Quality Control Freight Management (QCFM) specialises in interstate refrigerated transport and is owned and run by Eddie Quadara, 49, who has been in the game for 30 years, and his wife, Vivianne Quadara.
“The whole fleet runs on Dura Bright,” Eddie says. “Our first brand new truck had the Dura Bright wheels and we haven’t looked back since. They’re a good quality rim, they are easy to clean, they stay shiny and the support we get from Alcoa is just the whole package.”
Starting out in Melbourne, QCFM now also operates depots in Sydney and Brisbane too, predominantly carrying produce along the eastern seaboard. Most of the trucks run as B-doubles but there are also some semis in the mix, along with a few rigids too.
For Eddie, the foray into trucking wasn’t much of a surprise.
“My dad was originally a truck driver, doing interstate, so I grew up going in the truck with Dad on the school holidays,” he says. “I’m Melbourne based and my grandparents are in Sydney, so the whole family would get in the truck to go and visit them. All of Eddie’s trucks are from Volvo, his trailers are from Maxi-CUBE and Thermo King supplies the refrigeration units. Eddie’s tyres are from Bridgestone, his fifth wheels and landing legs are from JOST, the axles are from BPW, and the wheels, of course, are always Alcoa.
“When you start building a relationship, it makes it pretty easy,” he says. “Alcoa has always been easy to deal with. If there’s ever a problem, they fix it straight away.”
Eddie likes to stay loyal to his suppliers, and has been using Alcoa wheels from the beginning.
“You only know how good a brand is when something requires attention and you get the support,” he says. “That’s what’s important to us in our line of work.”
QCFM’s interstate trucks are generally replaced every eight years or so.
“That’s when we put them on local and we get the newer batch doing the longer kilometres. We purchased six new Volvo FH Globetrotter XXL 600hp prime movers about 18 months ago.”
Eddie takes great pride in his fleet.
“Our trucks get washed once a week,” he says.
“You can see some of them are coming back pretty black at the moment because of the floods they’ve been going through. We have guys who come out and wash the fleet once a week in all states and they come out like brand new. We always get comments on how clean our trucks look.
“Customers obviously like it when the units are clean and maintained. Behind the scenes we’re also running Guardian’s Seeing Machines, satellite tracking and temperature monitoring, too. We like to make sure that’s it not just a shiny truck but the back-end runs seamlessly as well.
“And our managers play a really important part in our business too. They’ve all been with us for a long time. I’m very fortunate because many of my staff have been with me for many years. We have a really good customer base and they’re an import- ant part of our business also. It’s like a big partnership – without the staff and customers, we wouldn’t have this business.”
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