Addressing rail’s current challenges head on
Here’s how our 2024–29 Strategic Business Plan will help rail maximise its potential.
Johnny SchuteChief Operating Officer, RSSB
We exist to help the industry maximise its potential. And key to achieving that is designing a business strategy matched to industry needs.
Understanding the industry context, its challenges, and its opportunities is the essential first step. It determines our priorities and how we use our resources and capabilities effectively and efficiently. We view the following, in descending priority order, as the key industry challenges at the moment:
cost reduction and performance
meeting customers’ needs
improving reliability
adopting technology
meeting the freight growth target
value to society and sustainability.
Our senior executive team develops our strategic business plan with input from our board. We also consult with industry about it. This allows us to include strategic insights from across the sector. And this means that our strategy can benefit the whole industry.
Since 2019, our core strategy has focused on six vital areas for the provision of tools, services, and resources. These are:
safer rail
healthier rail
harmonised rail
efficient rail
future rail
sustainable rail.
These are the most important areas for rail, and we’ve treated them as separate domains in their own right. They will remain essential for rail as we look to the future, so they’re still in our strategy for 2024–29.
However, we also need to recognise the complex ways in which technologies are changing. Focusing our actions only on separate areas assumes that there are no overlaps between different systems. But this is no longer the case. Different technologies and systems increasingly interact, sometimes with unexpected results. This means that if we focus only on separate areas, we may overlook important issues and possibly limit our impact.
To address this issue, our new strategic business plan introduces ‘strategic multipliers’. This is where we combine the expertise of our different teams to address important overlaps between systems. We’ll do this to respond to six challenges:
safety and health insights for the future
enabling automation and benefitting from artificial intelligence
improving testing capabilities
exploiting the value of data
improving weather resilience and preparedness for a changing climate
embedding sustainability.
Combining our knowledge and capabilities in this way will help our members to increase the impact of their actions.
We’re proud of our new strategic business plan for the next five years. We feel it’ll help us structure our support to industry between 2024 and 2029.
Read our 2024–2029 Strategic Business Plan.
Read more
Cost reduction and performance
Meeting customers’ needs
Improving reliability
Adopting technology
Meeting the freight growth target
Value to society and sustainability
