Ennis Traffic Safety Solutions secures a new Transport and Main Roads contract with the help of CHEP solution
June 22, 2012
Ennis Traffic Safety Solutions has secured a new Transport and Main Roads (TMR) contract in Queensland with the help of a CHEP solution.
The global road marking company
moves 5 million litres of paint a year,
and needs a supply chain partner with significant reach and depth.
With service centres and agents in 67 regional and metropolitan locations around Australia CHEP
meets this criteria, but in 2011 CHEP was able to offer much more.
The Brambles-owned pallet CHEP Australia put together solution incorporating scanning equipment and bar coded boxes to win the TMR deal for Ennis.
General Manager Ennis Traffic Safety Solutions Ian Cocoran says the key to winning TMR’s tender was two-fold.
“TMR required electronic traceability, which at the time was not offered in the container pooling space, and CHEP had to be ‘invisible’, Cocoran says.
“All TMR’s paint containers had to be scanned in and out, so we knew we had to do something very different to win the new tender.”
CHEP set Ennis up with scanning equipment, and bar coded boxes that allowed them to comply with the TMR requirements to provide a system with give a greater visibility of product movements and increased traceability.
“Effectively, CHEP is invisible to our customer,” Cocoran says.
“This was a critical requirement for the TMR and helped us win the tender. The process has been very good. It’s all been very positive.”
Additionally, winning the TMR contract required a fundamental change in business process which would see Ennis controlling the equipment used to transport its products at all times, that is, not transferring equipment on to the TMR’s account.
CHEP worked with the team at Ennis to create the new equipment management system.
Not long into the contract, a new challenge presented itself: traffic paint, which cures within two minutes of hitting air, is also heat sensitive, making temperature control critical.
The Ennis and CHEP team quickly discovered traditional blue CHEP boxes absorbed too much heat and posed a potential temperature issue.
The solution was to switch to CHEP white boxes.
Ennis has recently moved into a new market, the supply of glass beads, a central ingredient in reflective road paint.
“Because of the distances we cover, return logistics is one of our biggest issues,” Cocoran says. “Developing a foldable box will be worthwhile at the end of the day, if we get it right.”