Engineering Safety Management and Maintenance

Course structure and content

Maintenance and asset management may be considered as a number of interlocking, closed-loop processes, executed over different timescales, ranging from the immediate response to a significant failure up to long term asset management. After an initial introduction, the course explores the processes, working from the inside-out. The application of the theory is illustrated with a series of short exercises using a running example.

Module 1: Background and concepts

• Policy, regulations, standards
• Rationale for ESM
• Key safety terminology and concepts
• History of the Yellow Book
• Comparing the management of safety in railway projects and railway maintenance

Module 2: Day-to-day maintenance

• Maintenance
  An exercise to introduce a simplified but realistic piece of safety-related equipment together with its maintenance regime and explore how the maintenance activities achieve the objectives of maintenance, including controlling safety risk.
  The maintenance cycle
  We explain how day-to-day maintenance activities can be regarded as a Plan-Do-Record-Review cycle
  The safety planning, reducing risk, records and monitoring risk fundamentals
  We link the phases of the safety lifecycle to these four Yellow Book 4 fundamentals and then go on to explore the Yellow Book 4 guidance for these fundamentals. We acknowledge that safety planning occurs at different levels and limit ourselves in this module to short-term, tactical planning.
• An exercise to apply the fundamentals to try and improve the maintenance regime.

Module 3: Maintenance management and planning

• Introduction. We acknowledge that effective day-to-day maintenance does not exist in a vacuum - it requires a framework of management and (longer-term) planning
• A systematic approach to controlling risk. We explain how the defining your work, identifying hazards, assessing risk and safety requirements fundamentals can be linked together to produce a process to ensure that maintenance procedures are effectively focussed on risk with effort put where it is require. We introduce the guidance in the maintenance application note. We also describe some of the guidance from the main body of the Yellow Book which, while written for projects can be adapted for maintenance. A series of exercises to put the ideas into practice leading to a systematic review of the maintenance regime from the previous exercise.
• Planning and processes We return to the safety planning fundamental, this time looking at the longer-term aspects and we explain how the systematic processes and good practice fundamental supports it.
• The Configuration management principle We explain what we mean by "configuration management" and why it is so critical to maintenance. We explore best practice in configuration management as well practical ways of increasing its effectiveness in the context of legacy systems.

Module 4: Organisational issues

• Setting organisational goals
• Defining safety responsibilities
• Instilling a safety culture
• Competence and training
• Communicating safety-related information and co-ordination
• Working with suppliers
• Interfacing with projects

Module 5: Assurance

• The evidence of safety and acceptance and approval fundamentals On projects, these fundamentals are associated with safety cases and safety assessment panels. In maintenance the evidence of safety is normally presented in an ongoing fashion with approval granted and confirmed in a similar way. We introduce the Yellow Book 4 guidance for these fundamentals.
• Independent professional review On projects, this fundamental is associated with the work of independent safety assessors. We explain that there are many ways of implementing it and explore those that are most appropriate to maintenance.
• Commissioning, performing and writing up an audit or assessment