One year ago, the NRC team was in crisis mode, responding to members caught in Cyclone Gabrielle’s aftermath and flooding. This year, I see a more upbeat mood among members. No doubt the beautiful weather and new government have helped.

The quieter January gave the team at NRC time to reflect and plan for the year ahead – to ask ourselves how we can serve our members better. We looked at three things:

• Our team – are we well set up to serve our members?
• Our services – are they providing what our members need?
• Our advocacy – are we pushing for the right priorities with the government?

Our team

Our strategy focuses on rebuilding and refreshing our services, systems and processes. We are aligning our roles to cover our large member base, developing our culture and values and ensuring the team has the right systems and resources to deliver. Everyone is energised and embraces our rebuild.

Our services

We provide NRC members with a high-value discounts across essentials such as fuel, insurance, communications and IT gear. But we’re looking at our support services surrounding these.

One of our most used services is the NRC cost model, where we show members what they need to be charging so a contract doesn’t lose money. We are making the cost model easier to use and refreshing the underlying data.

This goes hand in hand with our new NRC Customisable Transport Cost Index, launched with Infometrics last year. Members who access this free service get a quarterly refreshed view of how much transport costs have shifted by tailoring them to their own cost weightings. We’ll further enhance both services this year, so watch this space.

Along with our partners at New Zealand Trucking Association, we are also developing new services. HARMFree, our safety and wellbeing portal for transport and logistics operators, is a one-stop shop for good work design, wellbeing and training. It provides a meeting place to connect with other operators to ask questions and share advice.

We are also bringing the Australian industry accreditation programme TruckSafe to New Zealand. TruckSafe provides strong, credible recognition for the hard work operators do to run a professional, safe and compliant operation.

Our advocacy

Our No.1 priority is reinstating the fundamentals to achieve a well-maintained and well-funded roading network. We’ll continue our call for a 50-year roading infrastructure plan and be actively involved in designing how our roading network will be funded.

The just-released draft Government Policy Statement on Land Transport is geared towards restoring the damaged road network so it is fit for purpose, continuing to look after it, and investing in the roads we need to support a growing economy. The $500 million pothole-prevention fund strongly signals that getting the basics right is critical. It’s pleasing to see our advocacy has been heard.

We are also working to refresh performance-based standards and other rules and regulations that, in some cases, have not been reviewed in 30 years. Relatively minor tweaks to rules can yield real efficiency wins, which will be game- changers for permitting and compliance.

I’m excited about all we have planned for members this year. The team has real momentum, and we are cracking on with getting it done for you.