I judge machine and factory data by whether a grower, a dealer or an assembler can act on it without being misled about what it shows.
I am chief data officer of Callowdene Machinery, a Toowoomba manufacturer of precision planters, trailed boom sprayers, chaser bins and grain augers. We build complete machines at our Toowoomba plant and planter row units and hydraulic assemblies at Dalby. They are sold through nine company-owned branches in Queensland and northern New South Wales and 41 independent dealers elsewhere in Australia. Revenue for the year to June 2026 was A$342 million, and we employ about 1,180 people. I lead a data office of 34 people covering data engineering, analytics, master data and governance. About 6,400 machines working in growers' paddocks send operating data back to us.
My first job, in 1997, was on a pump test bench in Brisbane, where a flow reading meant little unless someone had written down the water temperature and the impeller casting batch. Five years of reliability work at a central Queensland sugar co-operative followed. There I learnt that a well-founded forecast of a gearbox failure was useless once the slack-season shutdown plan had been fixed. Both lessons came with me to Callowdene in 2007, first in warranty and then in parts information, before I took over analytics and, in 2021, the newly created chief data officer role.
The work I can describe with evidence comes down to three decisions. We cut the dealer parts catalogue from about 83,000 numbers to 61,500 and delayed a sprayer release to do it. We rewrote our telemetry terms so that growers control their agronomic records, which cost a planned dealer subscription. And we moved a failure-prediction model from grower alerts to the pre-season parts order. Each depended on engineering, service, sales and dealer colleagues accepting a narrower use of data than they had hoped for.
Wrong-part returns more than halved
After 21,500 duplicate and superseded part numbers were retired in 2020, the share of dealer parts lines returned as wrong or unsuitable fell from 7.4 per cent to 3.2 per cent within a year. The price was a five-week delay to a new 36-metre sprayer.
Growers decide who sees their paddock records
Our 2022 data terms separate machine-health data from agronomic and location records. Within twelve months, 54 per cent of connected growers had chosen to share records with their dealer, and telemetry renewals rose from 81 to 90 per cent.
A prediction measured at the parts shelf
Using a vacuum-fan drive failure model to set pre-season stock lifted same-day availability of that kit from 69 to 91 per cent in the 2024–25 summer planting, for about A$640,000 of extra inventory.
Current focus
I am working with the Toowoomba and Dalby quality managers on a shared view of first-season warranty claims per hundred machines, and on documenting how the row-unit camera check at Dalby is used before anyone proposes extending it.
Conversations I welcome
I am open to a first non-executive role on an agribusiness, food-manufacturing or grower-owned co-operative board, joining its audit and risk committee, with about 22 days a year available subject to my managing director's consent and a review of relationships.
