The network
four plants, one DC, 17 docksFour furnace sites for a country the size of Europe. Western Australia has no furnace at all, so every pallet sold there crosses the Nullarbor once, in volume, to the Perth DC and is picked from there — which is the entire reason that building exists.
What each plant despatches
volume and cost are not the same ranking| Plant | B-doubles/day | Tonnes/day | Docks | Freight/day | $/tonne |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Melbourne Works | 41.0 | 457 | 6 | $8k | $17 |
| Brisbane Works | 39.9 | 464 | 4 | $17k | $37 |
| Sydney Works | 23.8 | 264 | 6 | $16k | $59 |
| Adelaide Works | 17.7 | 203 | 5 | $33k | $162 |
Adelaide runs the fewest trucks and carries the largest bill. It is the only plant that can form wine ware, and it is the closest furnace to a state with none — so it pays for the geography twice.
Where it costs the most to serve
by delivery point| Delivery point | Account | Haul | B-doubles/day | Freight/day | Served from |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Stillwater Brewing, Canning Vale | WA | 2,659 km | 3.3 | $14k | Adelaide |
| Barossa Ridge Wines, Margaret River | WA | 2,933 km | 2.3 | $13k | Adelaide |
| Tallow Creek Brewery, Townsville | QLD | 1,377 km | 4.2 | $11k | Brisbane |
| Ninety Mile Brewing, Dandenong | VIC | 245 km | 15.7 | $7k | Sydney, Melbourne |
| Golden Vale Preserves, Shepparton | VIC | 391 km | 4.6 | $5k | Sydney, Melbourne |
| Redgum Brewing, Abbotsford | VIC | 125 km | 11.9 | $4k | Brisbane, Melbourne |
| Golden Vale Preserves, Berri | SA | 576 km | 2.4 | $4k | Sydney, Adelaide |
| Murray Foods, Griffith | NSW | 505 km | 2.3 | $3k | Melbourne |
| Yarra Bend Vineyards, Healesville | VIC | 823 km | 1.2 | $3k | Sydney |
| Murray Foods, Mildura | VIC | 417 km | 1.9 | $2k | Adelaide |
Freight you cannot route away
articles only one plant can form| Article | To | Haul | Freight/day | Only plant that can form it |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 15021640 ml amber longneck6 × 152 · high rise · shrink hood | Redgum Brewing, Abbotsford | 1,701 km | $4k | Brisbane Works |
This lane is a production constraint wearing a logistics costume. The ware has to come from the one plant with a machine that can form it — section centres, gob band, colour — so no routing decision touches it. The lever is a mould set and a line qualification, not a carrier negotiation, and the cost lands on a freight budget where nobody can do anything about it.
It is 5% of the freight bill here, which is small — the network is well covered. It is worth watching rather than fixing: the number climbs quietly every time an article is qualified on one line only, and by then the mould spend has already been made.
Tomorrow’s trucks
17 of 133 are part loadsEach column is a B-double, filled to what it is actually carrying. A truck runs out of floor before it runs out of mass, so a part load costs nearly what a full one costs and the freight model — which prices per pallet — cannot see it. Consolidating the part loads that leave the same plant for the same state would save 6 trucks a day without renegotiating a single delivery window.
Delivered in full, on time
the one number the customer also keepsIn full is a stock problem and on time is a distance problem, and they fail independently — which is why a single percentage hides what to do about it. The cause shown is whichever failed most often on that account.
Wrap lanes
a bottleneck rather than a queueWrap type is a customer specification, not a choice, so a pallet needing a shrink hood cannot be sent to a free stretch-wrap lane. That is what makes this a bottleneck and not a queue: the plant can be at sixty per cent overall and completely blocked on one wrap.
Empty trucks going back
against cullet the business is buyingWorth about $25k a day at best, and the honest version of the idea is narrower than it first looks: it only works where the return leg already exists and the customer already generates recoverable cullet. A dock two hours away is worth almost nothing. A bottling plant on the far side of a thousand kilometres is worth a great deal, because the alternative is paying a merchant full freight on glass that was already in the right place.