'Job Well-Done'

Korea Rail Network Authority wins high mark for excellent work last year

Korea Rail Network Authority secured a high mark in the government evaluation of the state-run companies in the area of construction, management of installations and others by getting 79.8 points with 100 points being the highest level.
The rail authority has set railroad construction, management of installations and the development of the areas where railroad stations are located and nearby areas as its major business areas at a workshop attended by outside experts and its employees The rail authority has allocated 89.6 percent of its workforce to its core business areas, along with 99.8 percent of its budget, which is considered very well-done, especially with the budget turned over to the next fiscal year continued to be minimized, the evaluation said.
It also noted the rail authority's completion of ERP system, the systems for rail and electric car inspection and analysis and mid-to-long-term maintenance and repair plans and its implementation as an excellent achievement. The evaluation also lauded the rail authority's project to build a complex transfer facility and improving the approach and the nearby area of the Gwangmyung Railroad Station in Gwangmyung just outside Seoul to increase the revenue of the national treasury by setting up an affiliate company to run the facility. The income for the national treasury through the well-executed use of the asset of the national railroad increased 18.3 percent last year from the previous year, the evaluation noted.
For effective mobilization of national assets, the rail authority has also reorganized its operation into 6 headquarters, and 5 regional headquarters centered on project management bases in 2005, which was considered timely and well-planned. Last year, the rail authority merged the general railroad PM headquarters with the high-speed rail PN headquarters under the construction headquarters, which is considered an excellent move to avoid the redundant work and unify the rail construction management.
The evaluation also highly complimented the rail authority's effort to enter the new rail market as a professional railroad construction organization as witnessed in its selection as a model rail line constructor of the city-type magnetic railroad realization project, a futuristic high-tech transportation facility. The company plans to undertake the project as part of its effort to search for new growth areas in line with the realization of its vision as the professional railroad engineering entity with global competitive power in the age of Northeast Asia and commensurate with the purpose of its establishment.
In the homepage of the company on the Internet, it set up a corner for the application for new technologies and new construction engineering systems. The company announced the applications submitted on its homepage at a gathering and some of them were actually used in its projects with very good records, another excellent achievement of the rail authority. The company also collected those new technologies and construction engineering methods and put them into database and published some of the well-conceived applications in books, which has been called another mark on its string of excellent achievements.
But, despite such well-intentioned commendable achievements, the company's record on projects to introducing new technologies and reduce costs has been minimal at best only coming to 1.7 billion won last year, although some 89.4 billion won reductions in expenses by the company in 2006. The figure breaks down to 79.9 billion won in the area of construction technology application and 7.8 billion won in the project management. Accordingly, the authority should activate further the KR Technology Institute in the areas of research for the development of new rail construction technologies and the application of other research results in actual rail projects, the evaluation noted.
The rail authority has increased some 37.4 billion won in the national revenue by effectively utilizing idle national land attached to the rail authority last year, which is up by 5.7 billion won from the previous year.
However, the evaluation noted that the company could have done more in the area of raising income from land already being utilized as the income from the area only increased 36.4 percent compared to 48.6 percent rise in the area of new land utilization. nw

President Lee Sung-kwon of the Korea Rail Network Authority.