8MAY 2021Something Old, Something NewBy Scott Walkinshaw, Chief Financial Officer, Freo GroupW hen you work for Freo Group, part of Marmon Crane Services in Australia, you spend a lot of time talking about industrial machinery: heavy trucks, light vehicles, trailers and, most importantly, cranes. The crane industry has traditionally been very manual and labor intensive, but this is changing. Customers expect to see service providers taking advantage of technology in all aspects of operations, whether that be safety, engineering, operations or back-office support.As a Marmon/Berkshire Hathaway company, we are focused on delivering value to shareholders as well as being an excellent corporate citizen and a part of the local communities in which we operate. Striking the right balance on all fronts is a challenge, and it takes a dedicated team of experienced professionals from all business functions to make it happen.When I joined Freo as CFO in 2017, the business had a good idea of where it wanted to be in terms of technology supporting the crane operations, but not how to get there. I was given a mandate to digitize many of the paper-based, manual functions to improve productivity and efficiency. I immediately saw the size of the task in front of me and knew that it would be time-consuming and costly.A raft of technology applications off the shelf can handle logistics and dispatch operations, time and attendance, sign on glass functionality and real-time data collection and processing. The goal for Freo Group was to bring all those functions together in one package that was suitable for the crane services industry in Australia. I looked at many software packages that promised a partial solution but struggled to find one that ticked every box. I was conscious of adopting multiple platforms that each did one or two things as this presented integration challenges as well as requiring our more than 800 operations staff to learn various systems. After 12 months, I thought I was looking for something that did not exist, and I started exploring either bespoke app development or heavy customization of our existing ERP.IN MYOPINION
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