Case Study: Australian Railway Leader achieves 80% labor cost reduction and passes safety audits with Avetta

Australian Railway Leader Reduces Labor Costs by 80% And Easily Passes Safety Audits After Partnering with Avetta

Australian Railway Leader, a metropolitan passenger rail network operating hundreds of train sets and carrying more than 415,000 passengers each weekday, was struggling with a paper-based, labor‑intensive contractor prequalification process and serious compliance gaps (a Federal Safety Commissioner audit scored 1/100). Managing roughly 3,500 contractors overwhelmed internal teams and created redundancy and safety risk, so the organization selected Avetta’s cloud-based supply chain risk management platform in 2014 to modernize prequalification, compliance and contractor oversight.

Avetta implemented its SaaS solution and partnered on supplier outreach to centralize contractor data, qualification and auditing. The result: Avetta qualified and consolidated the contractor base, cut prequalification effort from about 80 to 10 hours per week, reduced labor costs by 80% (one person doing work that previously required six full‑time employees), and helped the rail leader improve its audit score to 99/100, while increasing responsiveness, reducing redundancy and providing reporting and dashboards for ongoing risk management.