Hitachi Rail Europe awards £Multi-million IT contract to Capgemini to support its UK manufacturing and maintenance facilities

Hitachi Rail Europe has awarded Capgemini UK plc a multi-million pound contract to provide the full spectrum of IT support for its new rail manufacturing facility, that is currently under construction at a greenfield site in Newton Aycliffe, County Durham, as well as its maintenance facilities. The new sites, which include Hitachi’s first train factory in Europe, are considered essential following major contract successes by the company, including the contract for the Intercity Express Programme to supply and maintain 866 railcars for the East Coast and Great Western Main Lines.

Headquartered in London, Hitachi Rail Europe manufactures and maintains the high-speed trains to Kent running on the HS1 line. Capgemini UK plc is part of the Capgemini Group, one of the world’s foremost providers of consulting, technology and outsourcing services.

The Capgemini solution for Hitachi Rail Europe is based on SAP software and will be deployed at a number of the company’s rail maintenance facilities in the UK in addition to the factory at Newton Aycliffe. A unique feature of Capgemini’s proposal, which won against competing bids from a number of other multinational IT vendors, was its integration of manufacturing with maintenance, reflecting the importance which Hitachi Rail Europe attaches to providing a comprehensive long-term service to its customers.

Nobuhiro Otsuka, Head of IT, Hitachi Rail Europe, said: ‘Capgemini has already demonstrated its ability to work effectively with us and to understand our complex and challenging business environment. With the IT solution so crucial to our ongoing success, we are looking forward to working closely with the team at Capgemini.

Other important factors in Hitachi Rail Europe’s choice included Capgemini’s proven expertise in SAP solutions, its ability to map Hitachi’s business requirements to SAP capabilities and to configure the software to match business processes, and its convincing evidence that the proposed SAP solution offered a lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).

Implementation of the new IT systems begins immediately in a three-phase programme. Phase 1, comprising high-level design, scoping, proof of concept & initial operating capability for maintenance is planned for completion in July 2014. Phase 2 will provide the core operating capability for both UK manufacture and maintenance, with go-live in June 2015, with Phase 3 comprising additional functionality from 2016. Capgemini will deploy its Rightshore® worldwide delivery model throughout the programme to give HRE the optimum blend of resources, skills and cost.

Jason Jago, Capgemini Account Director for Hitachi Rail Europe, said: ‘We were able to prove to Hitachi that we can keep pace with their dynamism, their meticulous standards and their can-do outlook. Now that we have won the contract, we are really looking forward to helping rail manufacture come back to its original home in the North East of England.’

Hitachi Rail Europe continues to expand rapidly. Senior-level recruitment for the Newton Aycliffe plant has already started and the overall employee number will reach 730 by 2016, a high proportion of whom will be regular users of the new IT systems.