 porterbrook the rolling stock asset management company welcomed suppliers customers and other stakeholders from across britain s railway at its second annual supplier conference in derby on 22 may 2019 the conference was attended by more than 200 delegates from over 100 companies debate focused on the biggest challenges and opportunities facing today s railway as it gears up for increasing demand over the coming decades and as it invests and innovates to improve passenger satisfaction and service reliability mary grant porterbrook ceo said our entire industry is focused on delivering a better more reliable service for all our customers that comes with more investment more innovation and more creativity it also comes with people and partnerships without our people without their skills we cannot deliver on our mission at the same time collaboration is key to our success we must work across our entire supply chain and with all our customers to deliver a better railway be that by harnessing technological know how and ip from britain s world class universities developing low carbon solutions with manufacturers or sharing data and data analytics with train operators ultimately this all has to be for the benefit of our end customers the paying public passengers deserve a quality reliable service that s fit for the 21st century let s work together to deliver that speakers from the department for business energy and industrial strategy beis the department for transport dft the national skills academy for rail northern rail unipart and other organisations debated the need to plug the gap in rail skills with an estimated 100 000 vacancies opening up over the next ten years speakers and delegates also discussed the importance of delivering a reliable service for passengers high quality trains that run on time that meet capacity demand that can keep passengers connected the need to promote well resourced well conceived apprenticeships how to help smes to develop their own apprenticeship programmes boosting diversity including more female participation in the railway s workforce increasing sme participation in the railway supply chain including dft s target to increase its own sme spend from 22% to 33% of overall budget by 2022 harnessing new technologies such as big data and digitalisation to facilitate predictive maintenance reduce downtime and improve reliability anvesh prasad head of procurement at porterbrook said at porterbrook we are only as strong as our supply chain we already work with many smes helping to sustain thousands of jobs working closely with our partners means we can implement better and faster solutions for our customers in turn helping them to deliver a better more reliable service to passengers 