OXplus CCO Richard van Dongen about our office in Canada

Given our presence and recent projects in the North American region, OXplus has made the strategic choice in 2019 to establish an OXplus Entity in Montreal, Canada. In this update OXplus’ Chief Commercial Officer Richard van Dongen tells us more about the importance of a presence in North America and his vision for the North American transportation market for the next 10 years.

“Several reasons for establishing an OXplus North American Entity are:

1. Presence for Customers;
   It’s important to show commitment to customers by being present and to be able to visit Customers and prospects on a regular base! You are more creditable from a customers perspective as they feel being serviced better than when you manage the account from a different time zone.

2. Market Focus and Business Development;
   If you want to be successful in growing your business in a region, it is recommended to have business development done from within the region, create focus and use your business contacts and network to get appointments.”

Regarding Market Focus, with already 2 Railways projects ongoing in North America, OXplus expects a significant growth of the business in the next 10 years. After a short market investigation we discovered the following:

• Roughly 80 Projects are identified in North America and are in an “Active” status (feasibility study, planned, proposed, under construction, …etc)
• 50 out of 80 are new Metro and LightRail projects and will be completed in the same timeframe
• 30 out of 80 are already in status “Under Construction”
• 20 out of these 30 are considered to be “New Lines”

With our extended experiences in Metro and LightRail projects across other regions of the World, this is a high potential growth market for OXplus, which we simply can’t ignore and are ready to grow our share in this North American region.

We are able to offer and implement Best Practices Solutions (COTS software for Railways, pre-defined Railways processes, pre-configured data structures, interfaces and user security profiles) as well as industry knowledge and Project Management skills.
Besides the ‘Greenfield’ projects, we should not forget the ‘Brownfield’ projects, where O&M contracts have to be renewed, which typically triggers new selection and implementations of Asset Management Solutions.

OXplus will launch a number of campaigns in the near future to get involved in a number of these new projects. Our offering is based on a Turnkey approach that can involve the following:

• Hardware and Infrastructure (Delivery and support On-premise or Cloud)
• Software licenses (Delivery, renewals and support)
• Implementation and configuration of a Metro / LightRail Solution
• A selection of 24 Best Practice Business Processes for Metro / LightRail
• Implementation of all integrations (ERP, DMS, GIS, SCADA, Mobile, PMS etc)
• Full support after Go-Live (1^st, 2^nd & 3^rd Line Support, including full Service Management)
• Full Training and or e-Learning Capabilities
• Overall Project- and/or Program Management

We are open to partnerships with Companies (like Operators, Maintainers, Manufacturers and Construction Companies) to get our experiences and best practices involved.

Interoperability and System Integrations are key for any Project and have become a daily activity for OXplus, which is not only a concern of the O&M (Operations & Maintenance) Company. This already starts in the D&B (Design & Build) phase of these Metro and LightRail projects. The way D&B and O&M can optimize their alignments through ‘handover’ of Asset information, Maintenance plans and Performance data, the more beneficial the start of O&M will be and the sooner Operational Excellence will be reached and contracts can generate revenue, instead of paying performance penalties.

OXplus supports its customers by providing and implementing solutions through an Agile new way of working. This should establish a culture within the customer’s organization that makes them Agile for the future as well. Change of business and circumstances (like COVID-19) should be much easier to deal with or to adapt and accordingly mitigate risks as soon as possible.