Nov. 27, 2024

An interview with Bjorn Feys, Safety Systems Director at Eurostar

Bjorn Feys has been working in safety for over twenty-five years both in the oil and gas and the railway industry. He joined Thalys in 2014 to design their safety management system and today he supports its integration within the Eurostar group.

Background

Eurostar runs high speed trains on tracks in the United Kingdom, France, Belgium, The Netherlands and Germany. This all comes down to very well controlled operations.

Eurostar started their proactive risk management journey after the results of a maturity audit. The first period they made sure that the company was able to make sure that it improved the process to respond to deviations and incidents. This was familiar ground, so only a matter of improvement.

After a 1.5 year period of research Eurostar decided to adopt BowTie as a method for modelling and managing the operational risks.

“SNCF and NS used Bowtie, making it a good candidate for Eurostar as well.”, says Safety Systems Director Bjorn Feys. “The main focus is managing the risks of the operational and maintenance environment and less so the construction and design scope. We needed a method that can be maintained, where BowTie has the reputation to be a good tool to proactively model and control the risks as an organisation.”

Performance management

European regulation for the rail sector is closely tied to performance management. Not at accident level, but focused on the control of our risk sources; hazards that can cause losing control. Eurostar has a long history of managing risk, which is their premise for existence running high speed trains.
“The focus is on the management of our controls. Our sector has had events that indicate the need for improvement of the way we control our operations. There are limits to what you can do with systems, procedures and processes. So we looked at alternatives to improve performance.”

Resilium helped shape the vision with practical implementation steps. To keep the program clear and maintainable, it is important to keep it practicable for the organisation.

Resilium a stable factor

Eurostar started tendering, in which various tools were reviewed. An alternative that was looked at was FRAM, which is better in modelling the risk on the one hand, but the maturity and the data of the organisation didn’t fit, on the other hand. Resilium offered training and consultancy using BowTieXP. The introduction was very valuable and Resilium came out as the winner.

The merger between Thalys and Eurostar plus Covid required resiliency from both parties. Resilium proves to be a stable factor ensuring continuity, despite unexpected changes.

“We maintain a scope of several years for this program, until it is really embedded in the organisation. To do so you need a reliable partner that will guide us along the way.”

From rules to culture

We are now at the point where we will start to embed bowtie in the organisation. Our proactive safety culture and human behaviour management are permanent factors that support this.”

“We are moving from a rules focus to a conscious culture supporting the desired behaviour of our people”, Bjorn continues. “It has proven to be very easy to enable experts within a short time to feed in their expertise in the risk analyses. The presentation that the bowtie model brings is very functional. But we need the guidance to apply the methodology correctly.”

Challenges

Eurostar is now at a point to apply uniformity and as much simplicity in the models as possible. “We do need work to make them as easy as possible, without oversimplifying it. Ownership of barriers and the evaluation of the performance and effectiveness of barriers require correct assessments with input from our experts.”

Bjorn foresees that Key Performance Indicators in the organisation will likely include the performance of barriers and occurrence of scenarios. “A lot of what we offer in high speed rail is about redundancy. Bowties provide a very visual insight in where barriers are redundant and where we don’t have backups. This combined with performance measurement will provide good insight in where to adjust our efforts when needed.”

“The business case is now mainly in the safety department. But the effort is from all of us, we want all managers to be on board.” This approach still requires good preparation in 2025, after which we will further expand this to the organisation in 2026. In the end managing risk is a shared responsibility in all the undertakings of an organisation.

What could Resilium do better?

After some consideration: “.. we needed support and tools and we have always been excellently taken care of.. perhaps Resilium may position itself more strongly as an independent party, because you have excellent capability that is not bound to a specific vendor.”

Please describe Resilium

Resilium helps companies model and manage risk; their experience with bowtie is very suitable for operational environments with socio-technical barriers. And lastly Resilium is a reliable party.