Commercial vehicle manufacturer, Scania, has announced the establishment of two new parts warehouses.
Increased investment in its Australian operations will see the company continue to support company-owned branches including the latest facility at Eastern Creek scheduled to commence operations later in the year.
These investments consist of a new national warehouse in Campbellfield and another in Perth dedicated to mainly to its mining customers in Western Australia.
Part of a strategy to secure additional capacity for spare parts storage and dispatch, Scania is looking to provide a higher level of first pick of spare and replacement parts, underpinning its promise of exceptional uptime for customers.
The Campbellfield facility, which is located near the Victorian headquarters of Scania and includes a 9000 m2 warehouse, is set to open in September.
According to the company it is substantially bigger than the existing National Parts Warehouse which opened in 1992.
The second investment is in a new standalone warehouse facility in Perth, where 2000 m2 of parts storage will support Scania’s WA operations from July 2021.
This facility is required to service the growing Scania on- and off-road population, particularly among demanding applications such as Scania’s many mining customers for whom uptime, and therefore parts access is critical.
“We have taken this decision to expand our national and regional warehousing capacity as a result of the accelerated growth of sales of trucks, buses and engines over the past decade, and therefore the expected demands for replacement and service parts for these vehicles and engines over the next decade and beyond,” said Patrik Tharna, Scania After Sales Director.
“We have doubled our truck sales and market share since 2010, and our bus market penetration remains extremely high, underscoring the need to supply many customers around the country with a reliable flow of parts, as well as the additional service capacity we are adding with our new company-owned branch at Eastern Creek,” he said.
“We live in an increasingly uncertain world and we have all seen over the past year the impact on long-distance supply chains. With this added capacity for parts-holdings we anticipate being able to provide more parts, more quickly to more customers from these new warehouses.”
Last year as COVID hit, Scania began to increase parts stocks at its National Warehouse in Victoria and at branch warehouses around the country in order to build resilience in case of major supply chain disruptions.
Scania also secured capability to deliver directly to workshops and customers from other warehouses in Europe and Asia.
Despite these efforts, production capacity and container availability has continued to impact spare parts availability.
According to Ben Nicholson, National Parts Manager for Australia, the after sales team member responsible for the warehouse capacity expansion project, the new National Warehouse in Melbourne will allow for even more stock to be located in Australia to counter the negative effect COVID-19 has had on global supply chains by making Scania more independent.
“With the addition of the new Regional Warehouse in Perth, we will also build some additional resilience into our supply chain within Australia,” he said.
“When the new warehouses are online, we will improve spare parts availability reducing lead times, as well as being better at pre-picking kits to provide superior support to our own and our authorised independent dealer workshop operations,” Nicholson said.
Meanwhile the expansion of its warehousing infrastructure is expected to require Scania to grow its employees working in Australia according to Tharna.
“We are now well over the 500 mark,” he said.
“In line with Scania’s global and local drive towards a sustainable transport solution, the new National Warehouse comes equipped with solar panels on the roof. We will take all opportunities to continue to reduce our carbon footprint,” concluded Tharna.