By Patrick Avenell

Through a long process of expansion and contraction, Electrolux Home Products is starting to realise the efficiencies and operations strengths of having a unified spare parts and service centre at its home-away-from-home in Adelaide, South Australia.

Although the company’s head office is located in Mascot, Sydney, in the shade of aeroplanes taking off and landing from nearby Charles Kingsford Smith airport, its cavernous facility in Beverley, northwest Adelaide, is providing an enormous boost to the company that supplies the Electrolux, AEG, Westinghouse, Kelvinator, Chef, Simpson and Dishlex brands.

“You’ve seen one warehouse you’ve seen them all,” quips the understated national logistics and spare parts manager, Chris Chilcott, before explaining the potted history that led to this new spare parts base, which services all spare parts throughout Australia and New Zealand, the Pacific Ocean regions, the Middle East, South Africa and North America.

In the old days of Southcorp and EMAIL, when Electrolux came to Australia and unified all the aforementioned brands, there were facilities spread across the country all specialising in certain categories. 

Dishwashers were based out of Regency Park in South Australia (that has now moved to Poland), cooking was in Dudley Park (South Australia and still going strong) and refrigeration was in Orange, New South Wales (still active though with some ongoing issues) and washers and dryers were in Beverley.

After that laundry production was moved to Rayong in Thailand, Electrolux sold the facility and then leased it back on 12 month terms. Its location is critical: near Port Adelaide for the convenience of launching cargo to foreign quarters and in central Australia for shipment to the capital cities. Electrolux still runs warehousing services in Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne and Perth, though this is clearly the Mothership.

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At 25,000 square metres and holding 22,000 active SKUs worth almost $16 million — and this is just spare parts — the Beverley warehouse is an example of best practice aftersales service logistics, Chilcott claimed.

All the small parts are located in what’s called a ‘vertical carousel’ containing 50,000 ‘locations’ — repositories ranging from the size of a DSLR camera to that of a soundbar (to use electronics references), that can automatically transition like the safes in a Swiss Bank to provide the part required with minimal human resources.

Two people working on the carousel can make up to 85 picks per hour, compared with the much slower 35 picks per hour under the previous manual model.

The establishment of this facility has not been all golden, however. Two weeks before opening in January 2013, there was a power outage at the facility, which is also used as a showroom for entertaining retailers.

When the power returned, Chilcott said, it “spiked the system and grilled the control boards in the appliances”. Thousands of dollars’ worth of beautiful new AEG and Electrolux cookers, refrigerators and hobs rendered burnt out and unable to operate.

It turned out a dedicated power transferrer hadn’t been correctly installed. Thankfully, it wasn’t the appliances that had been adversely affected, just the control boards. Chilcott said they were able to save nearly all of them by replacing these control boards, though some appliances had to be retired to the great appliance heaven in the sky.

While Current.com.au toured this facility, we were given a sneak preview of what is on the way from Electrolux Home Products, both in terms of large and small appliances.

We can now confirm that Electrolux is set to launch breakfast appliances – toasters and kettles – in Australia, as well as a much wider range of mixers to complement the hand mixer that went to market in late 2012.

In major appliances, AEG will soon release a new premium range with touch control via an iPad style screen, similar to the new input functionality on new Smeg and Miele ovens.

For those that care for aesthetics, we also saw the new handle that will be consistent across Electrolux’s cooking and refrigeration products and it should please consumers looking for a modern, clean look.

Click here to see our full image gallery from inside Electrolux's Adelaide warehouse.