Gunns Timber Products

2009-08-30 - Getting serious about our service offer

Many of our Victorian customers would be familiar with the history of our old sites in Port Melbourne – the old Auspine site at Lorimer St for softwood and the old Gunns site at Rogers St for Tas Oak. If age lines indicate the years of experience and hardship, then these two sites certainly had not aged gracefully but hold lots of memories for our people and many others in the industry still today. None of our staff will miss the vibrations of the office every time a large truck went past on Lorimer St!

During the last month, after months of extensive searching, assessment and negotiation by our state sales and operations management, the Gunns and Auspine sites in Melbourne have now come together in a new warehouse based in the south eastern suburbs. In bringing the two warehouse teams together we are now able to offer our customers a range of hardwood and softwood species from the one location. This is designed to compliment our direct ex mill service offer which is an integral part of our overall offer to customers.

The new warehouse is located at Lot 3B, 1490 Ferntree Gully Road Knoxfield and was an existing site that has been modified to meet our needs.  Key features include:

11,280 m² Warehouse
1,200m² Undercover loading / unloading area
2,500m² Hardstand
600m² Office

With a sales and warehouse team holding in excess of 282 years experience in the timber industry we are currently focused on cross training our people to be multi skilled across hardwood and softwood species.

What’s that saying . . . “Build it and they will come”.  We know that customer satisfaction is much more than just having a big shed full of product but it gets us to the start line.  We will have the right stock, with reliable, consistent service – meaning DIFOT (Delivery-In-Full-On-Time), high quality accessible internal phone sales personnel, and the right product offer including a wide ranging piece offer.  The new warehouse will also increase efficiencies from picking and deliveries which will enable quicker turnaround times with orders for JIT delivery.

The warehouse will now have us located with easier access to Melbourne’s freeway system enabling improved management of delivery times and schedules to our Victorian customers.

Inside the warehouse we have erected tree racking and pigeon holes for a comprehensive piece offer that will include Tas Oak and Jarrah.  In these species, the offer of piece orders in DAR and Mouldings is equally important as the pack offer JIT.

The facility is fully enclosed - this includes the loading / unloading area and reduces the possibility of our material picking up moisture or damage from weather exposure and causing issues for our customer’s end user.

The new facility and office will also support our new national Sales & Distribution structure by having all Customer Service for VIC and SA customers now being serviced by the one team at this location. This will increase ordering efficiency for our customers and support for our Account Managers on the road in VIC and SA.

All customer enquiries from these two states regarding stocks at any of our eight sawmills/ manufacturing plants and outstanding orders or delivery times will come via this service team of five in our new Melbourne office.

Racking for over 1000 m² of Tas Oak
Fully enclosed warehouse with in excess of 10,000 m² of undercover storage
In excess of 5,000 m² hard stand
Australia’s largest stock of Pine, Tas Oak, Jarrah and imported species
Complete undercover weather-protected loading and unloading bays
Dual loading and unloading capability
New piece and pack offer