The technical ground I can defend in a freight boardroom

A freight company's transport management system is where a customer's booking becomes a consignment, a trip, a proof of delivery and an invoice. At Morrowgate it now handles about 2.3 million consignments a month for 3,800 customers. When I arrived those consignments ran through three platforms and 410 customer connections: message exchanges, overnight file transfers, portal uploads and a dozen spreadsheets retyped at depots each evening. I treat that catalogue of connections as the real specification of the system, because each one carries commercial meaning: which reference appears on the invoice, which rate card applies, what counts as delivered. We migrated customers in cohorts, running old and new platforms together until each cohort had invoiced cleanly for two billing cycles. By May 2025 every division was on one platform, 120 customers had moved to a standard interface, connections had fallen to 236 and invoice disputes had dropped from 4.1 per cent of invoices to 1.5 per cent.

I am Morrowgate's technical authority for charging infrastructure. Fleet purchasing belongs to our chief operating officer, and the emissions commitment belongs to the board; my job is to tell both what a depot can supply and when. That means connection applications to the distribution network business, switchboard and transformer capacity, charger selection, site batteries, rooftop solar and the software that schedules charging around rosters. At our Melbourne port depot, 24 battery-electric prime movers run on a 1.5 MVA supply because charging is managed to keep site demand below 1.4 MVA. They use an average of 1.28 kilowatt-hours a kilometre, more on hot afternoons and with heavy loads. I also track the limits that brochures leave out. A battery adds about four tonnes of tare mass, which comes out of legal payload, so roughly 18 per cent of our shuttle containers stay on diesel. Interstate linehaul is not yet a practical candidate for us.

Our 1,720 powered vehicles and 2,900 trailers report position, engine data, door events and refrigeration temperatures, and our interstate prime movers carry cameras that detect signs of fatigue and distraction. In 2023 we moved 1,100 interstate drivers from written work diaries to an electronic work diary approved by Australia's National Heavy Vehicle Regulator. The Heavy Vehicle National Law, which applies everywhere except Western Australia and the Northern Territory, gives every party in the chain of responsibility a duty to ensure the safety of its transport activities so far as reasonably practicable. For a carrier that makes fatigue and speed data operational evidence, not marketing material. Footage is reviewed only after a triggered event, by trained safety coaches rather than line managers, and is kept for thirty days unless an investigation needs it. Our Western Australian operations follow that state's own heavy-vehicle rules, which we manage separately.

Cranes, reach stackers, gate cameras, weighbridges, refrigeration controllers and the telematics units in our trucks are all networked equipment, and most of them were designed by people who assumed the network was private. Our chief information security officer reports to me, and our internal auditors report to the Audit and Risk Committee, which keeps my own programme under independent scrutiny. In 2022 we completed the first inventory of operational technology across our terminals and container parks, found 27 standing vendor connections and replaced them with brokered, recorded sessions. We separated equipment networks from the corporate network at each site. Parts of our network fall within the freight asset classes of the Security of Critical Infrastructure Act 2018, so the board reviews and approves an annual report on our risk management programme. I write that report so that directors can see what changed in the year, what we tested and what remains exposed.

Automation in freight is often judged on its best hour. I judge it on its exceptions and on the length of the contract that pays for it. Most of our 21 contract warehouses serve customers on agreements of three to five years, while goods-to-person systems and automated storage typically need six to eight years to repay their cost. We therefore automate where contract length and volume support it. At one 42,000 square-metre site, serving a health-products customer on a seven-year agreement, autonomous mobile robots raised picks per labour hour by 34 per cent. At two other sites we declined shuttle storage systems because the customer would not commit beyond four years. At the terminals I apply the lesson from Brisbane's gate cameras: a system that handles 97 per cent of cases still needs a designed, staffed process for the other three, and that process belongs in the business case.