Speech by Minister Khaw Boon Wan at the 8th Joint Forum on Infrastructure Maintenance

Friends and Colleagues, 

1.     Four years ago, I took Mr Tan Gee Paw’s advice and launched this Joint Forum on Infrastructure Maintenance. At the inaugural forum, I remember I explained the purpose: first, to gather the collective expertise from diverse infrastructure sectors for cross learning, and secondly, to raise the profile of the engineering profession. Many developed countries in the world have gone through a stage in our generation where a lot of the students wanting to do engineering. But as the economy took off and other sectors became more profitable, engineering lost its lustre. This is not unique to Singapore. In fact, I remembered that there was a paper done by some Harvard professor who tried to correlate GDP growth with interest in engineering. As a country becomes richer, engineering interest is lost.  

2.     Over several editions of the Joint Forum, I welcomed the participation of public sector engineers from the aviation, land transport, military and public utilities, as well as private sector engineers from the transport equipment manufacturers, like Thales, Bombardier, Siemens and Alstom. I attended the Joint Forums and listened carefully to the presentations. They gave me ideas on how we could improve our systems, as we worked to transform the railway sector. 

Transformation of Rail Sector
 
3.     It has been an eventful four years. We went through two years of literally “firefighting”, as we struggled to rebuild public confidence. Followed by two years of pain and battle scars have allowed us to consolidate and stabilise our operations. In the past two years, we have begun to institute policies and processes to ensure sustainable operations going forward. The pursuit of excellence is a continuous process, obviously, with no endpoint. Nevertheless, the achievement, two months ago, of our reliability target of one million MKBF was a good outcome which LTA, SBST, SMRT and our rail workers and OEM partners can all be very proud of. Our intense efforts have delivered results, although much work still lies ahead. 

4.     To sustain the reliability outcome, all our stakeholders must embed within their corporate culture supportive values and instincts. Corporate culture takes time to build and needs constant nurturing. Corporate culture starts from the top and must permeate throughout the corporation. This is work in progress but over the past four years, I’m pleased to observe some significant positive shifts. 

a.     First, a clear focus on cost efficiency and continuous improvement. A reliable rail service requires substantial investments, both in capital expenditure for timely renewal of ageing assets, and in operating expenditure to fund operations and maintenance (O&M) adequately. We have experienced under-investment in O&M in our recent past history when some operators got distracted. We have corrected this but going forward, we may get distracted again if we are not careful, or we may even go over-board and “gold-plate” O&M at the expense of commuters who at the end of the day have to fund the operation. Finding the right balance requires sound judgement. Regular benchmarking against foreign operators will provide a useful reality check. Meanwhile, I commend the operators’ various cost saving initiatives and investments in predictive maintenance. LTA will be profiling some aspects of the predictive maintenance capability that it is developing in collaboration with Siemens and ST Engineering at the upcoming Intelligent Transport Systems World Congress, which we are hosting in Singapore. In fact, the development in predictive maintenance is something I’ve been very happy to watch. Four years ago, I was not involved in railways and all that but have been sort of following the development of the maintenance into the realm of predictive engineering and I was surprised four years ago when I first came here, to see the lack of investments in this area. At first, I thought it was a Singapore phenomenon. But as I talked to foreign operators and read up on rail journals, I was surprised to see the sector lagging behind other sectors in predictive maintenance when the whole development of sensors and the dropping in prices and big data analysis are now enabling engineers to be able to do maintenance in a much smarter way. It’s not just simply throwing resources, money or manpower into engineering department or maintenance department but how do you optimise without going overboard so that the operations can be run at an affordable level. Affordable - meaning from the commuters’ point of view. If you “gold-plate” the operations, it’s easy to say, alright, trains have a shelf life of 30 years, we can wait until 30 years and replace them with tons of problems in the last 5 years or we can go overboard and say, let’s replace the trains at mid-life, 15 years. The train operators will be very happy selling the trains to you. But it will come at a very high cost. Now, how do you optimise maintenance so that you do not undermine reliability too drastically while keeping costs affordable at the same time? That requires sound judgement.

