All road administrations responsible for management of a road network are faced with the same challenge every year – to assure winter users of a safe and reliable system. This is an essential and priority mission, which contributes directly to economic development by maintaining mobility and safety on the road network during passenger and freight transportation activities. The Ministère des Transports du Québec, in the past few years, has undertaken several performance improvement steps, by implementing ISO in operational units and prioritizing production and implementation of technological developments for constant improvement of its winter maintenance effectiveness. Based on the annual operating budget of around $180 million currently dedicated to this purpose, one of the new concerns of senior management at the Ministère des Transports du Québec is measuring the performance of the “Snow removal and de-icing” product and service delivered to users. Out of a concern for sending a clear message to all of the Department’s managers that this concern is a priority, a specific result was also formulated in the Department’s strategic plan and is one of the 18 results targeted for 2001-2004. The Ministère des Transports du Québec, in the past three years, has therefore embarked on a vast process of development and implementation of a winter maintenance performance indicator. This is the “Rate of compliance with winter maintenance requirements” performance indicator compiled for all contractors (nearly 400) who perform contracted maintenance of sections of the Québec road network on behalf of Transports Québec. A winter maintenance performance measurement tool has therefore been developed and implemented within all of operational units in Québec. This is an innovative, results-based management approach, which is intended to measure the performance achieved and improve the service offered to our clientele through the resulting analysis and the implementation of an improvement process. On the strength of the experience of the past three years, we have been able to fine-tune our winter performance measurement system and develop complementary tools allowing us to ensure the reliability of the data.
