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intouch spoke to Rockhampton Regional Council Coordinator Fleet Services Michael Borg, who has 20 years experience managing fleet and plant. 

Michael, tell us about your role at Rockhampton Regional Council, and what sort of fleet and plant equipment you manage.

My responsibilities include the management of the plant and fleet asset of council. It’s about a $40 million asset replacement value. I’m responsible for the planning of asset renewal policies relating to the use of the asset, maintenance, and some of the safety obligations that evolve around the operation of plant.

In addition to that I’ve got two mechanical workshops that do most of the maintenance on that asset, as well as fabrication and manufacturing type work. The whole team is about 40 staff.

Generally, the first port of call for repairs is the council workshop. For more complicated repairs, we then refer back to appointed dealers or service agents.

We have landscape maintenance equipment: ride on mowers, tractors, slashers. Then we move into the trucks, which are probably the mainstay of the fleet, everything from the light trucks right up to heavy prime movers and semitrailers. Then we have a range of earthmoving equipment.

There’s a few odd things in between, landfill compactors, a mobile crushing plant. We have approximately 800 major plant and vehicle assets.

Our primary role is as a breakdown response team. If there’s a breakdown onsite, we attend and try and fix it and get it going. Apart from servicing, which would be the second biggest action.

How did you get started in fleet and plant?

I started with the Rockhampton council as a young graduate mechanical engineer about 25 years ago. At that time I had fleet services, but it was a different thing back then under departmental structures. I also did water and sewerage and electrical, and worked in all the areas of council. You couldn’t ask for a better grounding within council operations.

It was Rockhampton City Council back then. I know the ins and outs of what has been built and what hasn’t been built and what council does.

What caused you to settle on fleet as a career direction?

Ultimately it was through council restructures and change in management structures. The role become specialised within council – I had the opportunity to take that role on, and since then I’ve been specifically focused on fleet management within council.

How do you approach the challenge of getting the best lifecycle value out of your fleet and plant?

Essentially, even through the equipment has changed over time, it still has some basic, underlying principles of utilisation and the maintenance and repair ratio. Essentially, if we’re going to own a piece of equipment we must ensure we use it, and we must use it for the purpose it was designed for.

The most efficient thing is to have a machine go to work every day, work during the day, and then go to work tomorrow. If there are machines not being utilised, or we have machines that are continually breaking down, that should be the focus of our energies, to find out why and rectify problems operationally or in maintenance.

Fleet and plant technology, particularly light fleet, has come a long way. Do you see longer vehicle life-spans changing the fleet landscape?

Certainly in the light vehicle area. Light vehicles have moved from ownership lives of three and four years, now out to six and seven years and 150,000km, without any real sacrifice on having them available.

In the trucks and construction equipments there’s not such a dramatic change, we have seen some extension in lives, but not a doubling. It’s not the same dramatic increase in ownership lives that we’ve seen with light vehicles. I think it’s probably related to the fact that if they’re managed correctly and being utilised, they’re working hard. Light vehicles mostly aren’t working at heavy load conditions.

Of times past, councils may have had machines on standby, because they had the only machine in the area that could do that job, or there were emergent reasons for it, but cost has meant that you can’t continue to hold those things and not get any work out of them. This is coupled with the fact that there’s private contractors now that have more equipment available locally, if we need top-ups we just call upon them.

What are some of the most challenging aspects of your role?

The machines themselves, if operated correctly, behave. It tends to be more the operational conditions – either operators themselves not doing the correct thing, or the machine being asked to operate beyond what it was designed to do, and we have breakdowns. Certainly, the introduction of more technology on machines is a challenge, in that it makes it more difficult to repair and keep working.

Because we are in a regional location, the manufacturer support is not as good as it is in the major capital cities, so our challenge is that if we have machines with technology on them and that technology suffers a breakdown, it’s a little more difficult to fix it and get it back on the road.

As soon as you start to leave the major regional or capital city areas, and you’ve got a council with equipment that’s operating 200km from the nearest workshop and they have something that’s stopped because an electrical sensor has stopped that may have never been present before, it’s a lot more difficult to get those things going.

We’re somewhat sheltered from that because we’re a major regional centre, but we still have our difficulties because tough economic times have seen dealerships closing and shrinking their support base, so it’s just a lot harder to get support in some instances.

How do you juggle people’s expectations against the need to stay in the black?

Councils have significant pressures now from reduced funding. Our funding sources now from state and federal levels are under extreme pressure, and the local rate base can’t take any increases, so the council itself is struggling with reduced sources of income, which ultimately comes back to capital funding.

We’re needing to make some tough decisions about extending our ownership life of equipment, and operationally it’s sometimes difficult to tell construction teams that we can’t afford to renew their prime excavator or their digger, and that means that they may suffer some breakdowns.

Certainly we try to shield the high-risk plant from that extension in life, but sometimes the cake isn’t that big and everybody wants a piece of it.

Is there any new technology coming through that you are finding particularly useful?

What we’re finding is that there’s new technology that’s coming on board that assists us in diagnosing what’s wrong with the machine, for example telling us that a machine doesn’t need a service because the condition of the oil is good, and the transmission lube system is fine, so we don’t need to do a service at a prescribed interval, as history would say we did. That essentially is increasing our productive time.

There is a lot of other technology around GPS tracking, but it’s not really producing significant benefits in plant operation. Ultimately, a good plant operator and manager know where their machinery is and what it’s doing without big brother watching and telling them what it’s doing. There’s some technology that’s great and it’s making our lives a lot easier, and there is some technology that’s more of a nuisance than anything else.

Do you have any thoughts on what fleet and plants of the future will look like?

We haven’t seen, in the last 50 or 80 years, any change in the work that the plant has to do. An excavator will still have to dig holes, a tip truck will still have to cart dirt. I think the biggest change will be the types of technology in the fuels and the propulsion systems that makes the machines do the work.

They’ll certainly be more hybrid, whether that be electric or use other types of fuels, but ever since they were invented, an excavator that digs a hole still looks like an excavator, although the engines are cleaner and it’s got more electronics on it.