ABSTRACT

TRANSPORTATION - A MAINTENANCE MANAGER OUTSIDE THE COMFORT ZONE

The transportation world is changing - after years of relative stability some challenges are impacting the way of moving people, and particularly the maintenance life in our depots. We will focus our attention on the following factors:
- Sustainability projects: the energy transition is pushed by the challenges imposed by the climate and the important amount of funding behind them. Fleets are changing in welcoming full electric vehicles, (bio)gas vehicles, hybrid solutions and so on. Vehicles are not being managed as they used to be in the past, and possible is a more complex system including infrastructure and not only.
- Maintenance 4.0: the maintenance process is evolving thanks to the new technologies / digitalisation, by introducing a new way of working in the workshops, up to creating a generational wall. Workers are requested to be faster at learning than they were in the past.
- The world evolution from the social point of view: young people don’t want to become drivers of maintenance operators, while the increasing of public transport is more and more needed. The lack of resources is another new challenge to face.
This is a very interesting period, but it is evident that new skills/tools, which one doesn’t find in the typical Maintenance Manager background, are to be searched for.
Starting from Arriva Italia experience, in this presentation we will analyse the three topics  by going deep into the following aspects:
- comparison among the different traction technologies by highlighting the potentialities and criticalities, and if we are following the right path to achieve the carbon neutral target 2050
- how we are using the digitalisation in the workshops and how we are supporting the operators training
- how we are trying to manage the lack of resources and find new solutions.
All these challenges imply a huge effort and sometimes the Maintenance Manager is worried, accusing the technology evolution to be too fast. We can demonstrate that technology is helping us change our approach and it is supporting the evolution. So, the real question is: «Is the technology evolution speed up the problem or is the problem our ability to manage this path?»
In the second part of the presentation, we will see what the sentence: «Outside the comfort zone» means, and we will try to give some tools to face this historical moment with some tips and tricks. 
In conclusion, the technological evolution is a fantastic challenge, and we are lucky to live this period, but it requires an attitude to explore new territories as well as a change of mindset by working on our soft skills more than we could ever do on our technical ones.