How GPS trackers are streamlining this Australian transport and mining business

When your business includes both freight transport and a mining operation, efficiency is essential.  Lipps Natural Resources have adopted EROAD’s vehicle monitoring technology to simplify fuel tax and vehicle maintenance, while also helping to solve complex problems like managing active and non-active zones in their gypsum pit. By integrating with MyTrucking, they’re also reducing paperwork for drivers and creating electronic records for mass management and proof of delivery. 

Lipps Natural Resource (Lipps) based in Kerang, Australia provide products and services to agriculture across Victoria and New South Wales. Lipps have two sides to their business: transporting freight; and supplying gypsum and salt for agriculture. Lipps have established a strong brand presence and are well known for their good service. They’ve installed EROAD’s fleet management system across their fleet of B-double trucks, loaders, dump trucks and excavators.

Before EROAD, Lipps Operational Health & Safety Manager, Geoff Fry would get a lot of questions from staff managing the trucks because they didn’t know what was happening. It caused quite a bit of frustration. Now Geoff says “it's plain to see at any given time what’s actually happening. Staff don’t ask or wonder what's going on - that's the part I like about it.”

It’s even providing benefits they didn’t expect, as Silvano Brocca, Lipps General Manager adds, “With the features that EROAD provides – it’s sometimes surprising the information we can get out of it.”

One of the biggest concerns raised by drivers is the need to reduce paperwork. Together with MyTrucking, EROAD is helping the Lipps team to resolve this in a number of ways.

By submitting paperwork through the MyTrucking app, drivers can electronically log their stops and picks ups. These stops can also be easily monitored using EROAD’s daily fleet activity feature. The drivers are then paid per stop or pick up without having to complete or submit paperwork.

Geoff has also used geofences in EROAD to set up inch-by-inch entry and exit points at the depots to easily track loading and unloading fees to be paid to drivers. “It minimises the amount of interaction, it minimises the amount of paperwork that the truck drivers need to handle and automates it” says Geoff.

The MyTrucking integration has also helped Geoff simplify some of their compliance. Drivers are able to upload photos of deliveries and trailer weights directly into the MyTrucking app, matching them with the order number. Then the telematics data from the Ehubo provides a log of vehicle activity history, showing the time a truck was at a specific location. Together, the system is helping Lipps maintain electronic records for proof of delivery and mass management.

This is still a new way of operating for the team, but Geoff is feeling positive, adding “it’s just a simple way to audit. Rather than the guys writing down the weights, then having to report them and send them through and then another person recording those and storing that information. When the auditor comes in, they can look up any given time, any load, and it's there.”

Lipps not only transport freight, they also operate a gypsum pit where they mine and screen gypsum. Their mining operation has two dump trucks, two loaders and two excavators which all have EROAD GPS tracking devices installed.

To help him to manage productivity, as well as protect non-active areas of the site, Silvano and the EROAD team worked together to set up a grid system for the mine using geofence technology in MyEROAD. “We now have a grid system on top of the whole gypsum pit and we can select certain grids and define in there that these are grids which the excavator has to stay within,” explains Silvano.

To make sure their operators know they’re sticking to the right grids, they’ve also set up GeoAlerts. This sends an alert to the machine operator when they’re entering or exiting a grid location so they’ll know if they move into the wrong area. “This is important for us because we want operators to stay within a grid and focus on a location, not go from one location to the other because, again, this slows down the whole operation,” adds Silvano.

As well as supporting the efficient operation of the mine, geofence activity reports from MyEROAD also help with regulatory requirements, “every year we need to provide a report to the government and show them that we’re doing the rehabilitation according to plan,” says Silvano.

Data from the machinery is automatically collected by the Ehubo device, and the team can generate a Geofence Activity Report which shows exactly where their machinery has been operating, “the report helps us to say this is where we’re doing rehabilitation at the moment. And these are the grids where we have done the rehabilitation and we don't go in there anymore.”

Keeping both their trucks and mining machinery well maintained is vital for Lipps. Before EROAD, paperwork was often incomplete or not handed in on time which created issues for service and maintenance – a costly problem for the team as Silvano explains, “we were sometimes too late and then machines would break down and it would cost us because production slowed down or stopped.”

The pre-trip and post-trip checklists in EROAD Inspect are now used daily across their heavy vehicle fleet including the loaders, dump trucks and excavators in their gypsum pit, “we now get daily checks and they notify us when something fails or when something is due for repair,” says Silvano.

The technology is helping the team streamline management of defects and repairs which has a big knock-on impact on their operations – particularly in the gypsum pit. “Now with EROAD, we have much more live up-to-date data. With the machine hours and maintenance checks that our staff are doing, and the equipment checklist – it’s all digital now,” says Silvano.

It’s good for the operators’ peace of mind too, adds Silvano “because they know it's in the system and it’s flagged until it’s repaired so they only have to report it once.”