CSAMS

04 April 2021
Image of railway tracks.
The CSAMS (Civil Structures Asset Management System), part of Network Rail's ORBIS data improvement program, covers the consolidation of the existing structures asset information systems into a single Ellipse EAMS.

The nineteen legacy systems have evolved over many years and include Access, Oracle and SQL Server databases, Excel spreadsheets and bespoke RDM systems, and to complicate matters further, many of the systems duplicate components of others, often imperfectly, creating multiple versions of the truth. The creation of a single accurate data source is part of the overarching aim of the CSAMS project but completion of the migration to schedule has required careful prioritisation of data improvement work.

Strategic Consulting’s team worked closely with both the ETL specialists tasked with writing the migration code and the Ellipse design team from AMT Sybex to specify the migration in a relational database capable of mapping every source field to every target field with all the necessary data quality rules and extraction logic.

Benefits

The CSAMS project will meet Network Rail’s regulatory commitments to retire and replace the exiting asset information systems and address outstanding data quality issues across the entire civil structures portfolio. The Migration Specification, developed by Strategic Consulting to facilitate the transition, will continue to provide a robust and auditable record of how the migration was achieved and a platform from which further data improvement work can be undertaken.