Client Background

 

South Gippsland Shire Council is a regional council located in coastal southeastern Victoria, approximately 100km south-east of Melbourne. The main council office is based
in Leongatha.

The council is responsible for operating a fleet of heavy vehicles that collect 4,122 tonnes of waste, 4,276 tonnes of recycling and maintaining 2,091km of sealed and unsealed roads each year.

 

 

Challenge

 

 

The Operations Manager at South Gippsland Shire council was aware of the NHVR CoR primary duty laws coming into force on the 1st of October 2018, and the implications for
his executive leadership team. Even though systems and processes were in place, the team wanted to mitigate undetected risk in their operations.

 

 

Solution

 

 

• A risk-based approach was used to review and gain a comprehensive understanding of the council’s current processes.

• A CoR risk identification workshop was arranged with key stakeholder representatives from each internal and contractor team operating heavy vehicles. The workshop was facilitated jointly with operations management and structured in a safe and collaborative environment to encourage validation of stress points in existing policies, processes and procedures.

• A summary of findings was compiled, analysed and subsequently, risk areas were prioritised for high/low impact and high/low remediation effort. This fed into the development of a recommendation report for the operations Manager to review.

 

Result

 

The robust risk assessment gave a clear overview of the controls required to adequately control CoR risks and close out gaps to meet NHVL requirements. The recommendation 
report is targeted to be presented to the executive leadership team for decisions and approval on a course of action to mitigate potential breaches.