Five practices for a business that peaks at harvest

Our fourteen sites take most of a year's grain in about ten weeks. A weighbridge, a sample-testing station and the grower record must agree for every load, often at two in the morning. I plan the year backwards from harvest: upgrades finish by September, a change freeze runs from October to January, and every site keeps a tested paper ticket process with a reconciliation routine for afterwards. Sites have two network links, one of them satellite, because a single rural connection is not a plan. I measure the season by minutes from gate to ticket at each site, not by server availability, because a system that is up but slow still holds trucks. After each harvest my team and the site managers review every interruption longer than ten minutes before we agree the following year's work.

Time a driver spends queuing in the vehicle generally counts as work time under the fatigue rules of the Heavy Vehicle National Law, and a receiver whose queues extend that time is a party in the chain of responsibility. That makes our site data a safety record as well as a commercial one. Our own drivers moved to an approved electronic work diary in 2022, which I supported with operations and our safety manager. Subcontracted carriers keep their own diaries; we do not install our telematics in their trucks. Instead we publish queue times by site and hour during harvest, so carriers can plan around them, and our safety committee reviews them weekly. I treat the measurement as an obligation to act, which is how the booking-slot work began.

Our terminal serves our own trading subsidiary and independent exporters. A mandatory industry code governs access to bulk wheat port terminals, with the ACCC as regulator, and it expects the operator to publish its shipping stem and not to favour its own trading business. I design terminal systems around that expectation: nominations, cargo accumulation plans and stem changes reach every exporter through the same channel at the same time, and access is logged. The terminal also exchanges vessel and cargo data with the port's shared booking platform, and exporters lodge documentation with Commonwealth systems. My team maintains those interfaces, tests them before each shipping season and keeps a record of who changed what, because a disputed loading sequence is settled by evidence, not by recollection.

In November 2023 a cyber incident at another operator's container terminals stopped cargo movements at several Australian ports for days. Our audit and risk committee asked what a similar event would mean for us. We ran an exercise assuming the nomination system, the port link and our corporate network were unavailable for seventy-two hours. Loading could continue for about a day from printed plans; export documentation became the constraint first. We now hold offline copies of the stem and cargo plans, have agreed manual procedures with the port, and segregate shiploader and conveyor controls from corporate systems. Parts of the port sector fall within the Security of Critical Infrastructure Act 2018, and we took legal advice on how it affects our operations. Our managed security partner monitors around the clock, while incident decisions stay with my team and the executive.

I learnt at a removals group that an outsourcing contract can transfer equipment and service levels while quietly losing the people who understood why a process worked. At Ninderbrook we buy hosting, the after-hours service desk and security monitoring from partners, because others do those things at a scale we cannot match. We keep in-house the integrations between weighbridges, sampling instruments and grower records, terminal scheduling knowledge and the data that growers entrust to us. Each partner contract names the internal owner who must be able to explain the service without the supplier present. I review the list of retained knowledge every year with my managers, and I would rather pay a premium for a contractor to work alongside an employee than let a harvest-critical integration become a supplier's private expertise.