Watershed moments in industry seldom coincide with those of individual businesses.
In the case of South East Queensland Hauliers (SEQH), a highly developed container road transport specialist based in the Brisbane bayside suburb of Hemmant, this was the rare case in 2007.
For strategic reasons, the company had wanted to own land rather than lease from the Port of Brisbane, seven kilometres away, prohibiting it from operating Super B-doubles, as was the custom of most of their wharf-side competitors.
Following a couple of years of consultation with government agencies and OEM partners, they shifted to PBS-approved A-doubles, a decision that has proven both innovative and efficacious in levelling the playing field given the same zoning restrictions, when leaving the port area, no longer apply.
The advantages of the A-double and how it transformed the industry are now widely acknowledged.
For SEQH it has since allowed the business to run two fully loaded 40-foot containers or the equivalent of four TEUs at 30 metres in length from the Darling Downs region of the state down to the port.
Supporting the western region and the Darling Downs remains a major, if not central focus of the business. The company operates a depot at Wellcamp, near Toowoomba, where A-doubles descend daily from Brisbane.
The fleet disperses 12 of its 80 prime movers out here to customer sites on afternoon and night shifts in double roadtrains or in an A-B triple combination.
For longer distance jobs, disembarking from Roma, SEQH might run Type 2 roadtrains with three fully loaded boxes. The GCM on these units is well over 100 tonnes.
Historically, operators running heavy containers from the likes of Roma, Goondiwindi or Moree, were, previous to the inception of the A-double, required to move roadtrains into Toowoomba where they would have to be disconnected before being moved down the range as singles into Brisbane.
The A-double, according to Nathan Craner, SEQH Deputy Managing Director, has been a real gamechanger and not just for reasons advantageous to productivity.
“From a safety side of things, you have less trucks on the road” he says. “From the labour side of things, you have less drivers required, which in this market today, given the driver shortages, that’s ever so important.”
What’s more, it brings a cost competitive solution for customers, particularly, in the export markets. Supporting the agricultural sector by keeping costs down is fundamental for farmers to operate successfully and profitably according to Nathan.
“From that point onwards, our business has always been trying to work with customers to consider how can we add value,” he says. “How can we do things differently? How can we be more efficient? We like to go into organisations and look up and down their supply chain, see where we can add value.”
In some cases SEQH has actually positioned container handlers on site for its customers once they have exhausted the gains achievable from the more traditional model of trailers or side loaders.
“There’s only so much you can do with those delivery modes,” Nathan explains. “The moment that you put a container handler on site it increases your throughput on how much you can process and therefore pack.”
Making its customers tangibly more efficient is only part of how SEQH likes to add value.
“If they can pack more containers it means they’re more profitable as well and the trade increases which helps us as we’ve got more containers moving on our trucks,” says Nathan.
“The aspiring goal, which we’re proud to have achieved now, is to be a full-service wharf logistics provider and for us that means everything we do revolves around the core of moving import/export containers, however, it also branches off in that we offer warehousing services. If customers can’t unpack containers or can’t pack containers for export, we can offer that service. For some customers that’s not a part of their business. They want to get the freight to port but they don’t want to have a specific warehousing operation. They want to leverage off someone else. We can offer that service.”
Among its industry accreditations SEQH is customs 77G bonded and licenced for a biosecurity 1.1 facility. This means, for any containers marked for a rural destination they are able to provide a rural tailgate inspection.
They can also provide general inspections,, fumigations and biosecurity washes of cargo or containers. They can also facilitate a customs overview if required.
Reefer plugs have been installed on site for customers who have containers that need to be kept charged up.
For awkward, ugly, oversized, hard to handle freight, SEQH possesses the equipment on site to handle out of gauge heavy haulage cargo. There’s also a public weighbridge on site. That goes hand in hand with the bulk side of the business.
Broadly speaking that’s what encompasses the full-service offering.
South East Queensland Hauliers has a history that begins in 1956 and diverts with the purchase of the business in 1997 by current Managing Director Brett Plummer.
His vision was to change the bread and butter model hinging heavily on tipper transportation and rapidly expand its marginal output as a containerised transport division to exploit the fast growing consumer economy.
Notwithstanding eight Volvos and a solitary Kenworth, the remainder of the truck fleet is represented by Mack trucks – SuperLiners, Tridents, Granites and Anthems.
The Anthems are in the main part operating around metropolitan Brisbane in the sideloader and single trailer fleet.
The A-double units, a product of its long association with Haulmark Trailers and Mack, are being predominantly pulled by SuperLiners powered by a 685hp MP10 engine.
In the last few years, SEQH have updated the permits allowing for the utilisation of Volvo FH16 units in the application. The predominant value-add in its heavy haulage division, as Nathan refers to it, is transporting for customers who have cargo in an open top container or flat racks.
