Case Study - Colas Rail
After using Pirtek to replace hydraulic hoses on their track maintenance vehicles, Colas Rail found that their leak rate had fallen by a staggering 70%.
Complete Trust
Pirtek Coventry’s senior Mobile Sales and Service Technician (MSST) Bernard Slack must surely be suffering from déjà vu at the moment. Having started his working life on the railways, he now spends a significant part of his working week at the Rugby depot of Colas Rail where he helps maintain the hydraulic systems of the company’s overhead wire maintenance vehicles and tampers.
Such is the trust that Colas Rail has put in Bernard over the past five years, Bernard has been entrusted to inspect a machine on one of their three, six or 12 month maintenance programmes and told to inspect, repair or replace any defective hydraulic hoses, couplings or fixtures he finds after consultation with the maintenance team leader and then identifies each pipe he has changed so it can be entered onto a data base.
Successful Exercise
“Originally we had our own team handling hydraulic hose replacements and we only tried Pirtek as an exercise. But we quickly realised that they could replace the hoses more efficiently than our own workshop, freeing up our own workforce to do more dedicated and specialised repair work,” says Colas Rail’s Rugby maintenance manager Adrian Watson. “We have since analysed Pirtek’s repairs and were staggered to find our leak rate had fallen by 70 percent.”
Instant Response
Adrian is full of praise for Pirtek Coventry in general and for Bernard Slack in particular. “We have complete faith in Pirtek. We book them in for our scheduled maintenance work but they also run a parallel preventative maintenance programme to ensure that any hoses that show signs of wear are replaced before they fail in the field,” he concludes. “In addition to our regular work, we know we can phone Pirtek up and say we have a problem to be sorted but the machine has to go out in a hour, and know they will respond instantly to help. I have nothing but praise for Bernard Slack. He’s a top man.”
Bernard and the myriad of hoses to be checked
“We have complete faith in Pirtek. We know we can phone them up
and say we have a problem, and it will be sorted”