DURING the past 50 years, Ross Fraser has watched 15-tonne capacity trucks evolve up to 100 tonnes, carried dairy cattle and pigs from one end of Australia to the other and experienced droughts as well as floods.

For the Frasers Livestock Transport director, those years in the industry have been a period of sweeping change and life-long memories. Last month he was given a plaque honouring his contribution.

Mr Fraser said he had clocked up some good memories in his time expanding the business his parents started.

"We carted 6500 pigs from Clifton to Darwin," he recalled.

"That had to be done in four trips and we had relief drivers and round PVC pipe to (feed and water them).

"We also arranged for a water truck to go with us and in the final trip, which was November, we didn't stop at all. We just slowed down and the truck would hose the pigs along the road."

Just one pig died.

That trip was preceded by long distances carrying dairy cows from one end of Australia to the other, milking the cows once a day.

Mr Fraser was a driver until his mid-20s when he then turned his focus to the work outside the driver's seat.

He has been president of the Australian Livestock Transport Association and Livestock Transport Association of Queensland, as well as a founding member of the two.

He said the success of Frasers was linked to his parents' philosophy of quality service.

"Our long-term customers and the quality of our staff over the years have also helped build the business," he said.

"We couldn't have achieved what we have without their dedication to the industry.

"A lot of people know livestock transport isn't easy, but I think people stay on because they like working with animals."

Today's challenges for the livestock transport industry are many, and Mr Fraser said it was difficult to strike a balance between rising costs and keeping fees reasonable for customers.

"The main challenge we have is to provide a product to customers that's affordable. We have to survive but so do our customers," he said.

"Wages costs are also becoming an enormous challenge and with the mining industry, it's even harder."

To balance things out better, Mr Fraser said the cattle market needed to remain firm, as did other produce markets.

Rising fuel costs were another difficult factor, as were the state of the nation's roads.

"In my mind there's no doubt we need to put more money into road infrastructure," he said.

"The government seems hell-bent on building roads on a budget which is fine, but it will never get us ahead. We need to borrow money to build roads to open up more of this country."

In the next 10 years, Mr Fraser said he saw himself "slowing down" but not retiring.

Source: Daily News

The long-awaited Calder Freeway and Kings Road interchange in Melbourne’s west has opened early.

The $62 million project has been completed five months ahead of schedule.

Victorian Roads Minister Terry Mulder says 38,000, including 4000 trucks, use the section of freeway each day and that traffic numbers are predicted to double in the next 10 years.

“The new interchange will consist of an overpass over Calder Freeway, including off and on ramps in both directions, which will improve the safety and traffic flow of vehicles travelling along, as well as moving on and off the Calder Freeway from Kinds Road,” Mulder says.

Kings Road has been upgraded and extended as a four-lane road through to the freeway.

“The Kinds Road upgrade is the first stage of planned safety and access improvements along the Calder Freeway between Keilor and Diggers Rest,” Mulder says.

He says funding has been allocated to safety improvements at the Sunshine Avenue and Calder Freeway intersection and to extending an access road to link Highland Road and Oakbank Road to the Kings Road interchange.

Source: Owner Driver

Volvo Group Australia will celebrate the 40th anniversary of its Australian manufacturing in 2012, covering local production of the Mack and Volvo products.

The Brisbane factory, originally at Rocklea, was replaced after it was flooded in 1974, moving to a ‘drier’ location at nearby Richlands.

As well as building Macks for local operators, the Australian arm has gone onto become a research centre for right hand drive models, a role that now includes Volvo models after the Swedish manufacturer took control of Mack in 2001.

Despite the global recession in 2008-2009, the factory and research and development unit continued to operate, with an upgrade during this period to expand the services offered to customers during the build process.

Although not operating at full capacity as the Australian truck market struggles to regain the volumes of 2006 and 2007, the factory produced 825 Mack trucks and 1215 Volvo models in 2012.

Source: ATN

THOR Truck Wash is famous for its commitment to quality, and continues to cement its name as the number one truck wash system in the country.

The year 2011 brought big changes for Thor, with numerous improvements to facilities and services, and the opening of its new site on the west coast. Now 2012 is shaping up to be better than ever, with Thor proudly announcing the installation of a second auto wash bay at its Kwinana site.

Thor's flagship facility, at Coopers Plains near Brisbane, went from strength to strength last year and the team seems to never tire of striving for improvement. The manual wash system has been totally refined, cleaning products are now customised exclusively for Thor, and operating hours have been extended to include 24 hour services on Thursday and Friday nights. Coopers Plains has also introduced fleet washing onsite for its important Preferred Customer accounts. It also made changes to its auto wash facility, installing a new spinner system for a more efficient wash.

Source: Big Rigs

THE Bruce Highway, including stretches between Cairns, Innisfail and Ingham, has been named the deadliest road in Australia. Isn't it time for action? What can be done?

The RACQ is calling for an extra $100 million a year to be spent on safety measures to improve the national highway.

The Australian Road Assessment Program report described the Bruce Highway as the riskiest in Queensland.

The highway, which accounts for one in six deaths on the national highway network, was given a medium-high or high-risk rating along most of its length in the report.

Bruce Highway flooded 400 times in 2 years | Flood-proofing the Bruce Highway to cost $5.3 billion | Bruce Highway the worst road in Far North Queensland

It is the third report in the past three months highly critical of the state and safety of the main link between Cairns and southern centres, including separate assessments by the RACQ and the Cairns Business Leaders Alliance.

The report follows the RACQ’s annual road survey in December 2011 and the alliance’s highway report card in late
October.

RACQ public policy executive manager Michael Roth said the latest report "cemented the Bruce Highway’s notorious reputation".

