JOST centralises safety training in Victoria

Eight years ago, the Victorian arm of JOST’s national manufacturing operations sat on Cherry Lane in Laverton North, a prominent industrial hub in the state.

The site clocked 1,500 square metres – a suitable size for the enterprise at the time. But as JOST’s role in the transport industry continued to grow, so too did its operational requirements.

Some years later, JOST relocated to a 4,200-square-metre facility on Mt Derrimut Road in Derimut. Again, this site was well-suited for JOST’s needs. But the business continued to grow and demanded more room as a result.

“We realised that we needed to expand,” says JOST Australia National Fleet Manager, Shane Harbridge. “Our building capacity and storage requirements outpaced the space that we were in.

“Moving to a site that could accommodate our growth was essential.”

JOST returned to Cherry Lane in Laverton North in early September this year, this time to a 14,000-square-metre facility backing directly onto the Princes Freeway. In addition to its sheer size, the new site features many amenities which benefit JOST’s operations. Chief among them is a purpose-built training facility to provide mechanics, dealers and fleet managers with safety training sessions and aftersales support.

“We have always hosted three types of training and support for our customers and staff – workshop training, driver training and product training,” Shane says. “We’ve typically supplied these services to our customers by travelling to their sites and walking them through the specific products that they’ve bought from us. But the amount of support we’ve been able to provide with this approach has been quite restrictive due to the products available onsite.”

JOST’s new in-house training facility eliminates this problem. It centralises these long-provided technical workshop sessions into one location, allowing customers to disassemble and reassemble JOST products onsite in order to learn how to effectively service and maintain them.

“Our training room provides ample space for our customers to come to us for aftersales support,” says JOST Australia Regional Sales Manager, Graham Cox. “Together, we run through a wider variety of our products with a more in-depth level of training. We can do certificate training to repair certain JOST fifth wheels while also covering other models and components altogether.”

The new training room serves to educate industry stakeholders on the many products JOST has to offer, in a comprehensive manner not previously provided. This capability, according to Shane, has been a long time coming.

“We always wanted a training facility like this but we never had the space,” he explains. “So, when we started the process of moving facilities, we needed ensure this idea could be accommodated.

“The Laverton North site didn’t initially have room for the training facility. However, when designing the layout of the new building, we made sure that this critically important aspect was accommodated in the fit-out.”

The aftersales support aspect of the training facility is further enhanced with a showroom which features JOST’s past Brisbane Truck Show displays and upcoming product developments for customers to view.

“This new space also allows us to host information nights for new pieces of equipment and technology,” Shane says. “It’s a setup that is comparable to the Brisbane Truck Show.”

These events, according to Graham, allow customers to receive critical information on JOST’s expanding product portfolio.

“We invite fleets and OEMs into our facility to help them understand all of the JOST equipment coming to the market,” he says. “This even extends to our own sellers and other stakeholders that are involved in our brand.

“We want to provide brand knowledge to as many people as we can. A lot of our customers might not know about all of the products the JOST group has to offer until we show them, so this training room provides us with a space to show everything off in full.”

JOST’s training room and the other various amenities at its Laverton North facility were recently showcased at an official open day event in October. Industry personnel and partners were in attendance to celebrate the new development and, according to Graham, were nothing short of impressed.

“We received a lot of comments and reactions from different people across different industries,” he says. “They were surprised by the scale and scope of the operation and services we provide.

“That’s exactly what the room and overall facility was built for. We want to bring all of our customers together in one space so that they can have a better awareness of our products.”

New JOST employees have also received detailed tours of the training room. Shane says they have felt supported to learn more about the OEM’s products in their own ways.

“Everyone learns in a different way,” he says. “Some like to read about concepts, some like to listen to them be explained and some need to deal with them hands on.

“With this training room, we can give our employees all three aspects to ensure that they get a full learning experience before they start working with us. They can see our products while we discuss them, meaning they are able to understand how they work up close.”

Following the success of developing the training room and completing the overall facility relocation, Shane says JOST is equipped with even more confidence to grow in the future.

“Developing these resources and undertaking this move has really highlighted how much we have to offer in the market,” he says. “This new facility has shown us that we can expand without restriction.

“The jump we made to develop the training room, warehousing facilities and manufacturing space was big, but we did it. That’s a great indicator of what else we can do.”