A short YouTube case-study (hosted by William Doyle MRICS) documenting how Balfour Beatty’s Integrated Track Team adopted the Rail Dairy site-diary platform at North Ealing Depot. Team members describe replacing paper/Excel diaries with Rail Dairy, enabling photo uploads, real-time visibility across teams, improved communication between night/day shifts, and better data-driven planning (including automated cost forecasts). The video frames these changes as time- and cost-saving improvements supporting works on the London Underground network.
Chapters
Hi, my name is Will Doyle. Just over five years ago now, I founded Rail Dairy. I started my career, though, as a graduate at QS with Valdebiti. Fast forward 10 years and we've gone almost full circle. I'm on site today with the Integrated Track Team in London and we're going to interview a few people and find out how they're using Rail Dairy to better deliver this project.
My name is Ferdanda Golgomura. I'm the innovations and change manager for the Integrated Track Team.
So I'm Severance Church. I'm a senior supervisor.
My name is Amanda Theodorou. I'm a delivery engineer. I work for Integrated Truck Team.
So, before Rail Diary, what we did to communicate site activities to our site.
Staff, we used to do an Excel spreadsheet.
So the Excel sheet would be created in the office, sent to our site staff on nights. They'll print it off and we pretty.
Much work with a paper document on site. We gather the information and we couldn't put no information until we got back.
To the office, scan it in and send it back to our office staff.
So much easier for the supervisors on site that you don't need to carry a load of documents with you that can all go on your site diary per night.
I can access every diary without the need of a link on any project we're working at the moment and to.
Get the information onto the diary as you go along, so you don't forget stuff, because that's like a target when you walk through and you can take photographs, the photograph tells a thousand stories.
So it's made that whole process really compact or compressed and made it really efficient for us to communicate with our site staff. It's really allowed us to use the power of data. So whatever site data that we collect, we feed that back into our office staff and this directly improves our planning. So we can see exactly how much we're doing on site and then trend the data in terms of productivity, how much labour we have, and then use that to change our plan in the future.
I can do my diary even before I leave site, so there's no need to go back to the office. Once people got hold of that situation, they really enjoyed doing a diary. They prefer that over the one London system.
We had a dedicated account manager who really got in touch with our site staff and quickly solved their issues.
The communication is a lot better between nights and days because obviously the day staff don't see what's on site.
The night staff can upload photos straight to the rail diary and that gives us a visual understanding of what's happening on site.
That's near enough really like them being on site with us. So the communication is a lot better.
Anyone on our project can actually view site data now. So whether you're commercial procurement, project management, everyone has an insight onto what's going on at site, which has kind of created a better appreciation for the work we're doing midweek.
Personally, I enjoy the new diary system. It's a lot easier to make my life a lot easier. Anyway.
Before Rail Diary, the integrated track team used paper or Excel to collect and report progress from sites. We've helped to transform their visibility by allowing office and field based teams to communicate in real time. This has facilitated a better understanding of works complete and issues affecting progress and even automating the generation of cost forecasts. So being able to present tangible savings in both money and time has allowed Balfour Beatty and Transport for London to continue to deliver efficient renewals and enhancements across the London Underground network.
