When Hasting’s based company Farmers Transport couldn’t find an off-the-shelf product to digitise its growing operation, it developed an IT management system in house, the first of its’ type in New Zealand.
According to The Herald, Farmers Transport is the North Island largest privately owned rural transport business, with a fleet of more than 100 trucks and ten operating bases in the East Coast and Central North Island with operations also extending into the South Island.
To better manage the fleet, The Herald says that Farmers Transport devised FROST (Famers rural operating system for transport) which harnesses GPS, radio and mobile communications platforms to capture every detail of a job as it progresses, enabling better use of resources and more accurate calculation of service delivery costs.
“It helps us to manage our trucking capacity and job flows with dispatching trucks to jobs,” says Farmers Transport chief executive officer Jason Roebuck.
“We’ve put in-cab equipment into our trucks that receives job information remotely, and those jobs can be updated in real time.
“If a truck is despatched to pick up 500 lambs but gets to the property and there are only 450 lambs, then that gets updated at the completion of loading.
“It allows us to to try to optimise our loading capabilities in a day – that truck can then potentially call in somewhere else to top up that load space.
According to The Herald customers are able to make savings on small jobs be pre-planned load-sharing. FROST’s capacity to deliver up-to-the-minute information on the movement of livestock can be tailored for anyone with a vested interest, from farmers and meat companies, to banks and registered security holders.
Farmers Transport says some New Zealand meat companies have jumped at the chance to take advantage of this logistics capability. They say the just-in-time delivery of livestock to plants across regions utilising partner transport companies is a model that represents the most efficient use of national livestock transport assets.
Roebuck is not aware of any other rural transport operator with a system such as FROST which links dispatch, trucks, third-party hardware and third party operating systems.
“For us its very important to be an innovator and a market leader.”
