On 23 April 2013 the 3rd UIC Team Leaders’ Meeting was held in Paris, UIC HQ. The Team Leaders’ Meeting (TLM) is a tool – originally established in the Rail System Forum Rolling Stock Sector and gradually adopted by other Sectors within the same Forum – created in order to have complete and systematic control of the Sector activities and to take the proper corrective actions.
The need to implement the TLM arose from the peculiar structure of the Rolling Stock Sector that is responsible for 16 Sector Expert Teams (SETs) – of which 10 are currently active – each of them dealing with a specific subject. Nevertheless the railway system needs strong coordinating activity of the different domains and in the TLM the coherency and the harmonisation of the leaflet guidelines is addressed. The Chairmen (Team Leaders) of each Working Group – SET for the Rolling Stock Sector – and the Programme Managers are members of the TLM.
One of the main goals of this specific meeting, moderated by Mr Cau (UIC), was to have a clear and updated representation of the general status of the Multiannual Project “Updating of the UIC Leaflets” that was approved as Global at the last General Assembly (Paris, December 2012): the leaflets are the core business of UIC and keeping them updated means providing UIC Members with the required reference documents that allow the everyday operation and exploitation of railway traffic.
Within this framework it is worth reiterating that about 75% of all UIC leaflets belong to the Rolling Stock field, and is consequently the most relevant part of the budget in the “Updating of UIC Leaflets” project. Due to these reasons, this edition of the meeting was mainly dedicated to the Rolling Stock Sector: nevertheless an e-mail has been sent to the delegates of the other Sectors and Forums involved asking them to inform and update UIC staff on this subject in order to fully report on the status at the next General Assembly in Paris on 27 June 2013.
Each Team Leader presented the state-of-the-art of the leaflets under revision within the led Working Group. As a first stage all the Project Sheets were examined and commented on by the participants and this was a valuable occasion to share knowledge and to compare best practice among the different Working Groups.
The Team Leaders’ Meeting was also the opportunity to discuss and strengthen the link between UIC and OSJD, thanks to the presence of the UIC-OSJD coordinator. The UIC-OSJD cooperation is one of the most important partnerships that UIC is currently developing and, in this sense, welcomed the proposal from OSJD of leaflets to update within this framework as well as the contribution from the harmonisation of UIC-OSJD leaflets. Some input is expected from the UIC-OSJD coordinator after the OSJD Meeting (13 and 14 May – Warsaw) perhaps propose additional entries to the list of the leaflets to be updated in 2013.
In addition, the governance of the Working Groups (or SETs) belonging to the various Sectors was discussed and the moderator proposed the systematic use of different means such as the list of Experts effectively available within the Working Groups, the Work Plan of the different Working Groups and the dynamic list of leaflets to be updated in 2013. This strict and meticulous governance programme is mainly due to the articulated structure of the different Forums and Sectors and permits the traceability of the work done avoiding any waste of resources. This structure – developed within the Rolling Stock Sector and adopted by the Energy Sector – is offered to the other Sectors and Forums, unless a better level of detail is provided.
The last subject discussed was the use and the status of EUTREQ (the UIC computerised process to manage UIC leaflets and railway standards in general which meets the level of the basic requirements and allows coherent, traceable and quality assured UIC Standards to be produced) within the framework of updating the UIC leaflets. The EUTREQ staff presented both a long and short term programme of activities, including dedicated training sessions and a further workshop – scheduled to take place before July 2013 – on the use of this innovative tool. Until present, about 40 UIC leaflets have been available in the EUTREQ system and, by the end of the year, it is planned to populate the EUTREQ Data Bank with about 200 UIC leaflets.
The meeting was concluded by the moderator expressing his acknowledgment for the strong participation and commitment of all the participants; he also proposed to organise another meeting on this subject with an enlarged participation, extended to all the Working Groups and Forums involved and to the OSJD delegate(s), before the end of June 2013.
