Marstons updates fleet with £700,000 Yale deal with Briggs
The UK’s top independent pub retailing and brewing business has opted for ‘one stop’ asset management support by awarding Briggs Equipment a new contract valued at £700,000.
Briggs secured the deal after Marston’s plc issued a detailed tender as part of a new group-wide procurement policy and is supplying 37 pieces of Yale equipment on an outright purchase basis. Briggs is also providing full maintenance support for the new trucks, which include 3 tonne and 2.5 tonne LPG counterbalance forklift trucks, 3 tonne LPG compact forklifts, reach trucks, low level order pickers and ride-on pallet trucks.
The new Yale equipment will be deployed across 13 depots around the UK, including Mansfield, Burton on Trent, Shadsworth near Blackburn, Cumberland and the Park Brewery site in Wolverhampton, adjacent to the new look Marston’s House, which reopened recently following a £10million upgrade. The forklifts will be used predominantly to transfer pallets of beer, spirits and soft drinks and keg and cask products to kerbside lorries for onward distribution to the 1,700 Marston’s pub-restaurants and bars around the country.
To ensure the forklifts are suited to the Marston’s operation, special keg clamp attachments that can lift up to 18 barrels at a time are being supplied as part of the contract. Marston’s and Briggs are also working with a specialist manufacturer to develop a keg deflector that will enhance operator safety while also reducing the risk of truck damage if a keg should fall from the clamp.
Kevin O’Rourke, warehouse operations manager based at Marston’s House in Wolverhampton, said: “We’ve been business partners with Briggs for a long time, but didn’t fully appreciate the scope of its current operation. For us, it is the range of aftersales support services that is available that makes such good sense.
“Briggs Equipment was the only supplier that could offer a complete response to our current needs and support for the future development of our business and I am confident that, working together, we can improve the management of our fleet and open up opportunities to generate key operational efficiencies.”
Under the terms of the contract Briggs engineers will service and maintain Marston’s existing fleet of 160 mixed brand machines, including its cleaning equipment, and will take on responsibility for the replacement tyre programme.
By providing Marston’s with complete fleet transparency and 24/7 access to accurate data that supports top level decision making, Briggs Equipment’s market-leading asset management tool, BE Portal, is set to play a major role in the partnership. A team of Briggs contract managers will use the system to monitor truck spend while also working proactively with Marston’s depot managers to reduce costs across all sites.
Mike Oseland, Briggs Equipment’s Key Account Manager, said: “When Marston’s awarded us this new contract, the focus was not solely on Yale’s reliability and versatility although both attributes, and excellent fuel consumption, were fully demonstrated in an equipment trial.
“As a ‘one stop’ resource, providing full asset management support, we are able to add real value to this partnership, enabling Marston’s to improve its logistics to maximise productivity.”