In its 2019 financial year update presentation, contractor Emeco Holdings flagged up a partnership with Quartile One that has seen the company improve the component life and reliability of its expanding equipment fleet.

The contractor has grown in recent years, adding, in 2018, rental specialist Matilda Equipment to the portfolio. It also recently bolstered its fleet with “strategic core assets” comprising mainly 240-t haul trucks and Cat D10/D11 dozers.

This has seen the company’s focus on Australia coking coal operations increase to around two-thirds of the overall business, with the remainder coming from Australia thermal coal.

The reliability of its fleet, which it characterises as young compared with the average across the industry, is crucial to its overall success in winning and retaining mining business.

During the update today, Emeco said it maximises component life within its fleet through centralised planning and a reliability engineering ability to rebuild components in house. Much of this is enabled by an asset management solution from Quartile One.

Quartile One, which is expected to be acquired by Aurecon next month after a deal was announced in April, is a key player in the data analytics space, helping companies manage physical and other infrastructure assets to meet “the performance and pricing challenges of the commodity markets”, Aurecon said.

According to Emeco, the Quartile One industry database contains 85,000 years of mobile equipment industry comparisons with assets on 150 sites globally. This enables benchmarking with best practice owners globally to drive improved performance alongside a valuable reference for optimised decision making.

Emeco said Quartile One’s “reliability engineers” monitor the performance of all components on its equipment fleet for signs of distress or abuse, while advanced financial and engineering analytics ensure data-driven decisions. This is backed up by asset telemetry, which provides real-time data on components.

Meanwhile, a central planning function accounts for component change out 12 months in advance, enabling the company to streamline maintenance ahead of time. Artificial intelligence tools are also in the mix, which support inventory optimisation, according to Emeco.

All of this adds up to a reduction in downtime, improvement in availability and reliability, visibility on major expenditure forecasts and plans, security of parts supply & lowest life cycle cost position, according to Emeco.