In 2017, 21st Century was appointed by the London bus operator Abellio on a managed maintenance contract for the legacy systems, to improve the CCTV operational hours. The installation company also fits all new CCTV systems at the factories supplying new vehicles to Abellio. The transport company has a fleet of 700 vehicles in the capital.
21st Century uses iBus, an on-line tool gathering operational data for every journey travelled, and its own in-house remote condition monitoring to identify faults. This way, 21st Century says, it provides targeted and responsive engineering to repair faults as soon as they occur, rather than attend site on monthly or quarterly maintenance checks that can waste engineers’ time because faults occur between visits and depots then have to wait for a scheduled repair.
Lorna Murphy, Operations Director for Abellio London Bus, says: “21st Century quickly demonstrated to us that they can support equipment installed by previous maintainers and organise their engineers to respond to faults.”
21st Century FITAS-qualified engineers (that’s short for FCS – Federation of Communication Services – Installer Training and Accreditation Scheme) work across Abellio’s London depots at night to keep downtime to a minimum. Lorna adds: “Our depot CCTV staff have a great relationship with the 21st Century service desk and their London fleet team in Croydon and I am delighted with the results our staff see with improved reliability and the help in the depots when extracting and reviewing video. We look forward to the innovation they can bring alongside their service.”
Mark Johnson, Director of Fleet Systems for 21st Century, says: “Like all London operators, Abellio relies on the CCTV system to be operating every minute the bus is in service, so it is vital to keep the system as reliable as possible. It is testament to the hard work our service desk and engineers have done with analysing iBus and targeting key issues, that Abellio has topped the performance league table. Improving the system availability and achieving the top rating demonstrates that our approach is the best way to manage London CCTV systems.”
