Alastair Forbes

Said the following about Adrian Whitecross Adrian Whitecross:

“Adrian, has over the past 9 months established a cross business forum looking at the management and alignment of our key resources as part of the consolidated planning process.

The process he has established draws on information gathered from all the IP Regions and Network Operation Routes which is then aggregated to form a national picture of requirements; this action is completed every period on a routine basis.

Once the consolidation process is completed, the national picture of demand is then presented back to the various information suppliers as as to a wider community including our key resource category owners (Resource suppliers); Engineering Access (Timetabling), National Supply Chain; Signalling Testers; Overhead Linesmen etc and our external supply chain partners.

Using this information Adrian has established a periodic meeting with key leading participants from the aforementioned business areas, that undertake a review the future key resource forecasts with the aim of working together to manage the over demands both in the short term through work re-alignment but looking towards the longer term strategic requirements.

It is to Adrian's credit that he has managed to secure the continued commitment and positive engagement from these key participants across Network Rail, and through working in a collaborative manner are able to address and resolve key points of resource over-demand a minimum of 6 months in advance and establish procurement strategies ie additional new Wagons for Christmas 2015 some 18 months in advance.

This approach has and will continue to save money by stopping abortive planning and development activities on projects that could not proceed due to resource availability or would have been canceled if additional resources could not be secured in a timely manner.“