The report said the road accounted for two-thirds of the top-15 most dangerous sections of national highway in the state.

Mr Roth said an alarming 37 per cent of Queensland’s national highways had a high-risk rating.

"The analysis found that the Bruce Highway experienced the highest level of road trauma on Queensland’s national network, accounting for 50 per cent of casualty crashes and 61 per cent of deaths between 2005 and 2009," he said.

"The Bruce Highway makes up about one-third of the national network in Queensland. Significant investment is required for infrastructure improvements to address safety deficiencies and to cater for increasing traffic demand on this major route for motorists and freight," Mr Roth said.

"Improvements such as more overtaking lanes, safer intersections, guard rails, audio tactile line markings, wider lanes and shoulders, and the removal of roadside objects would go a long way towards reducing the road toll.

"More Federal Government funding channelled into the upgrade and maintenance of our roads over the next 10 years would significantly reduce the road toll. The Government needs to spend an additional billion dollars over 10 years, $100 million a year, solely on safety measures."

Cairns Business Leaders Alliance spokesman Brett Moller said the new report endorsed his group’s view that the highway was "a national disgrace".

Mr Moller said that taxpayers, residents, businesses and community wanted to see road works, not more studies, reports and future planning strategies.

Queensland Trucking Association chief executive Peter Garske said the state of the highway was costing his members extra wages, fuel and vehicle maintenance, because of delays, crashes and other incidents.

"The state of the Bruce Highway is the result of many decades of neglect," he said.

Mr Garske said the demands of the mining and agricultural sectors was only going to put more pressure on the highway.

Main Roads Minister Craig Wallace said the state’s plan, released last month, set out a vision for a four-lane Bruce Highway from Gympie to Cairns.

"It identifies 110 priority projects, including 340km of highway duplication, 50 new overtaking lanes, intersection upgrades, bridge replacements and 10 proposed ring roads, bypasses and deviations," he said.

Source: Cairns

Setting your sights on the higher end of the market can work wonders for your business, but you also run the risk of limiting the scope of your potential customer base.

Scott Carson knows what’s at stake when you position your business in this way, having experienced it firsthand with his own venture. Luckily, he managed to turn it around just in time.

Carson is the founder and director of Only Logistics, a Sydney-based transport and logistics company, which has been operating since 2010.

Only Logistics commenced as an Australia-wide service for existing business owners and managers seeking to sell or acquire businesses in the industry.

In 2011, the company expanded its service offering to allow self-employed owner-drivers and subcontractors to advertise their arrangements, in addition to allowing courier and transport companies to advertise subcontract fleet, franchise or casual positions within their businesses.

Despite this progress, Carson can easily recall a mistake that almost cost him his business.

“Concentrating too much on the higher end of the market [was a mistake], ie. medium to large transport companies and 4PL providers,” Carson says.

“This limited the scope of our potential market to under 4,000 nationally.”

Within its first six months of operation, the company was experiencing a lower take-up of listings of businesses for sale. Luckily, Carson recognised his mistake and made changes.

“I thought, we’ve got the concept right so let’s go down the pyramid, where the businesses might be smaller but there’s a larger number,” he says.

“We undertook a complete review of our strategy and the transport business ‘sale’ market.”

“We then replaced our website with a service that now not only provides listing services for transport business owners seeking to sell their businesses, but also provides opportunities for self-employed transport operators to list their contracting arrangements, and for courier and transport companies to be able to list self-employment opportunities that exist within their fleets for subcontractors.”

The company developed a feature within its new website that allows listers to follow a step-by-step process to list their business for sale or list self-employment opportunities.

According to Carson, this includes a mix of free text and mandatory data and text fields, with the latter being transport-specific.

“The end result being a better quality listing with relevant information for viewers, rather than the lower quality and unstructured content that we continue to see on competitors’ websites,” he says.

“We also improved our eCommerce facilities on the website to facilitate lister payments for their listings to be SSL certified.”

With four staff on board, the business has a conservative revenue estimate of just over $100,000 for 2012, with a minimum growth rate of 20-25% each year for three years after that.

Carson says there are three major lessons he learnt throughout this process, including the importance of identifying target markets, and listening to customer feedback about the business.

“Also, to allow a restricted ‘free listing period’ to allow for the website to be populated and recognised faster than charging from day one,” he says.

“The plan is to make it the most relevant website for transport and logistics operators… The challenge is to continue to build our relevance in the market.”

“The service suits anyone, from a little transport company servicing the mining industry in Port Hedland right through to a container operator in Tasmania or a transport business running Sydney and Melbourne.”

Source: startupsmart.com.au

As Australia's largest sensitive freight specialist, COPE Sensitive Freight has a depot in every Australian capital city and operates in every state, territory and major regional area of Australia.

As Australia’s largest sensitive freight specialist, COPE Sensitive Freight has a depot in every Australian capital city and operates in every state, territory and major regional area of Australia. COPE strives to be either No. 1 or 2 in the industry sectors in which it operates. To make this possible, COPE has a unique business model that gives it an advantage over its competitors. This model has allowed COPE to become highly successful over the last couple of decades.

“Our competitors tend to fall into either very small and highly personalised businesses not able to offer a national network,” says managing director Greg Farrell says.  “Or they‘re huge businesses that can offer national networks but because of their size and scale are unable to match us on our personalised service and relationships; so it’s a unique business model.”

COPE maintains a good understanding of broader economic conditions, both nationally and internationally. This understanding ensures COPE is aware of the types of products and the demand for transport services across Australia and enables COPE to respond with its unique transport approach. It’s continually looking for areas of improvement that will enhance its offering and maintain its lead over competitors.

“It is a very professional, but also caring process that reduces the amount of damages,” Farrell says.

Read the full article here.

Source: supplychaindigital.com