Author:jim-ward

Swings and roundabouts: The Maintenance pendulum (Part 3) September 25, 2024 Vehicle maintenance (VM) contracts are becoming increasingly popular within the transport industry. In our August issue, JIM WARD explained how dealers calculate and establish their vehicle maintenance rates. In September, he explained the role of the owners. In this, the third and final article in the series, he warns that any contract is a delicate balancing act… Transport operators need to be aware of the pitfalls surrounding VM contracts. […]

Swings and roundabouts The Maintenance pendulum (Part 2) August 30, 2024 Vehicle maintenance (VM) contracts are becoming increasingly popular within the transport industry. Last month, in the first of a three-part series, JIM WARD explained how dealers calculate and establish their vehicle maintenance rates. This month, he explains the role of the owners. Maintenance contracts, like insurance and medical aid, share some important traits: they can limit exposure to risk, but they do require a certain level of honesty to […]

Swings and roundabouts: The maintenance pendulum August 2, 2024 Vehicle maintenance (VM) contracts are becoming increasingly popular within the transport industry. In the first of a three-part series, JIM WARD explains how dealers calculate and establish their vehicle maintenance rates. He also describes the lifecycle of a contract.  Full and part maintenance/service contracts (FMCs, or MCs) have become an important part of commercial transport. Offering predictable maintenance costs – fixed per month, kilometre, or even engine hour – they enable […]

No man is an island June 28, 2024 Over the years I have been impressed many times by the calm professionalism of paramedics at serious accidents. They are usually frantically busy attending to the injured and dying, but the quiet cooperation and understanding between them is remarkable and often taken for granted. These are highly committed, superbly trained, often quite young people, doing gruelling, dangerous, and essential work. They are required to follow long established life-saving medical procedures from memory, […]

Mkhulu and the AMG May 30, 2024 Soon after the light first appeared in the rearview mirror – faintly blue-tinted and exceptionally bright – it crested the horizon and transformed into a pair of headlights, moving incredibly quickly and approaching from behind… JIM WARD relates a tale that is truly strange, yet profoundly poignant. It was a Saturday morning, and I was heading back to Johannesburg from KwaZulu-Natal, having spent several days in supplier meetings and fleet inspections. The roads […]

For want of a nail May 6, 2024 There are some valuable lessons to be learnt from nursery rhymes, says Jim Ward. Those lessons – if heeded – can save transport operators a not-so-small fortune. I wonder if young children are being taught nursery rhymes anymore. Probably not. After all, they’re sexist, militarist, mock the obese (Humpty Dumpty is a case in point), glamourise unhealthy eating (dairy,  gluten, non-vegan, blackbirds, pies) and remain non-inclusive towards trans people and pronouns. They […]

A feather in the cap April 2, 2024 We work our equipment hard in Africa; unbelievably hard, in the opinion of some international experts, as JIM WARD discovered… After five weeks travelling around Europe on a knowledge-seeking mission – visiting poultry operations, equipment manufacturers, farms, and processing plants in Holland, Spain, France, and Britain – it was clear to me that South Africa already had a highly efficient and competitive poultry industry. In 2015, South Africa’s feed conversion ratio (FCR) […]

Give us this day our daily bread March 4, 2024 Given the many daily challenges in the logistics game, it will come as no surprise to learn that JIM WARD believes even the most professional managers seldom get everything right. He did, however, encounter one such contract manager in his career… In the logistics game, we seldom get everything right: not some of it, or even most of it, but all of it. The synergies only appear when different departments […]

Trailer chaos at the edge of the world January 22, 2024 It is often said that when youngsters are playing nicely, the noise level may vary but there is a general hubbub. This is quite normal; it’s nothing to worry about. It’s when things go quiet that you need to start worrying. The same, writes JIM WARD, can be true of the transport game. Occasionally, remote contracts may go a bit quiet. This can give the impression that everything is […]

Finding fumeiyo November 14, 2023 The Japanese phrase “fumeiyo yori shi” is composed of the words 不名誉 (“fumeiyo” meaning “dishonour”), より (“yori” meaning “more than; rather than”), and 死 (“shi” meaning “death”). So, death before dishonour. This was a phrase that sprang to mind when JIM WARD encountered some foreign visitors who struggled to comprehend local criminal habits. It’s not only difficult clients, perishable loads, accidents, and remote breakdowns that grind people down in this industry, it’s also striving to hold […]