OVER the last decade, BMW Group Australia has experienced such unprecedented growth driven by consumer demand, that not only have sales increased by 85%, but their Melbourne warehouse has had to cope with a growth in vehicles being shifted from 9,318 in 1997 to 17,197 in 2007.
To tackle this increased demand, BMW decided that a twin warehouse strategy was the best solution to maintain the company’s premium service objectives of optimising parts availability and maximising speed-of-delivery to dealers and customers.
The strategy was two-fold: design a new National Distribution Centre in Sydney; and re-focus the use of the Melbourne Distribution Centre to become a satellite warehouse.
The resultant project took over three-and-a-half years to become a reality and BMW has now offi cially opened its new state-of- the-art National Distribution Centre in Moorebank, Sydney.
According to BMW Group Australia parts operations man ager, Martin Ellis, the decision to re-locate the NDC to Sydney was due to 58% of the parts being sold into dealers across New South Wales and Queensland, with 48% moving in to Sydney and Brisbane metropolitan regions.
“Our new facility stocks the full range of parts and acces sories for BMW with over 30,000 SKU’s. Moorebank NDC will sup ply fast and medium moving stock in to the Northern and Central regions and slow moving stock nationally. Our target FPA is 93-95% ex Moorebank and 85- 87% ex-Mulgrave,” Ellis said.
Mulgrave satellite warehouse will stock fast and medium mov ing stock and service 85% of the Southern region requirements directly with over 13,000 SKU’s. It will also hold the centralised stock of LifeStyle and Motorcycle Rider wear.
The new facility in Moorebank is 12,600 square metres of ware house, with a provision for expansion to 20,000 square metres to handle future growth of the company.
“A critical component of our new NDC is the turnkey supply of a state-of-the-art racking, mez zanine and storage systems designed and installed by SSI Schaefer International. The rack ing height is 7 metres, and 3 lev els of mezzanine approximately 7.5 metres in height and the foot print of the mezzanine is approx imately 1300 square metres,” said Ellis.
SSI Schaefer International cus tom-built the pallet racking I600, the modular shelving R3000 for storage of small and medium parts, the mezzanine, lighting system, sprinkler system, goods hoist, mesh wall panels, shelf/rack and aisle labelling and modular shelving for storage of bulky and body parts. Schaefer also organised all the local authority consents so the build ing could be habited, including development application, con struction certificate and occu pancy certificate.
The Schaefer I600 pallet rack ing system offers BMW the flexi bility towards future modifica tions and integration of picking levels to meet new and modified product ranges.
The Schaefer R3000 shelving system was easy-to-assemble boltless and modular design.
The Schaefer mezzanine was custom-built for BMW purpose and has the highest load capaci ty and material quality.
Schaefer installed the BMW goods hoist system which serves three levels of the NDC and has a load capacity of 2000 kg.
“The success and on-time com pletion of the Schaefer installa tion was critical to BMW meet ing all subsequent ramp-up dead lines, and having the facility fully operational on schedule. Allan Slingsby and the team at Schaefer were extremely profes sional and competent, overcame a number of unexpected hurdles outside of their control and achieved all of the deadlines set for them,” Ellis said.