Engagement & objective
Helping stand up a repair campaign, at pace.
A tier-one iron ore producer was standing up a large-scale structural repair campaign across a large rail-wagon fleet and needed additional leadership and delivery support to mobilise quickly. PPS embedded within the rail maintenance team to help get the campaign moving at pace, working inside the client's systems, governance and safety standards. Mobilising fast and helping lead the stand-up mattered in its own right, and it set up everything that followed.
Campaign delivery
Review the process, then safely lift the rate.
Working shoulder to shoulder with the client team, PPS helped lead the campaign and reviewed the end-to-end repair process, from workshop infrastructure and equipment to workforce capability and operational constraints. Reading where the real constraints sat, PPS applied dynamic project prioritisation to sequence the work and safely ramp production up to multiple wagons a day, moving the campaign past its throughput target while holding the highest safety standards.
The engineered solution
An original access system, from field sketch to construction-ready design.
The highest-payoff opportunity the review surfaced was safe access inside the wagons for weld repairs. Conventional scaffold access was slow, tied up cranes and kept people working at height, so PPS engineered an original access and egress system, conceptualised from an initial field sketch through to a detailed, construction-ready design, then fabricated and deployed, making confined-space access safe, fast and repeatable.
Designed within strict wagon geometry and overhead-crane constraints, the system incorporated hands-free lifting features, integrated workstations and repeatable access arrangements, eliminating the need for repetitive scaffold construction.
3D design phaseThe outcome
Safer, faster, and millions deferred.
Together, the campaign leadership, the reprioritised delivery and the access system removed approximately 14,000 working-at-height hours, improved more than 70,000 access and egress events, and delivered approximately $2.6 million in campaign savings through scaffold elimination, reduced crane dependency and improved repair efficiency.
The productivity gains helped the workshop stay ahead of its required repair rate, extending fleet service life and deferring millions of dollars in short to medium-term asset replacement expenditure.
Internal wagon repairRecognised within the client's continuous-improvement program as a standout safety and capital-productivity outcome, and a repeatable standard for its maintenance operations.
Client recognitionWhere to next
See how we work.
This campaign is one of several embedded engagements across mining, port and rail. Explore the capabilities behind them, or see the full range of selected work.
Let's talk
Got a campaign that needs to move safely?
We mobilise fast and own the result. Tell us the scope.