Rohan Schuppan, Managing Director

Rohan Schuppan has extensive experience in both management and strategic consulting in the rail sector and other industries. After commencing his career in the oil industry, Rohan worked for one of the world’s leading strategy consulting firms in Australia and overseas before focussing on the rail sector as the Operational Planning manager of Citytrain, a division of QR. In this position, one of Rohan’s responsibilities was the design and implementation of a complete re-build of the metropolitan timetable. This timetable has delivered significant measurable operational improvements to the organisation.

Following this, Rohan founded Systemwide in 1998 and since then has been responsible for the completion of numerous high-level strategic and operational feasibility studies for government agencies and corporations in the rail sector throughout Australia. His work focuses on, but is not limited to, infrastructure capacity analysis and strategic operating plans for complex rail systems, particularly metropolitan networks.

Rohan is adept at guiding strategy by understanding the important influence of rail operations on the strategic success of a railway. This relationship is critical to the success of a railway as it strongly affects the customer experience, the capital investment and the on-going cost of operation.

Huw Hawkins, Associate Director

Huw’s role at Systemwide sees him predominantly overseeing and managing the analysis and delivery of consultancy projects. Having cut his teeth conducting detailed analysis on Melbourne’s network, he now manages a range of detailed and high-level strategic analyses around Australia.

His current projects include defining the future rail operational requirements of the Brisbane metropolitan network, assistance with developing strategic operating plans for the new metropolitan operator in Melbourne, assessment of the implications of the introduction of ETCS into the RailCorp network in Sydney and creating a rail operating plan for the coalfields of Central Queensland.

Elton Gani, Senior Consultant

Elton has worked on an extensive range of studies covering the Melbourne, Brisbane and Sydney passenger system as well as the Queensland's coal freight network. His most notable project looks at developing Brisbane's long term rail strategy, its requirements and impacts on passenger amenity through to 2051. As part of the Systemwide team, Elton is mainly responsible for leading the project analysis and assisting in management of project deliverables.

Mike Backhouse, Senior Consultant

Mike is a self-motivated and enthusiastic Systems Engineer with nine years experience of defining and implementing rail systems modelling analysis.

Mike has recently relocated to Australia, bringing to Systemwide his extensive experience in rail capacity modelling, timetable and infrastructure assessment and operational analysis. In the past three years as a Systems Modelling Specialist for Network Rail (UK), Mike has been involved in a wide range of analyses, providing key sponsors with the confidence to make multi-million pound investments throughout the UK.

Brooke Markewicz, Consultant

Brooke has worked on a broad range of network capacity and timetabling projects since joining Systemwide in 2005. Her project experience includes freight capacity analysis, strategic service planning and detailed timetable simulation modelling. A recent project of Brooke’s was to develop future service plans and assess these plans in RailSys for a consortium bidding to operate the Melbourne metropolitan network.

Matt Pattison, Consultant

Matt has worked on a range of studies on the Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane rail networks. His experience ranges from capacity analysis of lines, turnbacks and signalling systems (including ERTMS/ETCS type systems) to train load prediction and detailed simulation of inner city rail capacity. His transport consulting capabilities are complemented by his software design and development expertise, where he is a senior developer of Systemwide’s Train Load Predictor, a software product which estimates future passenger loadings on trains.

David Glover, Consultant

Bachelor of Science with Honours University of Melbourne, Australia

Whilst at Systemwide, David has analysed various complex rail planning and operational problems throughout Australia at both strategic and detailed modelling levels.

David has been instrumental in defining the future rail operational requirements of the Brisbane metropolitan network as part of the largest planned recent rail infrastructure project in Brisbane — the Cross River Rail project. He also built an extensive model to forecast performance and resource requirements for the Melbourne metropolitan network as part of MTM’s successful bid for the franchise.

In addition to passenger operations, David has undertaken detailed freight analysis to investigate the benefits of proposed infrastructure upgrades to networks in the Pilbara region of Western Australia, as well as the future capability of the Brisbane metropolitan network to meet forecast freight growth.

David’s diverse background in discrete mathematics and the physical sciences provides him with a solid base for complex systems analysis and has been invaluable in his work with Systemwide.

Dr Jennifer Barrett, Consultant

Jennifer has experience in a range of projects involving both passenger and freight rail systems. She has conducted capacity analysis for infrastructure planning purposes and developed a train performance model from the ground up for a heavy-haul railway in Queensland. She has also created timetables and employed dynamic simulations to validate the design for a new underground metro system. Using her deep mathematical capabilities, Jennifer has developed a new technique to determine optimal balise placement for an ETCS-based signalling system in Sydney.

Jennifer holds a PhD degree in applied mathematics and she is able to apply a strong research background to analysing rail networks and extracting meaningful information from large volumes of data, presenting insights in a clear and comprehensible format.

Nicholas Cotsell, Consultant

Nicholas has recently joined Systemwide following his 5 years working as a Service Designer for Yarra Trams, including a period as the Senior Service Design Manager. While there he constructed timetables and rosters for many areas of the network, the most notable being a redesign of the St. Kilda Rd timetable – the spine of Melbourne’s light-rail network – which resulted in immediate, measurable performance improvements. Since joining Systemwide Nicholas has utilised the strong planning and timetabling skills he developed during this period to provide advice to MTM on the operation of Melbourne’s rail network, at both a strategic and a timetable level.

Robert Williamson, Consultant

Since joining Systemwide, Robert has worked on a range of projects on the Sydney, Melbourne and Central Queensland rail networks. These included analysis of the potential impacts and benefits of implementing a new communication based signalling system in Sydney’s metropolitan network and the optimisation of coal services to improve network capacity in the Central Queensland area. Here Robert developed a sequencing approach to improve the planned operations of the Goonyella Coal Network to minimise overall cycle time. The outcomes of the work validated the feasibility of QR Network's infrastructure and operations plans. Robert has an Honours degree in Mechanical Engineering.

Matthew Steel, Consultant

Since joining Systemwide, Matthew has worked on developing a crewing and depot strategy for a coal railway in Queensland and validating a 2016 rail operating plan for Adelaide including forecasting future passenger loadings. More recently, Matthew has designed a parametric model to assist the strategic planning of rail depot locations for a mining company.

Matthew's programming and operations research background augments his consulting skills, providing him with novel tools and techniques to perform planning and network analysis.

Minh Vuong, C# Programmer

Minh is one of the key developers of Systemwide’s proprietary software, Train Load Predictor. This software allows rapid reporting on a number of key timetable performance indicators for proposed and potential future timetables, including a prediction of future passenger loads on individual services. These assist in providing a sound understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of a service plan or proposed timetable, which is critical for railway network planning and to ensure customer expectations are upheld. With his background in information technology and computer science, Minh has been focused on enriching software features and improving software performance. This work has included data analysis, scientific algorithm implementation and implementation of usability improvements for the graphical interface.