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Business profile
SET has been active in R&D for more than 13 years and in the last five has developed a successful business
supporting electronic and electromechanical maintenance in heavy rail
Innovation at its core
With strong technical progress
and collaboration with industry
partners, SET’s patented
Wheelmotor, a radical new drive concept,
may soon be available to the market. An
innovative approach to traction control
that combines the ability to greatly
increase the drivetrain efficiency with the
need to reduce operating costs means that
it will bring benefits to the whole of the
UK Rail Industry.
A radical approach to maintenance
As well as design innovation, SET has
extended its thinking to repair services,
which have grown up alongside its R&D
activities. The result is an approach which
suggests improvements and performs cost
benefit analysis to produce appropriate
long-term solutions to maintenance and
repair issues.
Information Sharing
Building partnerships with customers
has been paramount to SET’s success
in its investigation, maintenance and
repair offerings. Some important but
often neglected aspects of getting to
the underlying causes of maintenance
problems are good communication, open
information sharing and mutual trust
among all parties involved, with the joint
aim of improving both SET’s service and
the reliability of the equipment entrusted
to it.
Working on this principle, SET finds
that open discussions between itself,
maintenance staff and engineers often
reveal critical information and history that
would otherwise be lost if the equipment
were simply sent away for routine repair
with a standard fault ticket attached.
Identifying failure patterns
Through careful logging and classification
of repairs, failure patterns in equipment
and sub-assemblies can be identified
and present opportunities for further
investigations. Carrying out these
investigations will generally lead to a
working solution and a reduction in both
direct and indirect costs. However, in
reality maintenance departments working
to a tight schedule may be concerned only
with doing what is immediately necessary
to keep a particular unit operational,
which may amount to nothing more than
simple component substitution until the
problem goes away - an unrewarding and
costly task, especially if the problem is
intermittent in nature.
Utilising various techniques such
as data-logging, statistical analysis and
physical modelling, SET works closely
with maintenance engineers to get to the
root cause of the problems observed. With
this approach, the company is able to help
eliminate intermittent and long-term
repeat faults in both revenue critical and
safety critical equipment. A further benefit
to this approach is the potential to prolong
the life of obsolete/obsolescent equipment.
Is this really a new approach
SET’s maintenance solutions are overseen
by the same staff responsible for the
development of its traction system,
meaning that any necessary changes
and upgrades to customers’ equipment
are subject to the same levels of rigour
regarding testing and certification as a
new product development. This is essential
where repair and modification is to be
carried out on safety-critical sub-systems,
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