Spoornet gets to work on improvement measures

SPOORNET IS in the process of restructuring to reduce the overall transport cost of exports and enhance overall market growth through improved General Freight Business (GFB) rail efficiency and focus on rail friendly traffic, says Ravi Nair, the parastatal's general manager, restructuring and joint venture.
Addressing the Africa Rail 2001 conference in Midrand last week, he said that in order to grow in the market, Spoornet would maintain its pre-eminent position in heavy haul and bulk through a symbiotic relationship with GFB.
"There is a very close relationship and interdependency between GFB and export operations, which is evidenced by the GFB traffic transported on the export lines," he said. "A total of 14million tons of GFB traffic is conveyed on the coal line and this accounts for 50% of the train slots.
"Without these GFB trains, the unit cost of moving coal from the coal fields to Richards Bay would increase vastly. In addition much of the support costs for the coal line are currently borne by GFB."
Nair said the Halcrow Turnaround report, issued by the British firm of consultants and tabled in October 2000, identified 120 improvement measures that could be completed within a three-year horizon by March 2004. Some 20 further projects have been added subsequently and more are under review.
The projects address the processes, technology, staff and combinations thereof. It should be noted that every effort is made to preserve jobs in the railway industry even if those jobs are not within Spoornet, he said.
A dedicated project team has been established to manage the process. In this way structural savings of R171 million were achieved by March 2001 and an additional R600 million is targeted for the current financial year ending March 2002.