Investigating maintenance decisions during initial fielding of rolling stock

Successful organizations align technology with their competitive strategy. The challenge is first to make the right and timely decisions when acquiring new technology. Next, organizations must make decisions that help configure the maintenance services to fit the technology they acquired. Ideally, new technology should fit seamlessly with company practices and ways of working. In practice, this is rarely the case and there is misalignment. For maintenance service providers, the problem of fitting maintenance of new capital assets to traditional ways of working is especially important. This paper examines the decisions made by a maintenance service provider to maximize cost efficiency during initial fielding of rolling stock. We explore the different decisions made to design the support organization around newly acquired trains used for passenger service