Emeco is Australia’s leading mining equipment rental and maintenance services provider, and at IMARC 2026 in Sydney this week in a presentation from Ian Testrow, Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director, the company talked about connecting maintenance strategy, condition monitoring and execution on a mining fleet.
The company has around 840 of its own equipment units with over 975 employees and seven workshops. It is active at around 275 projects. And the maintenance part of all this is something of a fine art today.
Emeco: “We own the asset lifecycle chain, from the entry point to the rebuild, and reduce costs every hour the machine runs. The customer’s production plan requires high-performing assets. Reliability and availability at a lower cost per hour is what we are paid to deliver. Our ability to deliver strong
maintenance outcomes across both Emeco-owned and customer owned fleets helps us win and
retain customers. Growth in maintenance services built on our fleet, workshops and people drives higher return on capital.”
It says it is focused on using these capabilities to increase its rental earnings and build a stand-alone maintenance services business that provides Emeco with a platform for sustained growth and shareholder returns.
Emeco has seven regional workshops positioned near major mining areas. Its Mackay and Forrestfield locations rebuild engines, powertrain and hydraulics to one standard. Rotable stock is staged across Perth, Mackay and Gunnedah, while on-site crews and leaders maintain Emeco owned and customer-owned fleets.
One team owns lifecycle strategy, reliability, condition monitoring, planning, inventory, data and AI; with field work, oil and telemetry data combined on one platform.
Testrow said that digitalisation has been a major focus – specifically digitising defect and work management to drive quality and oversight. Emeco argues that a successful mid-life asset model requires exceptional defect management. Capturing each defect accurately allows the plan to be
resourced correctly and timed to protect asset performance.
Component condition, measurements and photos are captured at the machine when the defect is found, supported by evidence. Everything is set against a standard, so when a job is done it is decided by the condition of the asset, not by who raised it. Parts and labour are planned from the recorded scope, so the job goes into the window once with what it needs.
Execution quality decides whether a repair holds. On paper, oversight only reached as far as a supervisor could physically observe. With the digitised approach, every service and repair task carries required readings, photos and sign-offs; a step cannot be skipped or closed blank. A reading outside the specified standard is flagged as an exception that must be actioned before the job closes. Who did the work, when, what they found and to what standard is recorded for every job, on every site, and can be reviewed by anyone.
The record is reviewed centrally and used to control quality before and after the work. Technical Reliability Specialists review every defect against the standard before it reaches a planner: approved, returned with the reason, or closed as a duplicate, with the raiser coached.
Post-maintenance compliance and quality is reviewed against the job as planned, by the central reliability team. Measures are taken straight from the record: component commissioning compliance, PM quality, post-maintenance inspection compliance, defect scoping quality, exception close-out, and duplicate rate.
In tandem with all of this, proprietary advanced analytics combine oil sampling, live telemetry and operating data to predict maintenance needs, enabling fewer interventions, higher uptime and longer asset life. Emeco: “Every component that reaches its full life instead of being pulled early is capital that stays working. Every failure caught weeks out is a planned window instead of a breakdown. One small central team does this for the national fleet: our own rules from our own failure history clear the routine, models built on each machine’s operating history flag when it drifts from its own normal before an OEM limit is reached, vetted by a condition monitoring analyst before being actioned.”
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