Behind the call-out: keeping robots running on the Fleurieu Peninsula

August 2026. Article by: Rick Majoor

For farmers weighing up robotic milking, the question isn't usually whether the technology works - it's what happens when it doesn't. Dennis Phillips has spent the last five years answering exactly that question, first as an electrical contractor and now as the owner of a Lely service partnership covering South Australia's Fleurieu Peninsula. His job, in short: make sure the robots keep running smoothly, and make sure farmers never feel like they're on their own when they don't.

Dennis's path into robotic milking started sideways. "We started as an electrical contractor for our first client here in South Australia," he explains, "and then progressed on to being a service partner for Lely Oceania." Five years on, he's still climbing the learning curve - but enjoying every step of it.

It's a trajectory that's given him a front-row seat to the single biggest question farmers ask before they commit to automation. "Generally, the farmers like to be reassured that there's enough staff available in a timely manner to make sure that they can keep their robots and systems running as required," he says.

Robots are machines, and machines could have problems. Dennis doesn't dress that up. "It's an electronic machine, so things do happen if you don’t service them well. Generally, we find it's minimal."

The causes are rarely dramatic. When the call comes in, the response is fast and layered. "We share an on-call phone, so we can answer the call generally straight away and work through their issues over the phone to start with," Dennis says. Often that's enough - "sometimes we can identify a simple fix that the farmer can do themselves… quite often they are a computer problem, and sometimes they just need a reset." If it needs a technician, "the majority of them are on farm within the hour."

And when one robot does go down, the rest of the system keeps working. "There's capacity in the system to handle one robot being out of action quite comfortably," he says. "Very, very rarely would you have multiple issues at once - and if you did, we'd be there even quicker."

Distance is one of the biggest practical challenges of servicing farms across a region like the Fleurieu Peninsula, and Dennis leans hard on Lely's remote tools to shrink it. "Our ability to log onto the system and review the current site status, and look beyond what the farmer can see, deeper into the robot, makes a big difference on solving a problem in a timely manner."

The Lely Technician Diagnostic Application (LTDA) is central to that. "Very much so — we have remote access in the Lely tools and diagnostic apps, that make a big difference to problem-solving and solving issues well before they become a problem."

Beyond emergency callouts, Dennis's team runs scheduled preventive maintenance under Lely's ABCD program. "We try to schedule them so that we're on a farm nearly every month," he says, reviewing the system for anything that might cause trouble down the track.

That regularity builds something you can't fast-track: trust. "Being on the farm with the farmer, or the people operating the farm, you have the maximum opportunity to pass on tips and tricks and preventative tasks."

Becoming a Lely technician isn't reserved for a select few. "Technically yes — if you're technically minded and willing to learn on the mechanical side of things, and also the electronic and computer side of things," Dennis says. New technicians come up through Lely's SL1 program — a mix of classroom and online learning — before progressing to SL2 and specialising further. Dennis and one of his own technicians recently completed that next step themselves.  

Nothing slows down a repair like waiting on a part, so Dennis's operation is built to avoid it. "We keep on site, on the farmer's property, the small items and materials and consumables, so the farmer can do a fair bit of the basic stuff themselves." Behind that, his workshop holds the critical spares locally, backed by a further stock held at the Lely warehouse in Melbourne.

The on-call phone runs around the clock too, shared across the team on a roster — "so that we all get a break and have a weekend off from time to time." 

Dennis expects the next few years to be less about response times - which he's already confident in - but more and more about catching problems before they happen. "The tools that are coming on in the near future will be very helpful for greater remote diagnostics, preventing downtime and faster return to uptimes if something happens," he says. He also points to the scale of Lely's global data collection as a quiet advantage for local farmers: "There is a lot of data collected globally, and all those faults and problems are logged, so they are addressed and managed to minimise them in the future. Farmers can rest assured there's a backup there."

For anyone still on the fence about switching to robotics because of service concerns, Dennis's answer is direct: "It'll exceed what you're currently getting on your conventional farming, because of the greater online presence and access that we have to diagnose the faults and repair them as quick as possible."  

*Disclaimer

Dennis Phillips has serviced Lely robotic milking systems across South Australia's Fleurieu Peninsula for five years, starting as an electrical contractor before becoming a certified service partner for Lely.

This article is based on Dennis Phillips' account of his own service operations. Individual response times and arrangements may vary by region and service partner.