BIGmate paves road to efficiency in Mackay

The need to continually work on improving efficiency and maximising the substantial investment in modern plant fleet led the Mackay City Council Works Department to BIGmate.

Manager Works Ian Wright said the move to utilizing BIGmate’s advanced technology to monitor 41 plant items, from street sweepers through to lawn-mowers, has proved to be a very sound business decision.  “I was looking to improve efficiencies of plant and equipment”, Mr Wright said.

“You’ve got to keep up with the technology that’s available so we put out a tender, calling for quotes. Initially we wanted to monitor vehicle performance and activity, as well as service delivery, and we then wanted to follow up and use this technology to replace and improve manual reporting, record keeping and data collection”.

Council started utilizing BIGmate on three street-sweepers.  “We wanted to look at improving sweeping time, minimise travel and monitor downtime” he said.  “We have monitors on the broom and on the truck, and we know where they are going, and whether they are sweeping or not”. The good news is that the information supplied is easy to understand.  “We are looking at a computer graph, and basically we are looking at the flat spots, which show when the machine is not sweeping”, Mr Wright said.

“The operators have been actively involved in the selection and development of the system and have full access to the information available.  It has already proved worthwhile in supporting the staff by providing accurate information for insurance claims and on levels of service.  Also the paperwork is being reduced.  Previously each operator had to manually fill out detailed running sheets, but we have worked with BIGmate to automate this process.  The operators have just five different buttons to press depending on the activity they are carrying out, and the reports are now generated automatically”.

Eighteen months down the track, Council now has various items of plant including street-sweepers, mowers, and slashers, spraying equipment and graders on the monitoring system.  Different information is being obtained depending on the type of equipment, and the type of information required by management.  “You have to be in a position to use the information you are getting, which is why we have been doing a progressive rollout” Mr Wright said.

“BIGmate is as good as I thought it would be, and it’s definitely doing what we wanted it to do.  We can get out of it exactly what we want for the particular situation, because the level of detail provided can be tailored to suit you needs.  BIGmate also allows you to tailor your costs, so it’s very cost effective.  If you think about just the street-sweepers, we have had improved productivity of at least 5%, equivalent to a $40,000 increase in value of service delivery within the first 6 months.  And there are improvements still to come”