Engineering data railroaded into global system

Large scale engineering data management software and services specialist Quillion is moving beyond its roots in the oil and gas, refineries, big chemical plant projects, and railways. It’s looking to the utilities, including electricity generators and distribution companies. The firm’s profile has been going through the roof in recent months, with its pivotal role in mapping the UK rail industry’s massively diverse assets and systems. Matthew Griffin, Quillion’s operations director, says he wants to capitalise on this, but won’t be pursuing general engineering. “We’re leaving that to the PDM/PLM software companies that are already well advanced there.” For the UK rail industry, Quillion is in the final throes of completing its truly massive asset register, and is ready to move on to real time integration. “Essentially, we’re taking data out of any one system and making it available to another,” says Griffin. “Our capability is in mapping all systems’ data to all others using our vanilla neutral model for dynamic translation.” He says it’s absolutely not the case that the rail industry lacks data; it’s swamped by it, but hitherto it’s been in a plethora of ad hoc developed systems and of unknown quality, just because of the industry’s age and geographic spread. Users haven’t known where to go for their information, so they’ve created their own systems – and so it’s gone on, with zones and projects being fairly independent and data and system proliferation being the inevitable consequence. “We’re providing a single view of the truth,” says Griffin. And the firm is doing so in bite size chunks, every three months or so rolling out stages of the UK project with tangible benefits, with time scales under the control of the regulator. Griffin reckons the rail industry will have all its data globally available and managed within the next year or two. And with the scale of engineering knowledge embedded in the board of the new operating company, we can look forward to significant improvements in rail travel in that time frame.