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Full steam ahead for Advisian rail division

Company News Friday, April 8, 2016: WorleyParsons

Advisian, the advisory business line of WorleyParsons, is rapidly becoming a leading provider of rail advisory and engineering services in Africa, offering independent management and strategic advisory services for the railway sector.  Advisian’s rail practice deals primarily in resource-based rail, focusing on freight and bulk transport.  The company is currently involved in a number of rail projects in sub-Saharan Africa that are in various front-end planning stages. 

Advisian’s Sub Sahara Africa Managing Principal for Transport Consulting, John Marshall, says that rail transport is increasingly becoming the option of choice in many African countries, where poor infrastructure and road systems hinder the capacity of contractors to deliver goods and services.  “The challenge in sub-Saharan Africa is that there is simply insufficient infrastructure, and this is why rail is more frequently being considered as a feasible means of transport,” says Marshall.  “Although road transport may be cheaper in the short term, in many cases rail is the more viable option over the long run.”  

Advisian is able to provide an integrated service capability for the rail sector including feasibility studies, project management, engineering support and EPCM for new rail corridors, renewal of colonial railways, complex urban rail and integrated rail systems, as well as related services.

“We are high level technical advisors to our customers,” says Marshall.  “We investigate the methods, quantify the methods, and develop it through concept, pre-feasibility and feasibility stages,” explains Marshall. Coupled with technical and deep domain expertise accessed through the broader WorleyParsons group, the company’s consultants can add value at all stages of the project life cycle, enabling customers to drive capital productivity, minimise operational expenditure and increase operating margins through environmental optimisation.

“We provide a completely seamless process so that the Advisian team who works on a project in the early feasibility stages can become key players when the project moves into the execution phase,” says Marshall.  “By being involved in the initial phases we generate and develop a large amount of information and understanding that puts our customers in a stronger position when moving into each of the following phases,” he explains. 

Advisian’s Regional Executive Manager, Adam Boughton, says, “This unique ‘line of sight’, combined with our support services complement including Environmental & Social, Geotechnical, Master Planning, Energy Advisory, and Ports and Martine Terminals provides a truly integrated offering. Further, having the ability to take a project from inception right through to completion is what Advisian believes places us ahead of our competitors and makes the group a strong driver of growth in our Africa operations.”

With over 200 personnel with experience in the railway sector, Advisian assists customers in Africa and throughout the world with a full complement of services.  These include transport planning, passenger, freight and heavy haul management and operations, integrated rail engineering and design and project and contract management. 

Advisian operates as an independent business advisory line within WorleyParsons and was officially launched globally, including in the sub-Saharan African region, in July last year.  It combines high level strategic management advisory services with strong engineering and technical expertise to create an advisory service able to address the needs of customers at every point in the project development cycle.  All the skills residing in Advisian worldwide are available to customers in Africa allowing for an enormous breadth of expertise to go beyond performance optimisation to mitigating risk and identifying opportunities across customers’ entire end-to-end business value chain.