b.     Second, a strong determination to build local capabilities. A reliable rail service requires strong local O&M capabilities. We are now much better off than four years ago, but we need to expand on it, to keep up with technological progress and as our network grows. That is why two weeks ago, I visited the local repair facility by ST Engineering for electronic cards. I encouraged them to do more, not just servicing our own rail network but also the networks in the region. That was also why we supported Thales to set up the signalling simulation facility here in Singapore. It has been invaluable to the NSEWL’s resignalling project. I am happy to see Thales using the facility for training their regional clients. Each time I visited the Thales facility, I reminded them that “please use this facility not just for Singapore, you have regional clientele.” Because they would need to train or to be made aware of what’s possible with the signalling software. Open it up for your clients in Hong Kong, in wherever. Thailand, they can fly in, stay a few days, work on the simulation centres and then they bring back the expertise to their own country. Along similar lines, I am pleased to announce that Siemens and Alstom will also be setting up their respective signalling simulation centres for the Downtown Line and Thomson-East Coast Line in Singapore. Local core engineering capabilities, not just in land transport, is something that we always encourage because at the end of the day, we cannot have the whole country running on financial services. Even if you want to have technological start-ups, it requires engineering – real serious skills of building up those capabilities. Otherwise, who will design all the algorithms that runs Google and so on and so forth. Getting our students to be interested in technology, science and engineering is a constant struggle but very important undertaking. If you don’t have good core, local capabilities on engineering and science and tech in Singapore, I think we are missing out something. 

c.     Third, there must always be an instinct to contribute to the global rail industry, to want to contribute to the global rail industry. We are a significant buyer of trains and our demand for trains is growing rapidly as we expand the network. We already have a strong manufacturing and engineering base in Singapore. While we do not aim to design and build trains, we must have the ambition to want to contribute to the growing rail industry, at least in the region. For example, we could design and build important components used by trains. Mr Seah Moon Ming told me that some of the electronics used in the Taipei Metro came from ST Electronics. My former counterpart Thai Transport Minister also told me last year that the platform screen doors used in the Bangkok Metro came from Singapore, because they were the best. Our turnaround experience in rail reliability is another opportunity. Most trains are designed and built using the British or European Standards. For Operations and Maintenance, the standards are less established. We could tap on our O&M turnaround experience to establish the Singapore Rail O&M Standards. This is the background to the recent announcement a few days ago, by Enterprise Singapore to launch a Technical Committee on Railway Systems. They are working with the rail operators to formulate the Singapore Rail O&M Standards to raise the reliability, safety and productivity of railway systems, as well as building the capabilities and expertise of our local enterprises to service the railway sector in Singapore and potentially the region. This will profile Singapore rail engineering and insert ourselves into the global rail industry in a meaningful way. My main message is this -The Singapore market is always too small, compared with the regional or global market. We need to service our local needs, but you can achieve greater excellence if you are able to ride on this to serve a larger catchment, minimally the region. 

That was the same attitude we take for healthcare or hospital services because when we were planning the children’s hospital, we knew the birth rate had been dropping. We are getting less and less babies and I was talking about at the peak when we were having 65,000 babies. Today, 35,000. So it’s almost half. And the good thing is that because we saw the need for hospital beds – for the hospitalisation of sick babies have been coming down over the years. That’s why there was this great debate at that time about whether we should still build a children’s hospital. Will there be enough patients to fill the children’s hospital? Because the need for the number of beds has been shrinking due to the shrinking population base. Less babies, less children but at the same time, because of improvement in health, nutrition and healthcare, the (number of) sick babies is shrinking even more, but at the same time, there will still be some very sick patients, which requires world class skills at the sub-specialist level. Now medical practice at the end of the day is about practice, because if you don’t have enough patients to hone your skills, how do you achieve world-class standards? You require a bigger base. And therefore, that is why it is always so important that we talk about healthcare not just for Singaporeans. 

While it is primarily to serve Singaporeans’ needs, you must base your expertise on a much larger catchment, minimally the region and that’s why we serve patients from Indonesia, Malaysia, and now increasingly further afield from China, sometimes Europe and America. That way, you have a much better base, to sharpen your skills and to achieve world-class standards. It’s the same thing with engineering and railway engineering.

d.     Fourth and most importantly, an unambiguous One Transport culture. One team. Whether it is MOT, LTA, SMRT, SBST or the OEMs, we all share a common goal of delivering a reliable, safe and affordable rail service. We play different roles, we wear different uniforms, we report to different employers, but our common customer is the commuter. It was the One Transport culture which fixed the rail reliability problem. And the same One Transport culture will ensure that our rail service will remain the pride of Singaporeans. However, be mindful of the risks of regulatory capture. By all things, good things are good. But you can go overboard even with good things. A little bit like the e-scooter’s problem. I was having a chit chat with Mr Tan Gee Paw just now. While e-scooter is good, e-scooter can also be a menace which we are now trying to think about how we can benefit from the advantages of having e-scooter, eg. providing local connectivity and at the same time, ensuring safety for all, to both the pedestrians and to non-users. A regulator working closely with the industry to advance consumer welfare is of course good. But a regulator getting too comfortable with the industry, neglecting consumer welfare, will be crossing a red-line. The recent Boeing 737 Max incidents from the aviation sector are useful reminders. 

