Meryl Connolly | National Fleet
Operations Manager | CSIRO
My staff and I have always worked from home
once a week, but once this COVID-19 happened
we moved towards that model permanently a few
weeks ago. We have staff working in Queensland,
Hobart, and I’m in Sydney but it’s working for us so
far.
This is already affecting us due to the fact we have
56 different sites that are completing many different
degrees of work. We're already looking at how
we're going to keep getting vehicles registered, and
then how we can get them inspected during this
shutdown. We've got a full senior team working
on figuring it all out, so from my point of view, I'm
watching closely what they're doing so I can work
out how we are going to act.
We have stopped all non-essential use of our
vehicles and stopped all research vehicles unless
it is critical to their research and have seen a much
lower amount of vehicle use. I am doing a GPS
project at the moment but that has already been
affected because we're not getting the volume of
data from the vehicles that we normally would.
For future vehicles it is going to become tricky
if the dealerships can’t deliver vehicles due to
whatever is happening within their own businesses
or if we've got a site shut down and physically
can't have it delivered. We are all going to have to
be very careful and plan for these impacts.
We are currently doing a lot of things to keep
people safe within the cars. We have been
educating our staff on how to decontaminate the
cars after use, advising them on how many people
are allowed to be in the car, what to do if there's
not enough pool vehicles, and how they get
around that.
Things are just taking longer, but we must be
ready for that slow down. Every industry is going
to be struggling so we have talked a lot about that
as a team. We have got to all work together and
be respectful of what everybody's challenges are.
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Philip Browne | Managing Director |
Autorola Australia
From a health perspective all the things the
government are doing are looking like they
are having an effect and that is something
important we need to all work together on. It
will take time however and it is having some
effect on our operations in the meantime.
Our general sales trend is down, but things
are still motoring along for now. Because of
our reliance on rental companies we have
been hit very hard, but our corporate fleet
customers are continuing to turn over for us
so that’s encouraging.
We predict our April result will be about 50 per
cent of March and May will be a bit lower than
that again. We are still selling cars because
there are some buyers out there, but we are
working extremely hard to find new avenues
of trade because some of the traditional
buyers have stopped buying.
We are finding accident numbers are down
dramatically since COVID-19 hence there
are less write offs overall and that has had
an impact. We have noticed lower value cars
are still selling quite well to the independent
dealers, but the large franchise dealers have
slowed their purchasing on late model, low
kilometre vehicles. So, there’s challenges
there.
In terms of our workflow we have not reduced
staff and we have no intention to during this
pandemic. Currently our staff are still busy,
it is just that their tasks and priorities have
changed and we are adjusting accordingly.