MARTA is the ninth largest transit authority in North America with nearly 5000 employees. The agency has been using Trapeze EAM since 2006. MARTA uses EAM to manage its bus, paratransit, non-revenue, track work vehicles, rail facilities, and maintenance of way (MOW) assets. With MOW alone, MARTA improved operational efficiency by 70% by interfacing EAM with its graphical track maintenance tool.
Like any system in use for a while, the team fell into comfortable patterns. Through attrition, MARTA discovered that some tribal knowledge and nuances for using the system were lost. Some of the business units were not aware of updated functionality. Jonathan Weaver, a long-time MARTA employee, became the Manager of Operations Technology in November 2022. He started asking questions about EAM: What does it do for us? How can it make us better? Jonathan decided to bring Trapeze onsite to share with the team features and functions they might be missing, as well as the latest in transit best practice workflows.
After Trapeze completed a health check on MARTA’s use of EAM, the agency decided that an optimization project was the best course of action. In addition to workflow optimization, MARTA discovered that it wasn’t using existing modules like State of Good Repair/Capital Planning, Mapping, and MobileFocus to their fullest.
For Don Pensyl, Senior Planner, Railcar Operations, the ah-ha! moment was realizing that adjustments to workflows could create big gains in efficiencies. “We were still doing things in a way we thought they needed to be done but we found out we didn’t have to do them that way anymore. For internal rebuilds, we were still going to our purchasing department to get a purchasing order for components and parts that we already owned. Now, we complete the rebuild and give them the parts and they initiate the restock after we’ve completed the work. It’s saving days of waiting time for a purchasing order.”
For Jonathan, it was a configuration update that changed the game for how EAM interacts with MARTA’s Mobility (paratransit) contractors. Contractors are required to track their parts via EAM but they also use their own software. “The not-from-inventory (NFI) configuration enables outside vendors and contractors to flag their parts as NFI so all subsequent fields in MARTA’s EAM aren’t required. We can transfer the vendor’s part number, part costs, etc. into their system.”
Through the optimization process, MARTA is considering the importance of new modules such as Asset Configuration Management to continue streamlining its operations and staying ahead of industry best practices. MARTA will start commissioning new railcars in 2025 and so tracking the new components with ACM will be critical.
"Trapeze have been great so far. Very accessible. Very knowledgeable. We've made great progress. They've been a lot of fun to work with."
Configuration tweaks, testing support, training, new modules, or an upgrade to the latest version of EAM, can have big impacts on workflow efficiencies. Through the optimization, MARTA is already experiencing the benefits as it is now able to capture true costs with improved data elements for assets to improve lifecycle analysis and reporting. Investing in their employees with training in the newly configured system is equally important. If Jonathan and Don could offer one piece of advice for agencies considering an optimization project, it would be to do it sooner rather than later.
“Having compared it to the other asset management software out there, I will say that Trapeze EAM is the most user-friendly EAM. You could have no knowledge of asset management, but because of how Trapeze gets you set up, you can start using EAM right away, Trapeze makes it super easy. Period,” notes Jonathan.
Bus
Rail
Paratransit