than more basic systems, generating an optimal train driving profile.

“We are here for rail, and we want to radically improve every rail ecosystem in the world,” Sanket said. “The way we do that is by providing smart technologies that will positively impact the network. We are in the business of reduction – reducing carbon, complexity, delays, and costs.”

In 2023 the Australian Research Council supported the DAS partnership’s academic excellence with a new round of funding, locking in future investment for the innovative collaboration.

The value of this research has also been recognised by the Commonwealth Government’s Innovations Connections Grant which helps growth sector businesses seeking to develop concepts with commercial potential.

The system, and the research behind it, has been honoured with an Australian Export Award, a Premier’s NSW Export Award, and Australian Rail Industry Award.

Sanket said the recognition is nice, but he is of the belief that continual development is needed to support the sector.

“We have developed intelligent energy management which is an extension of our DAS but will help ensure the train is running as efficiently as possible,” he said.

“You can have certain networks in places like Sydney, where two trains cannot run next to each other as they draw too much power. Our energy management system would eliminate these problems.

“Our business is creating smart technology through university-backed research that comes out of listening to the industry, understanding the pain points and keeping up with the dynamic nature of the industry.”

Want to connect with the Trapeze Rail team? Our experts are ready to talk about our rail-specific software solutions so get in touch today.