Mesea partners with dss+ to deploy its safety programme

Developing safety leadership capabilities and a risk awareness culture has helped Mesea, a new entrant in the high-speed rail maintenance industry, to drastically improve safety performance.

 VILLOGNON, France, April 12, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Since 2017, Mesea has been the first private operator in charge of maintenance and operation of the high-speed train line infrastructure between Tours and Bordeaux. In 2018, Mesea asked for dss+ support to deploy a safety policy targeting high performance, aiming at understanding and eradicating High Potential (HiPo) events. dss+ assessed, elaborated and proposed a strategic tailor-made action plan with 2 focus areas: risks awareness and safety leadership development for managers and all employees. This resulted in a 60% reduction of high-potential incidents and a decreasing of total recordable injuries (LTRI) by 10 over a 3-year period.

Mesea partnered with dss+ to understand the root cause of the HiPo incidents, which are classed as 'near misses' whereby the incident could have resulted in serious injury or even fatality. The challenge Mesea faced had 3 complications : the railway maintenance workforce  was distributed over a large territory, work  was  mainly carried out at night, and in all weather conditions. dss+ used their expertise to analyse   dangerous situations, develop a risk profile and zero-incident action plan called 'All Preventers' which involved all leaders, managers, and the entire workforce.

Jean-Bruno Delrue, CEO of Mesea, said: "Mesea ensures that 20 million passengers travel safely along the +300km railway between Paris and Bordeaux. But we must also ensure the safety of our maintenance workforce who work in challenging conditions. We must mitigate the risks to avoid what could potentially be serious incidents, but we knew we couldn't do this alone. dss⁺ assessed our safety culture and from that we worked together to implement the necessary changes, where through training and coaching we have transformed our safety culture. Results speak for themselves. We are all feeling optimistic that our ambitious zero-incident target can and will be reached."     

dss+ work with organisations around the world to help them to recognise, evaluate, and mitigate their risks so that they can work safer, smarter and with purpose. Mathieu Leduc, EMEA Director of Industries & Practices at dss⁺ explains: "Transforming safety culture is not just about enforcing rules and procedures or removing hazards. It must start with the people, changing attitudes, empowering people and taking ownership for their own actions and the actions of others. That's exactly what we focused on with the 'All Preventers' programme. By enhancing the capabilities of everyone you can increase both risk management capabilities as well as risk awareness and mitigation skills of all staff. Through a risk-aware, engaged culture you can transform safety and ultimately save lives."

Read and watch the video about the success of this project: https://www.consultdss.com/content-hub/mesea-zero-incident-safety-transformation-programme/

Mesea continues to work with dss⁺ to sustain strong safety performance in the long run and keep anticipating emerging risks to maintain the downward trajectory towards their zero-incident target.  

About Mesea 

Mesea, a Vinci Concessions and Systra subsidiary is the company in charge of the maintenance and operation of the high-speed train line infrastructure between Tours and Bordeaux. After opening the line, Mesea ensured the safety of more than 95  million of passengers by maintaining and operating more than 300km of the rail infrastructure. . Maintenance operations are very diverse, where the main activity happens at night, in all weather conditions and all year long.

Safety, performance, and accountability are the core values of the company. In the first operating year, Mesea executive committee launched an ambitious program to reach zero incident.

For further information on Mesea  please visit https://www.mesea.fr/ 

About dss⁺

dss⁺ is a leading international provider of operations management consulting services with a purpose of saving lives and creating a sustainable future. dss⁺ enables companies to build organisational and human capabilities, manage risk, improve operations, achieve sustainability goals, and operate more responsibly.  

For further information on dss⁺ please visit https://www.consultdss.com/

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