Our Track Record
15 Years Down The Tube - Directors reveal the secrets of their success
This year Brookvex celebrate 15 years of unbroken engineering service delivery into the London Underground environment. Two of the company's directors reflect on the critical factors that have made for their successful delivery of major projects into the rail environment.
Established 21 years ago as a cabling company, it was to be 6 years before Brookvex would get its first opportunity to work on the railway; delivering a minor works service for London Underground's telephone services department.
Since then, the company has never stopped delivering projects and services into LUL. Each year the company has increased its capabilites and service portfolio to the extent that today it has become a major provider of specialist infrastructure services into the highly regulated world of rail transport.
Geoff Ayshford, Brookvex's director of engineering says "Safety is of paramount importance when working in a railway environment. That is why we built solid controls into the core of all of our delivery processes and we have quite a few of those these days".
Geoff continued "Maintaining high levels of productivity in the Underground is a particular challenge as the Tube is in operation every day of the year except for Christmas Day. We only have on average a 3.5 hour window to work in any 24 hour period so we need to approach every shift like a military operation."
Geoff went on to reveal "The secret to high productivity is to: plan and prepare well before going to site; have good contingency arrangements to be able to deal with the unexpected; use reliable people who will get to site early and work hard; and, above all, to have your teams run by experienced and effective site supervisors."
Michael Davidson, Brookvex's founder and managing director, says "In my experience, to be a professional contractor in today's rail industry you need to be good at a number of things. You need to be particulalry good at sourcing the required skills, you need robust systems for managing competencies and compliance, and you need to have top-class project managers and supervisors who can deliver the works safely, on time and to budget."
"That is why, over the years, we have invested heavily in our people and our systems and have expanded our portfolio to be able to fulfil all forms of infrastructure requirement from design through installation and on to system support, maintenance and management."
"I am particularly proud of the fact that, after 15 years, we are still delivering the original minor works service into the Underground. Only now we have diversified into delivering multi-workstream major projects as well as managing our client's telephone networks and mobile phone assets."
(reproduced with the kind permission of Tina Kingham, The Rail Articles Agency)