Milk tanker system gets ditched

By MICHAEL FOREMAN

Dairy giant Fonterra has abandoned a $400,000 vehicle tracking system just months after it was installed.

Boris Bruges, managing director of Parnell-based mobile data specialist Wirelessdata, said Fonterra was about to decommission his company's Autotrack system, which was running successfully on 180 milk tankers, even though its replacement was still in development.

Bruges said the tracking system had been commissioned by the former New Zealand Dairy Group two years ago. The system monitors the performance of trucks as well as recording the volume of milk collected and its temperature. This data is then transmitted via the trunk radio network to any one of five dairy product factories around the country.

When the Dairy Group merged with Kiwi Dairies to form Fonterra, Wirelessdata hoped the system would be installed throughout the company's combined fleet of 430 tankers.

But Bruges said Kiwi Dairies had commissioned a similar system at around the same time.

"They have chosen that system instead, even though ours has been running for six months and theirs is not yet finished," he said.

Fonterra's general manager of milk collection, Garry Webber, said Autotrack would be replaced by an Australian package, Cash, which was already being used in part of the Kiwi fleet because it integrated the business from milk collection to the payment of suppliers.

He said the Cash system collected the same data as the Wirelessdata system, but it also produced an optimised schedule of pickups from 14,500 farms, including a prediction of the likely volume of milk based on collection data over the previous five years.

Webber said Fonterra had obtained an independent evaluation by Walter Glass at Massey University before deciding.