After Mackay Regional Council lost 50-years of fleet and plant experience with the departure of two key staff in 2015, Danielle Houston took it upon herself to ensure things kept running smoothly.
Houston’s dedication to improving the council’s fleet and plant procedures was recently honoured at the Local Buy Government Procurement and Fleet Conference, where she was named Fleet Manager of the Year in the Government Procurement and Fleet Professionals Awards.
intouch spoke with Houston about her role as MacKay Regional Council Procurement and Plant Administration.
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Please give us an overview of what your role at Mackay Regional Council involves.
As the Procurement and Plant Administration, my role is to provide support to the Manager. The duties involve preparing fleet budgets, tracking the locations of plant and equipment, reviewing fleet procedures and monitoring fuel usage across the council’s fleet.
How long have you been in your current role?
I’ve been at Mackay Regional Council for five years in this role. In the past 12 months I have assisted our Acting Manager to learn about fleet and assisted our Acting Fleet Coordinator and Workshop Supervisors with the knowledge that I gained from my mentors over the years to keep fleet operations both functional and moving in the right direction.
My role very quickly became more about fleet and I revelled with the fact that I had found my niche.
How large is the council fleet, and what does it include?
Council operates 1560 items of fleet. This includes graders, backhoes, truck and dogs, light trucks, utes, sedans, ATV’s, tractors, mowers, brush-cutters, blowers, hedgers, boats, generators, motorcycles, compactors, water tanks, fuel tanks and much more.
Council outsources a portion of its fleet servicing. The light fleet handbook servicing is completed by our service agents.
What innovations have you brought to the role?
In early 2015, the departure of two key staff members resulted in the loss of more than 50-years combined experience.
During the past twelve months I have continued to work on inputting accurate fleet information across all of council’s systems. This has been a two-year project and has ensured that all plant numbers in all systems lined up with operators names and programs. We have built a “smart form” that uses management approvals to amend all aspects of plant, with procurement and plant having the final approval for control measures. This achievement has made a major impact on preparing for 2016/17 budgets. With more accurate data coming from our finance systems, Managers and Directors can spend meaningful time on preparation of budgets, rather than chasing down correct fleet information.
More recently I have been working with governance to set up a user-friendly way for staff to report items as missing/unaccounted for. We will soon have a section within a governance “smart form” that can be utilised. This will then allow the fleet team to investigate and make a recommendation. It will then go on to be approved by management or the plant will be updated to the correct details as an outcome of the investigation.
What are the greatest challenges the council's fleet creates, and how are you managing them?
Keeping track of 1560 items over an area that is roughly 7622km2 is a challenge – we rely on the support of supervisors and coordinators of each program to accurately maintain our fleet.
Currently, the fleet team is looking at radio frequency identification (RFID) – a small GPS device that can be installed into our small fleet, trailers, snippers and generators etc. This will allows us to better track items and reduce the risk of misuse or items being unaccounted for. We currently have GPS devices in our light fleet and our trucks – this is now starting to be used across programs to reduce response times from job requests. We have also started to integrate the GPS tracking of this portion of fleet into other systems to allow staff to allocate jobs to a unit via the GPS. The capability of these technologies has the potential to really make some changes to operations across the council, and that is really exciting.
I have mostly enjoyed learning more about fleet management, the complexity of it. I am a data person: Get the data right and the rest will follow. That has been my main aim so far and we are really starting to see the rewards.
What is your response to receiving this award?
Being presented an award such as this has been overwhelming for me personally. I give thanks to my mentors for teaching what they did before departing our team in 2015. My contribution to fleet would not have been possible had it not been for the very supportive fleet team here at council, who have since taken me under their wing and taught me so much more. It has taken the entire team to get to this point – they have shown their support and appreciation for my efforts by nominating me for this award. I am grateful for that, as it has opened doors for me to be able to learn more about something I have really become passionate about.
The team have been working toward making fleet easier for future staff, making fleet transparent across all systems is still ongoing, and making slight changes to how we account plant financially.