The UK's Tube Lines has been awarded the Project Excellence award for successfully improving an age-old process for measuring earth structure movements.
The honour was awarded by the British Quality Foundation Lean Six Sigma Academy for new measures to assess the condition of earth structures, resulting in an estimated ВЈ2.6m budget saving.
Tube Lines, which is responsible for the maintenance and upgrade of the infrastructure on the Jubilee, Northern and Piccadilly London Underground lines, is responsible for around 80km of cuttings and embankments, all of which need regular assessment and remediation work.
After carrying out a review of the assessment process the Six Sigma team, which partnered with Tube Lines, found that the techniques for measuring movement of the slopes were not entirely accurate, resulting in remedial work being undertaken on some structures unnecessarily and at great cost.
The team then introduced new measures to predict earth movement much more accurately, such as replacing tape measure and compasses with global positioning systems.
Tube Lines Six Sigma Deployment Manager Eva Holmes said that innovation and process improvement had always been important for Tube Lines.
The team is now able to target remediation of the earth structures where it is actually needed, and reduce the cost of maintenance per metre of cutting or embankment.
"The use of Six Sigma across the business is reaping tangible benefits, including reduced cycle times for our station upgrades, lower project costs across the board and an improvement in the quality of the work we are delivering," said Holmes.
The process is now being used as the new benchmark by others in the transport and engineering industries.
By Daniel Garrun.
