From retired CA to weighbridge expert

Jonathan Palmer, chairman of Sasco Metrology Services, shares the history of the company and sheds some light on the new consignor and consignee regulations, to be implemented at the end of January next year. CLAIRE RENCKEN reports.

Palmer begins by giving some background information: “Avery, a British company, started Sasco in 1910. Having failed to develop new technologies or to maintain service levels, both Avery and Sasco were in serious financial trouble by 2002.

“A few years earlier, after a successful career in the global transportation of cars by sea, I had retired in the United Kingdom (UK), aged 40. In early 2002, I met an executive of Avery UK at a drinks party. When asked what I did, I said nothing, except that I used to be a chartered accountant in South Africa.

“He jokingly asked me if I wanted to buy some struggling weighing companies in southern Africa. Well, eight weeks later, I became the new owner of Avery’s Africa businesses (with the exception of Kenya and Nigeria). The core company was the South African scale company, Sasco.”

The new regulations coming into effect on January 31, 2015, basically mean that truck owners will need to formally advise the consignor of each truck’s permissible axle loadings and permissible total loading capacities at the time of collecting goods. (See page 8.)

“For the consignor, the implications of the new regulations are much more onerous. In summary, the consignor will need to ensure that adequate records are kept on a load-by-load basis, to demonstrate that vehicles were loaded in such a way that their permissible axle loadings and total permissible load carrying capacities were not exceeded,” Palmer explains.

This means having weighing equipment, which can provide both axle weighing and total mass calculation, and having systems and processes to produce records that show that the permissible axle weighings and total carrying capacity were not exceeded.

This is where Sasco comes in. “The first step that we took after acquiring Sasco, was to start the process of securing exclusive access to the best weighbridge technology in the world. Bilanciai, an Italian company, produces the world’s best weighbridge instrumentation. In 2007, Sasco was appointed Bilanciai’s exclusive African distributor,” he says.

Sasco has subsequently expanded its axle weighing product range from multi-deck weighbridges and “Bilanciai upgrade packages”, to include portable multi-deck weighbridges, portable truck decks, static axle weighers, in-motion axle weighers, weigh pads and smart software solutions.

Palmer concludes: “Therefore, Sasco can offer a range of standard axle weighing solutions that will enable consignors to comply with the new regulations. Supplying a standard solution revolves around Sasco Cloud, which was launched to enable weighbridges using Sasco Proweigh software to write weighing data (including axle weighing data) directly to the cloud for subsequent access by various systems. We believe Sasco Cloud will fully meet the consignors’ record-keeping requirements under Regulation 330B (2) of the Act.”