The Manager of Fleet Management Services for Dubbo City Council, Steve Colliver keeps close contact with other councils in the vast Western Plains region of NSW. He believes sharing ideas and resources is invaluable in a widespread area like his.
What are some of the unique aspects of a fleet manager’s job in a large rural area like the Western Plains region?
With a population of some 42,000 people, Dubbo is the largest city in the area, so we’re pretty well resourced in terms of skills, and if we need to hire an item of plant or contract out a service, there are plenty of suppliers nearby.
But we’re on the edge of thinly populated area comprising 25% of NSW, so many of the smaller local authorities in the vast area surrounding us aren’t so fortunate. Consequently they often look to us in terms of sharing resources. It’s certainly not a one way street though, because we can make use of their resources as well.
We haven’t gone headlong into resource sharing yet, but we’ve experimented quite a bit with it and are certainly looking at developing it further.
For instance, if a smaller council some 300 km to our north suddenly has an urgent once-off need for skilled people, they might not have a suitable contractor locally, and the short duration of the job probably wouldn’t justify taking on permanent people. So we could contract a few of our skilled people out to them. In some cases we might contract out specific equipment to them as well.
Conversely, many rural councils don’t have huge workforces so if one or more of their people are not being deployed during a slack period it makes sense to deploy them elsewhere. So if we had the capacity to take those workers on for a while we would.
What are the advantages of a system like that?
Well, resource sharing has great advantages in a large outback area where skills are thin on the ground and where the volume of work can fluctuate in the smaller towns. It allows smaller councils a great deal of flexibility in terms of remaining sustainable because having the ability to tweak your workforce occasionally is very advantageous.
From our point of view, it has the potential for giving our people a refreshing opportunity to work on tasks they might not otherwise encounter in a city like Dubbo. And vice versa of course for those people who migrate to us for a while from outlying areas.
Apart from resource sharing, what are your challenges in Dubbo itself?
Well, although Dubbo is a city, it has far-flung boundaries into rural areas, which means vehicles and plant have to traverse a lot of distance.
That makes it imperative to stay on top of costs and systems, and to gather data and analyse it carefully in order to justify needs. Measuring the utilisation rate of vehicles and plant is particularly important in a council area of this size because it provides an excellent basis for making decisions about buying versus hiring equipment, or whether to stay in-house or contract out when it comes to maintenance.
I think with the focus being turned on Councils to demonstrate that they are sustainable and are able to effectively manage their assets, there is a real need for fleet managers to have the systems in place to collect relevant data to prove that the fleet is managed efficiently and that it value adds to the effectiveness of Council’s operations.
Failure to do so could see money spent in other areas and the demise of the fleet assets.
So I see these systems as not only the most effective way to manage the fleet but also as a tool to justify the ongoing investment in fleet.
Another challenge we face here in Dubbo is not so much a skills shortage, but the fact that most of our workforce is fairly mature, and that’s a bit of a worry going forward. Our average workshop age is 55 for instance, whereas we would like to have more people in their 30’s and 40s so that the skills can flow through.
So we are now making a concerted effort to promote work opportunities with TAFEs in the area, and we’re heavily into sponsoring kids in terms of work experience.
What do you recommend to help fleet managers in their professional development?
I’m a great advocate of the IPWEA’s superb resources and courses – particularly their Fleet Management Certificate course. It provides an insight into all aspects of fleet management and allows participants to gain a holistic view of the business and how their role, whether it is in the workshop, administration or purchasing, contributes to the overall effectiveness of that business.
On a day-to-day basis though, I think the interchange of ideas and networking with colleagues in other councils can be extremely valuable. That happens a lot out here, particularly at our region’s IPWEA Forum meetings – we get around 35 attendees at each event from towns as far away as Broken Hill, Bourke and Cobar.