Blogs

KEEPING YOU IN TOUCH

TEAMTALKS - August 2011

It’s fair to say that Fonterra needs no introduction to Teamlalk customers. We all know who they are and what they do — which is, of course, dairy. Many TeamTalk customers are shareholders of Fonterra, and many more provide valuable services to the dairy industry here in New Zealand, which they dominate.

The numbers are impressive: Fonterra is the world’s largest exporter of dairy products, responsible for more than a third of all international dairy trade. Fonterra’s products can be found in 140 countries around the world. Not bad for little old ‘Nu Zillund’.

The sheer volume is mind-boggling. On a peak day, Fonterra’s fleet of milk tankers can pick up 76 million litres of fresh milk — totalling 14.7 billion litres per year.

In fact, an easier way to wrap your head around the volumes we’re talking about is to think of it like this: a waterfall flowing at 7000 litres per second would have to flow 24 hours a day for 24 days and nigbts to see that amount pass through, and a Fonterra tanker would arrive every four seconds during that time to keep up.

To perform that impressive task, Fonterra has a fleet of 480 tankers nation-wide, the biggest in New Zealand, and it’s Richard Suckling’s job as Fleet Services Technical Manager to keep them moving. It’s a big job, but one that Richard loves.

“I look after the electronics on our trucks - metering, sampling, vehicle monitoring, and associated hardware,” explains Richard. “This sort of technology and data is critical to our operations, because the window of opportunity with fresh milk is quite short. It must be processed as soon as possible, which means we can’t afford to miss a collection due to technical issues.”

Which is where TeamTalk comes into the picture. Richard has overseen the installation of a sophisticated electronic monitoring system that transmits information about a truck and its contents back to dispatch, based in Hamilton.

“Generally, this information is transmitted via GPRS cellular networks, but due to the rural aspect of our work, we can lose cellular comms regularly,”says Richard.

“We wanted a good, reliable backup that was simple to use and capable of getting the really critical information through. That’s exactly the solution TeamTalk engineered for us. When a truck goes out of cellular range, the TeamTalk networks kick in automatically and transmit the vital information we need.”

A timely example of this was the series of cellular blackouts caused by the Christchurch earthquakes.

TeamTä1k’s networks held up and we were still able to communicate by voice and data with our drivers — firstly making sure they were OK, and secondly working to help our farmers where we could,” Richard says.

Richard believes that having TeamTalk mobile radio for both voice and data communications (they regularly use the group call function to save time and money) is a vital part of the way Fonterra goes about the business of collecting milk at the farm gate.

“It’s been great to have the support of TeamTalk — they’ve worked hard to provide us with a solution that meets our unique needs. We certainly appreciate the increases in efficiency and safety as a result of their input.”