Today, McColl’s operates in three principal markets: the farm milk collection service, transporting milk between factories, and transporting chemicals—and it has seen business increase significantly in each area. Alongside this rationalisation, the company has implemented a business improvement programme based on locking all operational activities and events into defined business systems—a concept it calls being ‘systematically better’. At the heart of the newly tuned internal administration lies a specialist transportation ERP system that had been in the company for 12 years but only used for its invoicing capability. This has been cleansed and populated with accurate data and is now being configured to manage the business administration faultlessly from end-to-end, from initial order entry, through truck scheduling and materials ordering to customer invoicing. Beyond this, great improvements have been achieved at the driver level. A $1.6 million investment in a GPS truck management system named McColl’s Co-Pilot is significantly improving operational efficiency as well as driver safety. Installed in every truck, the system monitors and measures all aspects of the equipment’s activity in real time. The control centre therefore records and monitors where the vehicles are, how they’re being driven, whether speeding or driving in a fuel efficient way and so on. “We can then reward drivers who are driving efficiently, and improve the driving skills of those who are not,” Thornton says. With a fleet of 200 prime movers and 500 tankers and trailers travelling around Australia and an annual fuel bill of between $14 million and $20 million, even a small percentage improvement in fuel efficiency significantly impacts the bottom line. “One of the big issues in Australia is managing driver fatigue and we have strict fatigue laws that govern this,” Thornton continues. “However they’re difficult to manage unless you put in some systematic way of doing it.” Most companies operate a paper management system using driver diaries that are filled out and checked retrospectively, but McColl’s is going to be the first in Australia to manage this also in real-time electronically. When the driver gets in the truck he punches in his pin number and it keeps track of him, reminding him when he should take a break, and
124 Transport & logistics