They handle trommels destined for goldmines, cable drums and other agricultural machinery.
Earlier in the year brought with it some interesting transportation challenges.
The first of which was the job of moving an enormous McCloskey S190 rock crusher.
The other being the task of safely transporting two adult giraffes. This entailed picking up the animals from a local Zoo, a stop off at the SEQH depot, where they could be fed and loaded onto a flatrack before they were sent down to the port under hook where they were lifted onto the vessel bound for New Zealand.
Unlike livestock, there was no standardised trailing equipment for animals 3.4 metres tall. A crate, at four metres high, was provided by the zoo. It was restrained onto the low loader float purely because of the height factors involved.
Lifting equipment on site was used to elevate the crate off the truck and place the giraffe onto the flatrack which was then secured as was the food for the animal around the crate so the carers and veterinarian would have easy access to the food for the three-day voyage.
“It all had to be timed perfectly for the welfare of the animal to keep them in the crate for the shortest time as possible,” recalls Nathan.
Increases in shipping rates, some as high as 700 per cent, this year have naturally had repercussions in the market. So much so that space is now at a premium on vessels.
That has brought with it greater congestion and higher demand.
“When people are shipping, they’re trying to maximise their weights as much as possible,” says Nathan. “So what we’re seeing is more containers are getting heavier and heavier as people find solutions to jam more cargo into the containers and optimise that berth.”
Investment in a spread axle side loader was deemed a necessary response to these conditions by increasing the legal limit SEQH can handle on the road as the current side loaders might offer 36-tonnes in lifting capacity but fail when it comes to a legal axle spread in transit.
“If we’ve got a really heavy box and we need to send a trailer as well as a side loader to follow to lift that box off the ground there’s more cost, more inconvenience and labour,” says Nathan. “It makes it harder. Having the spread axle increases the weights meaning we can add more value to our network and the customer.”
Fleet replacement is now a matter of escalated forward planning for carriers who have hitherto enjoyed short cycles when upgrading their vehicles. SEQH is no different in this domain. Purchasing arrangements for prime movers and trailing equipment is now being planned for the years ahead.
“We’ve placed orders early to have a better chance of getting our gear,” says Nathan.
“At the same time, there has been opportunities whereby other companies have ordered trucks but haven’t actually ended up fulfilling that purchase when the gear comes online and we’ve been working with our provider and essentially doing last minute purchases when trucks have become available just to decrease the average age of our fleet and we’ve since then sold off more older equipment to try and relieve pressure in our workshop since there is two issues.”
The first issue Nathan points to is the labour shortage of diesel mechanics in Australia. That will, in the current climate, extend the time frames for servicing and maintenance at a major truck fleet. Secondly, there’s the parts issue.
“With us having newer gear and reducing the average age of our fleet that then helps us to have more confidence that our average time on road is going to be better off because we’ve helped to reduce the average age of the fleet,” he says. “That’s to take pressure off our workshop labour and to respond to the reality that parts are hard to come by at the moment. You can’t rely on older gear like you used to.”
For the moment SEQH is better equipped to avert the obstacles, which are many and soon accumulate for businesses that get caught with an over reliance on ageing mobile assets.
Nathan took a circuitous route to road transport. His first career pathway following school was in fitness. At one stage he owned a personal training business with another fitness professional that was scheduling 400 PT sessions a week with eight different trainers.
He sold that business but not before crossing paths with Brett Plummer. After time working for Kings Transport, Nathan was eventually offered a role at SEQH by Brett who is passionate and goal oriented, both great qualities for teaching.
“That makes it very easy to learn from him and I have just sponged off Brett’s knowledge immensely,” says Nathan. “He’s got very strong values within the company around work ethic and also helping customers, and working together as a team. He will jump in a forklift or into a truck if we’re really up against it.” Over the years Nathan, too, has got the relevant licences to operate forklifts and heavy vehicles.
“When it comes to peak times, he’ll think nothing of jumping behind the wheel to help take the pressure off the allocators and to support the drivers on weekends. In that sense he says he got swallowed up by the industry.
“The thing I loved about the fitness industry was I saw it as helping people change their lives,” he says. “We were very much focusing on helping unfit, unhealthy people. I liked getting into people’s heads.”
That’s been a springboard for Nathan, who, in transferring to the road transport industry, discovers many similarities.
“We’re trying to understand customer’s businesses. We’re trying to understand the economics. We’re trying to understand our people as they represent our company. I love spending time with our people to positively help them so that they have a career pathway. A lot of the time you’re trying to help people understand their purpose which gives them fulfillment when they’re exercising that purpose and growing.”
He adds, “Those are the crossovers and synergies that I see.”
