Christopher Tan | The Straits Times | Thursday, Jun 18, 2015
When Mr Desmond Kuek went from being
permanent secretary at the Ministry of the Environment and Water Resources to
heading rail operator SMRT Corp three years ago, some of his close friends told
him he was either brave or plain crazy.
"I said there's a fine line
between being brave and crazy," the 52-year-old former chief of defence
force quipped.
As it turned out, the retired
general's mettle was put to the test immediately.
Within weeks of his appointment on
Oct 1, 2012, the new Circle Line suffered a major breakdown.
The following month, a bus driver
strike - Singapore's first strike in 26 years - shook the company to its core.
More rail breakdowns followed,
prompting Transport Minister Lui Tuck Yew to express his disappointment
publicly.
All these piled pressure on a
company that was already in deep crisis after two massive breakdowns in 2011
triggered a costly and humiliating public inquiry.
Mr Kuek, who is not easily fazed,
admitted that the task of getting SMRT back on track is "incredibly tough
and challenging".
His earlier assessment of the
company was damning, describing it as having "deep-seated issues...
managerial, structural, cultural and systemic issues".
One of the first things he did was
to assemble a team of senior executives made up largely of former career
soldiers. Then he started beefing up the technical staff. In the past three
years, SMRT's team of technicians and engineers have grown by 21 per cent and
59 per cent, to 2,169 and 278, respectively.
He reshaped the company's
organisational structure and streamlined processes to offer employees clearer
career paths, and for them to give feedback and voice grievances effectively.
These moves are bearing results, Mr Kuek said, noting that there has been
"a clear shift in our staff culture", even though this is "not
yet consistent everywhere".
SMRT's train withdrawal rate - where
a train is withdrawn from service because of faults - has come down from 3.3
for every 100,000km operated in 2012 to 1.05 last year.
"This is the lowest in seven
years," Mr Kuek noted. "And we are targeting to go even lower this
year."
He admitted that reducing the number
of major breakdowns, or breakdowns that last 30 minutes or more, remains a
challenge.
"We have made tremendous
progress on many fronts... but there is much more to be done to improve rail
reliability."
Most of these works are arduous and
span long periods.
SMRT has replaced all the rail
sleepers on the North-South Line (ahead of schedule), and is now replacing
those on the East-West Line. The Straits Times understands some of the wooden
sleepers were in such a bad shape that it looked like they would fall apart
when removed.
In the next few months, SMRT will
start replacing the power-supplying third rail on the two lines.
The overhaul of older trains has
also begun. All these trains will be fitted with new motors from Toshiba. SMRT
tested them on two trains last year and found that they used 30 per cent less
electricity.
Meanwhile, the network's 30-year-old
train signalling system - which determines how tight train service intervals
can be - is also being changed.
"This may not sound like
anything exceptional to some, but Thales, our contractor, tells me that this is
its biggest project on a 'live' system anywhere in the world," Mr Kuek
said.
The North-South Line's resignalling
is expected to be completed next year, allowing peak-period intervals between
trains to be shaved to 100 seconds, from 120 seconds today.
When all the upgrading is done and
with the "robust preventive and predictive maintenance regimen" the
company is putting in place, Mr Kuek is confident SMRT will rise from its
recent chequered history to recapture its spot as one of the world's top
metros.
"Whatever has happened in the
past does not faze us - it only makes us stronger," he said.
The chief executive officer has also
been busy transforming the business. "Sustainability, not simply
profitability, is our aim," he said. Since assuming the helm, he has set
up a department to look at mergers and acquisitions.
He started a rail engineering
subsidiary, which has clinched a deal to market Toshiba train motors, and tied
up with France's Faiveley Transport to supply train maintenance, repair and
overhaul services in South-east Asia.
In April, SMRT announced it was
eyeing a stake in OMG, a new company vying to be Singapore's fourth telco. But
it dropped the idea amid mounting criticism that the move might distract it
from its core business, even though it intended to be nothing more than a
passive investor.
SMRT is also bidding aggressively
for new bus operating contracts. Even as its failed bid for the Bulim contract,
Singapore's first public bus contract, raised eyebrows among investors for
being the lowest, Mr Kuek claimed it would have been profitable.
The company is also negotiating with
the Transport Ministry over transitioning to a new rail financing framework
that sees the Government owning all operating assets. This will allow SMRT to
focus on service quality without being weighed down by huge and lumpy capital
expenditure.
Talks have been ongoing for well
over a year now, and industry watchers reckon the main impasse is the operating
margin that SMRT should enjoy in the new regime, which is deemed to have lower
risks.
But Mr Kuek would not comment on
this, merely saying the new model is more sustainable, and "we have made
good progress in the ongoing discussions".
And although he does not say it
outright, it is clear he does not think Singapore can support more rail
operators.
"It takes five to 10 years to
groom an experienced rail engineer," he said. "The question of who
will run upcoming new lines does place some uncertainty on an operator. Should
it invest in growing the expertise for the future?
"There is a very real risk of
incurring the cost of raising the manpower but not winning the licence."
He looks to Hong Kong as one success
story, where a tightly regulated operator derives synergy from a fleet of
trains that can be deployed on any line.
"Hong Kong's MTR has a rail
plus property model, and an integrated design, build, operate, maintain
arrangement that presents it with great flexibility in network design, whole
life cycle asset management, and effective decision-making on a host of
rail-related issues," he added.
Nevertheless, he concedes that
"each city evolves its own system based on its socio-economic and
political considerations", and there is no one size that fits all.
"Within our own structure, we
are determined to achieve as high a level of operational excellence as MTR's.
Our aim is to be the people's choice - that people will take the train because
they want to, and not because they have to," he said.
Source: asiaone
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