Business View Oceania | January 2020

47 48 BUSINESS VIEW OCEANIA JANUARY 2020 BUSINESS VIEW OCEANIA JANUARY 2020 AGG-TECH MACHINERY equipment into broadacre farmers, gear such as headers, seeding equipment and self-propelled sprayers. Because of the drought up here there’s not much going on, but at our other location in Woomelang there are some quite good crops, so we’re doing a lot of broadacre business down there.” Agg-Tech employees benefit from a company culture that treats them like family. The firm promotes a positive workplace through Star Performance appraisals and regular departmental meetings; recognizing individual achievements and encouraging their growth in the business. Technical staff members are sent to training programs in Adelaide, Melbourne or Sydney that are run by AGCO and other major equipment suppliers, where they are trained on the products they’ll be servicing. According to Rod, “The service guys use computers to plug into the machines and diagnose faults or set different operational parameters. There’s also quite a bit happening with GPS navigation and telemetry, so there is a lot of new technology and I don’t think that’s going to stop anytime soon. Smart Farming telemetry shows real time performance on tractors and other farm machinery, and customers can allow us to monitor their equipment, so an alert will come through to our service people if a fault occurs in a piece of machinery or if the tractor is due for servicing. There’s plenty of that type of technology in the game now, so that’s really interesting.” As for the future, Agg-Tech is considering expanding into other areas and intends to increase their business footprint. Rod admits, “With our dealership in Mildura, we’re restricted for space because we’ve had such strong growth, so we’d really like to relocate to a larger site. Commercial land in Mildura is very expensive – so we have to be careful in what we do; that we can maintain a return on our investment, when going from where we are to where we want to be. Looking ahead in the industry, electric and onejmetal@hotmail.com 520 TWENTIETH ST, CARDROSS VICTORIA 3496, AUSTRALIA 0438246451 -Jason Watt- Fabricating all Australian Products since 2004 Specializing in Agri Fabrication, plant maintenance, onsite projects & general welding and design.