Pumped Up

With annual revenues of over $A3 billion, the Fonterra Australian and New Zealand business unit is the largest consumer foods company in Australasia.

IN Australia alone Fonterra employ 2,000 people, operate over 10 manufacturing sites and collect 21 per cent of the country’s milk and that equates to over 1.7 billion litres each year.

To streamline the milk collection process the business operates 75 tankers across its largest collection areas in Victoria and Tasmania, both of which are controlled by the Fonterra Australia, national transport manager, Tony Miller.

To keep up with the required milk flows and to continually improve both the productivity and safety of their transport fleet, Tony calls on tanker builders like Byford Equipment to help develop new innovative collecting and freight handling methods.

“We’ve been using Byford tanker technology for the past seven years for two basic reasons; the company is very responsive to our needs and is prepared to listen and invest their time and money to improve the way we need to do business in the field,” says Tony, who approached the Byford team to develop the ‘next generation’ of Fonterra milk tankers. What Byford came up with was a truck chassis mounted ‘compact pump module’ developed through a variation of one of their original tanker concepts introduced to the marketplace many years ago.

“This new generation Byford demountable pump system has given Fonterra a leading edge in many ways. One big change for us is, because the pumping gear is mounted on the truck chassis and not the tanker, we can now swap prime movers within hours rather than days. It’s a big saving as we keep the hose reels and pumping gear for around 10 years but need change our trucks over every 5 years.

This development also gives us the flexibility to swap trucks and tanks over at a moment’s notice to suit specific milk runs,” said Tony. Having the hose reel vertically positioned and up front on the truck chassis also gives Fonterra, according to Tony, valuable savings. “With the hose reel and pumping equipment mounted where it is, both our mechanics and drivers are very happy. Firstly they have better access to both the truck and hose reel components for quick and easy maintenance and secondly our drivers find the physical use of the hose and reel less stressful, especially when applying the automatic push button ‘hose rewind’ feature.

“Because the hose can be hydraulically and automatically moved to either side of the truck also makes life easy for our drivers when the entrance to some milking vats demands such access flexibility.” As the pumping gear has now been placed further forward on the truck chassis and therefore closer to the ground, Byford has been able to vastly improve their pumping equipment’s flow rate.

“The location of this new system, which has resulted in far less piping, has doubled our pumping capacity to 1300 litres a minute and with all the latest on-board flow metre technology to accurately measure the weights of the load, our drivers spend far less time at the farms. When you have over 1500 sites to service daily that gives us a huge benefit,” said Tony.

Another important feature of this Byford 30,000 litre tanker/pumping package is the inclusion of the Trailer Electronic Braking System which offers the Roll Stability Programme.

“Ninety percent of our fleet is now kitted up with the EBS and BPW disc brake technology which I believe has contributed greatly to the elimination of both avoidable accidents and roll-overs over the past 5 years. I’d recommend to any operator who has any high centre of gravity or dynamic moving load issues, especially on articulated vehicles, that they investigate the BPW Roll Stability Progamme.

“We are running semis, 19 and 25 metre B doubles and are currently trialling the A double, (Pocket Road Train). Without the BPW disc brake axle and highly stable suspension and EBS package, our ‘award winning’ safety record wouldn’t have conceivably been achievable and I might add, a level of safety unique in the milk tanker world.” In summary, Tony says that the Byford new generation tanker and pumping equipment package is like chalk and cheese to anything else the company has so far encountered.

“We’ve had terrific feedback from our drivers about the time savings, workplace safety and behavior of the Byford transport equipment, both on the road and on the farm.”