Light Rail Refurbishment Stabilisation and Scale Up

Business Case

A $250M Light Rail Refurbishment Project was experiencing significant schedule delays due to unclear engineering scope, limited parts availability, and the absence of a structured issue-resolution process.

Mobilisation commenced without a detailed activity plan, resulting in poor alignment across cross-functional teams, conflicting priorities, and increasing delivery inefficiencies.

Difot Australia was engaged to stabilise project delivery, support leadership, implement operational progress reporting, and establish an effective governance framework.

Approach

To stabilise production, cross-functional workshops were conducted to establish project priorities and improve collaboration across teams.

A Material Availability Visual Board was designed and implemented to strengthen communication between planning, logistics, and production. In addition, Visual Management Boards were introduced to improve communication between production shifts and monitor refurbishment progress.

To scale project delivery:

• Cross-functional activity plans with key milestones were developed.
• Project performance metrics aligned to the Project Mandate were established.
• Tiered Visual Management Centres (VMCs) were implemented for reporting, escalation, and governance.
• Continuous improvement initiatives were introduced to eliminate process waste.
• Process observations were completed to identify operational inefficiencies (Lean waste), prioritising improvements based on business impact, implementation cost, and ease of execution.

Results

• 42% reduction in lead time.
• 100% improvement in throughput.
• 10% reduction in labour requirement forecast for the fleet.
• Improved cross-functional communication and team alignment.