Specialised Roading Equipment (SRE) is now able to deliver a holistic spraying unit package, thanks to the wealth and strength of both its telescopic and recently launched fixed wing configurations. As SRE’s leaders explain, no matter the requirement, there’s a suitable unit ready to go.
In a relatively short time, New Zealand-based, bespoke road construction machinery and equipment provider Specialised Roading Equipment (SRE) has left its mark on the Australian market.
Targeting diverse customer segments across Australia, predominantly by listening to industry demands, has quickly secured the company’s position in the road construction machinery hierarchy.
SRE Managing Director Mark Wansbrough says that despite the growing success of the company’s patented telescopic spraying models there’s growing calls for an additional fixed wing option.
“Through our discussions with existing and potential customers we saw that more and more companies were asking for us to introduce a fixed wing option to supplement our existing telescopic offering.
“Among those connections, you could sense a level of frustration around the existing lack of options in the market, the extended lead times and the lack of after sales support.”
It just so happens that these are three areas in which SRE excels, as Wansbrough explains.
“Many of our Australian customers were already impressed with our current offering at the time, so they reached out and asked, ‘could you build us a fixed wing sprayer?’ For those companies, as well as the ones who may not be ready to move to a telescopic offering, we effectively made the decision to extend our range to fulfill these desires,” he says.
Fixed success
The telescopic option could be regarded as the foundational piece that allowed SRE to become the company it is today and is the most popular option across the company’s home nation of New Zealand.
This environment pushed the SRE team to develop a design that would help them to differentiate their offering – and eventually – stand above the rest. So much so, that when the company first introduced its products to Australian shores, word of mouth quickly contributed to initial sales.
Chris Kaelin, SRE Technical Manager says the decision to develop and launch the fixed wing design into Australia was ultimately a simple process.
“Fixed wings are by no means new to us, we’ve been designing and manufacturing them for years,” Kaelin says. “It’s been easy to take that design and adapt it to meet the demands of the Australian market, as there’s clearly a market for a simpler spraying solution in Australia.”
SRE now considers Australia its home away from home.
Kaelin says Australia is a unique market, with differing regions and applications requiring very different machinery. Therefore, SRE’s goal with the fixed wing design has been to minimise complexity while maximising reliability, making its units easier to maintain and operate.
“Obviously Australia is a massive place, and we see that there’s demand for a simplified sprayer design, without the requirement for the flexibility of the telescopic model,” he says. “There are conditions, particularly outside of the metro areas, that lend themselves better and are more suitable to a fixed wing design.
“The aim is to provide a fixed wing option that is reliable, easy to operate, and can be serviced by local mechanics, even in very remote areas of Australia,” Kaelin says.
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This regional difference also revolves around customer preference. Kaelin says customers in the eastern states tend to prefer the flexibility and efficiency of the telescopic sprayers, while those in more remote, rural areas see a greater need for the simpler, fixed-wing option.
One of the company’s biggest strengths is its commitment to engaging with industry to further refine its designs, with Kaelin spending as much time with Australian customers, as he does their New Zealand counterparts.
“I’m in Australia every month, visiting customers, getting feedback on their existing machines and what they’d like to see on our new units,” he says. “We’re very much a ‘boots on the ground’ type business, which also gives us a broader view of our own horizons, as well as future trends in the market.
“We’re not just sitting in our office all day, every day.”
Regular customer engagement has led to the SRE team incorporating customer feedback into the development of new features and technologies.
For example, it is replicating control system functions such as the option of the job management system and sprayer automation across both the telescopic and fixed-wing sprayers, providing a consistent operator experience.
“The idea is that the operator can flip between sprayers, depending on the project and they can look down and see a very similar interface,” Kaelin says.
The control of all sprayer functions can be replicated over both sprayer types, while allowing for individual jet control through either toggle switches or “fast taper” mode for the fixed wing variant.
“Even for our base specification fixed wing control system there is familiarity on the layout and operation of the sprayer,” Kaelin says.
SRE’s expertise delivering both ensures that no matter the decision, customers are receiving some of the most technically advanced bitumen sprayers on the market, in a timely fashion as well.
“We’ve always held the view that customers don’t want, and shouldn’t have, to wait more than 12 months for a sprayer,” Wansbrough says. “We’ve been consistently increasing our capacity to make sure that our lead times stay well below that time frame.
“We’re about to move to a new site that’s double the size of our existing facility, for that exact reason. It’s about having that attitude that we always need to work on our own systems, processes and resourcing to make sure that we can continue to put out quality products relatively quickly.
“Now we’ve got a product range that, whatever you’re doing or wherever you’re going, there’s an option available for you.”
This article was originally published in the December edition of our magazine. To read the magazine, click here.