SŽ Efficiency – training
As Slovenia’s national railway company, Slovenske železnice (SŽ) operates about 200 freight trains and 500 passenger trains per day. The company plays an essential role in linking the port of Koper to its European hinterland. With the subsidiary Fersped SŽ also offers road forwarding and logistics services.
Scope of work
While several network sections have been electrified and upgraded in the recent past, operating trains in Slovenia in a reliable and profitable way is still a challenge. This is partly due to bottlenecks on single-track lines and to the need for new appropriate equipment. In addition, rail transport in Slovenia faces strong competition by other transport modes and by other Mediterranean ports. Infrastructure measures such as a second track between Koper and Divača will improve the situation, but they will not be available in the near future. The SŽ management team thus intends to improve the company’s efficiency in the short and medium term. During the first audit phase TransCare identified 22 measures to increase the efficiency. 12 measures of which were defined as a scope of the expert training program.
Main results
TransCare’s expert training program covered the crucial business activities of SŽ and was accomplished within fifteen months. The main objective of the training program was to provide the management of the key companies with the knowledge base on how to meet the future challenges of rail business in Europe. The main content of the program:
- Know-how in developing strategic business plans
- Assistance in development of joint ventures between SŽ and wagon providers
- Recommendations for modernizing the locomotive fleet
- Improved ticketing policy for passenger transport
- Technical prerequisites how to increase current capacity of the line Koper – Divača
- Options to increase fleet, workshop and driver efficiency (e.g. measures to increase locomotive availability)
- Recommendations concerning elimination of redundancies in the administrative processes
- Support in optimization of sites and infrastructure in Ljubljana
- Activity Based Costing for freight and passengers transportation, rolling stock service company, administrative center (Holding) and infrastructure
- Reorganization of single wagon loads, modernization of cargo wagon fleet, inorganic growth of cargo business
- Improvement on driver and fleet efficiency, modernization of locomotive fleet, consolidation program
- Yield management in passenger transport, optimization of passenger rolling stock
- Improvement of the slot Koper – Divača, team management for infrastructure maintenance
- Consolidation of administrative and central services, optimization of office facilities in Ljubljana
