Six months after NMC’s recommendations, Cardinia’s civil maintenance service is measurably more efficient and better regarded.
Cardinia Shire Council’s civil maintenance team was struggling to keep pace with rising customer requests and deteriorating road quality across a genuinely difficult network to manage. The shire spans two starkly different regions which create distinct problems: the flat southern region is prone to significant flooding, while the hilly northern region creates steep, unmaintainable assets.
With the team relying heavily on reactive maintenance, defects were typically patched with short-term remedial fixes rather than treated with the full rehabilitation needed to address their root cause, meaning the same problems kept resurfacing rather than being resolved for good.
NMC consulted directly with Council’s civil maintenance staff through more than 30 individual consultations and five workshops, and went out on ride-alongs to inspect the unmaintainable assets and existing maintenance processes first-hand. These findings were fed into a maturity assessment which found Cardinia’s business maturity sitting well below the expected range for a peri-urban council. Benchmarking against comparable councils confirmed where Cardinia ranked and provided proven examples of how others had tackled similar challenges.
From there, NMC recommended targeted training delivered by subject matter experts, so every maintenance activity addressed the root cause of a defect rather than a short-term fix. Council was also encouraged to trial a proactive maintenance approach in place of its reactive model, alongside an investment in an additional flip screen to improve materials processing.
