Our systems earn their keep in the harvest weeks, so I plan, test and freeze them around the days when a delay becomes a queue on a public road.
I am chief information officer of Ninderbrook Bulk Logistics, a privately owned grain handler headquartered in Horsham, Victoria. We receive grain from growers at fourteen up-country sites in western Victoria and southern New South Wales, move it by contracted rail and our own trucks, and load it onto ships at a bulk export terminal at a Victorian port. Revenue for the year ended 30 June 2026 was A$412 million. I lead 38 technology colleagues and the partners who host our systems, staff the after-hours service desk and monitor security. Grain trading, site safety and terminal operations belong to other executives.
My first job, in February 1993, was fitting two-way radios and early vehicle-tracking units to trucks for a Melbourne installer. A driver once showed me the radio he had switched off because dispatch called him every twenty minutes. I have carried that conversation through rail scheduling, a transport-software consultancy, a removals group, a regional coach operator and, since January 2020, Ninderbrook. A system in a transport business is used by someone who is also driving, sampling, loading or waiting, and its design either respects that time or consumes it.
The cases on this site are three harvest-season and terminal choices. I kept a twenty-year-old receival system running for one more harvest rather than cut over in September. I introduced booking slots at our six busiest sites after measuring how long drivers queued, knowing that some growers would deliver elsewhere. I also removed our own marketing team's early view of other exporters' vessel nominations. Operations, marketing, legal advisers and growers shaped each choice, and each carried a cost I still report.
One more harvest on the old receival system
Cutover to the replacement platform was planned for September 2023. I recommended March 2024 instead. Extended support, spare servers and vendor standby fees cost A$2.6 million, and new sampling instruments sat unused for a season. The 2023–24 harvest received 2.8 million tonnes without a lost day.
Shorter queues, fewer tonnes
Booking slots at six sites cut average peak queuing from 2 hours 50 minutes to 1 hour 5 minutes during the 2024–25 harvest. Receivals at those sites finished 4.8 per cent below plan, and our marketing team estimated A$1.1 million of margin forgone.
One shipping stem, seen by all exporters together
In 2022 we rebuilt access to the terminal's nomination system so that our trading subsidiary no longer saw other exporters' pending vessels before publication. The work cost A$780,000 and slowed internal vessel planning by about a day.
Current focus
I am preparing the terminal's systems for a shiploader control upgrade in 2027 and testing, with the port and our exporters, how long we could keep loading and documenting cargo if the port's shared vessel-booking platform or our own network were unavailable.
Conversations I welcome
I am seeking a first non-executive role on an Australian board that oversees physical operations, such as agribusiness, freight or regional infrastructure, with about twenty-two days a year available and my chief executive's agreement in principle.
