A Hastings-based rural carrier has developed an industry-first IT solution to manage the demands of transporting livestock in the 21st century. Farmers Transport is the North Island's largest privately owned rural transport business, with a fleet of around 100 trucks and ten operating bases focused mostly on the East Coast and central North Island regions with operations regularly extending into the South Island. When it failed to find a suitable off-the-shelf product to digitalise its growing operation, the firm went in-house and devised an innovative IT management system that puts it ahead of the pack.
Called FROST (for Farmers Rural Operating System for Transport), the system harnesses the power of 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 manage our trucking capacity and job flows with dispatching trucks to jobs," says CEO Jason Roebuck. "We've put in-cab equipment in our trucks that receives job information remotely, and those jobs can be updated in real time.
"If a truck gets dispatched to pick up 500 lambs but gets to the property and finds there are only 450 lambs, then that gets updated at the completion of loading. It allows us 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."
Customers are able to make savings on small jobs by pre-planned load-sharing. And 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.