The paper discusses the development of an automated system to measure the performance of the newly started Attiko Metro (AM) entity operating Lines 2&3 in Athens. Point of departure are well-defined strategic initiatives assembled within the 20-year AM business plan. The strategies are transformed into 21 partial objectives belonging to four balanced perspectives: seven financial measures (cost/revenue, outsourcing ratio), six customer-driven measures (service quality and safety), six measures of business process efficiency (labour and vehicle productivity), and two employee-driven measures (motivation and commitment). The measurement system of the metro performance concurs with the balanced scorecard framework. The so called Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) interrelate input resources and factor costs (labour, energy, materials, vehicle capital), service production (e.g. vehicle-kilometres) as well as service consumption variables (e.g. ridership, revenue). The full set of measures refers to monthly reported KPIs and a subset to weekly KPIs (both actual and last 12-month average). Moving average values for the first year of the metro operation will be discussed. A valid comparison with best practices of similar metro systems (in terms of size, technology etc.) is established. The target benchmarks represent a demand, such as a significant reduction in input factors consumed or a substantial increase in quality achieved. Attiko Metro operating entity seems to be in many dimensions already an outperformer. One of the reasons for the good performance is the high outsourcing ratio (>20%) of AM non-core activities. Another interesting aspect is the performance comparison with the old metro operator of Line 1 in Athens. Both operators share the same regulatory environment and regional cost-of-labour index. A proprietary Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system went live in AM on 2001 covering a part of its business processes. The ERP software will integrate after all the domains of finance, human resources, maintenance, warehouse and procurement based on a single database. The metro divisions can share information and communicate with each other. The ERP technology is expected to improve the metro performance. For instance, warehouse shortages are revealed in real time, so inventories may be reduced. Financial reporting becomes more transparent and detailed, so that accountability within the company is increased. A Performance Management and Controlling (PMC) module has been developed as an application embedded within the ERP. One added value function of the PMC module is that as well as monitoring past performance variability over time, it also predicts future performance via "what-if" scenario analysis. Scenarios enable the estimation of avoidable costs of operation, leading to improved metro performance. For the covering abstract see ITRD E124693.
Abstract