Over the past 12 years Hi-Trans has gone through a process of adaptation and development the system to work precisely to help improve fleet performance. PowerTorque talked to Andy Mickan, National Workshop Manager at Hi-Trans Express about using all of the data created by the truck and trailer assets to improve productivity in the business.
The Hi-Trans Express business model is all around depot to depot line-haul over long distances, where the most important factor is the reliability and consistency of the rolling stock day-in-day-out.
The Sydney to Adelaide trucks do around 400,000km per year, running a changeover regime, a pattern which is repeated between most of the capital cities in Australia.
There are over 40 trucks in the fleet as well as over 150 trailers. There are also lot of subbies involved in the operation hauling the trailers, as well. Monitoring of the trailers is an important part of the data collection, ensuring they are fit for purpose on each night run. Trailer maintenance is all done in-house by the operation.
“If you plan everything in advance, it’s so simple,” says Andy. “It’s not reactive maintenance, it’s all planned maintenance. We also do a lot of history reporting, with every repair having a job associated with it. The stock of spares is also allocated to each job and monitored to assess costs.
“Every tyre is monitored. If you put air in the tyre or torque them up, look at steer tyres and rotate them, everything goes into the system and is put against that asset.”
It was this monitoring which brought Andy’s attention to the efficiencies of the recently introduced Bridgestone M866, with the new drive tyre exceeding mileage expectations across the line-haul operations. Hi-Trans Express recorded 364,688km from a set, with another set of M866 tyres involved in the trials also projected to have a life of 360,000km and beyond.
The net result of Hi-Trans Express’ experience with M866 is an average of five to ten per cent improvement over its predecessor, the M766.
“These are the best tyres we’ve ever run. I’ve only got positive things to say since we started running them,” says Andy. “The M766 was a very good tyre overall, but we’ve never seen results like we have from the M866.”
Hi-Trans Express was one of ten Bridgestone customers to conduct extensive real-world testing of the M866, contributing around 1.2 million km of data to the development including direct comparisons with the predecessor model and the competitor’s product. The trial was conducted on the Adelaide to Sydney return run and Adelaide to Emmdale return runs.