Conclusion 

5.     In conclusion, we have come some way together since the Joint Forum was set up four years ago. We have built an informal community to share best practices and to learn from one another. I hope that this engineering community will stay connected, and continue to tap on one another’s expertise and experience as we go forward. 

6.     Finally, I would like to convey my deepest appreciation for Mr Tan Gee Paw. He stepped forward without any hesitation when I asked him four years ago to help us turn around the rail service. He gave us very good advice, drawn from decades of engineering expertise. He is a water engineer, and he reminded me many times, but picked up rail engineering quickly to be useful to us. We have had many useful discussions. I benefited from his thinking out of the box, and always warning me, giving me alerts about potential problems. They are very useful chit chats but always worry me and gave me sleepless nights, because sometimes what he said would happen a few weeks later. Today, I was looking at the typhoon problem in Tokyo and the dramatic picture of the shinkansen train half submerged under the flooded water. He had told me about this - that the tunnel if flooded, there would be nowhere to go. Can you imagine passengers inside the train and the tunnel flooded? How are you going to rescue the passengers? With rising water levels, many lives will be lost. I remember that very scary conversation. About three weeks later, the Bishan flooding happened! Not to that dramatic extent, fortunately, but it was something, so I said better to take a look at flooding. But before we could act, Bishan was flooded and we were grilled in Parliament for many uncomfortable hours. I don’t want to tell you about some of the alerts he gave me about potential disasters which fortunately we were able to pre-empt and avoid. 

7.     Besides the Joint Forum, Mr Tan also chairs the Rail Excellence Advisory Panel (REAP). We  assembled a group of very good global metro operators whom we hand-picked. They came in their personal capacity. As experts in the metro field, sharing with us very generously, because we are really not rivals or competitors. Good engineers have certain characteristics. They like to share, they are generous to share their experience and expertise, so that the others can benefit and avoid paying tuition fees unnecessarily. These metro operators in our panel, under the chairmanship of Mr Tan. Mr Tan Gee Paw grilled them and forced them to open up. Of course, they are attitudinally most happy to share, but in order to get the gems, the real details, first you require a chairman who knows what he’s talking about. Secondly, someone who is senior enough to gain the trust and respect of the metro operators who literally opened up to say things they would otherwise be very hesitant to say in public, whether at home or in Singapore. So we kept it closed door, and respected privacy, but along the way we learned deeply about the problems we may face and which we were able to avoid, pre-empt and eliminate. 

8.     With Mr Tan helping me to chair this, and as a result of that, plus a lot of efforts we all put in to fixing this problem. Today’s discussion versus four years ago is very chalk and cheese. Four years ago, we went into the meeting really stressed and a bit shameful because our performance level was so hopeless compared to what they had been able to achieve. But now, we are equal to the best, and in fact, we have surpassed some of their performance. But let us not be arrogant. What happened in the past could easily happen again, once our eyes are not on the ball. Therefore, my main message really is that yes, we have crossed a proud milestone, but really, achieving reliability in railway is a continuous marathon. There is no end point. The moment you decide that ‘I’ve arrived’, that’s the end of it, the end will happen very quickly within months, if not within a couple of years. Therefore, our job is a difficult one. People only remember when we fumble. When we are doing well and able to bring people from A to B seamlessly, smoothly, very few commuters will come forward and say thank you for doing a good job. But to be fair to Singaporeans, there are people who recognise me will come forward and say thank you for doing a good job when I take the train. I say ‘thank you very much, we need your support’. It’s not just rails, it’s also the bus captains who get up early in the morning. Some of them stay in JB and get up as early as 4, 5am. They come all the way and run a good bus service which we can all be proud of. Singaporeans travel, they know what’s the level of public transport elsewhere and while what we have in Singapore is not perfect, (but) frankly speaking, it’s not bad. So thank you very much.