MHD COVER STORY
LEADING BY
INNOVATION Jungheinrich Australia has invested in 50 new service vans.
MHD catches up with Grant Stewart, Sales and Marketing Director at Jungheinrich Australia to find out why the fast-growing forklift provider is committed to putting innovation first.
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TP Forklifts has been the exclusive partner for Jungheinrich products in Australia since 2008 and in 2015, Jungheinrich acquired NTP Forklifts. What was once a small privatelyowned local company now has the backing and support of an international organisation with revenue of nearly €3.8 billion in the last financial year. According to Grant Stewart, Jungheinrich Australia could always offer the high-quality Jungheinrich forklifts but struggled to pair the product with the standard of customer
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service expected of one of the world’s leading brands. “Jungheinrich is a superior European provider, and their forklifts are top of the range. But with that there is an expectation to give a service that matches the product. However, NTP Forklifts Australia being a small private company just couldn’t match the service offering that some of the other big players could offer,” Grant says. Grant joined Jungheinrich Australia two years after the acquisition happened and was tasked with transforming the organisation to
function like a corporate entity, with all the infrastructure and technology that is needed to offer a high-level of support, advice and service. “We recently engaged an independent consultancy to survey our customers. We very quickly found out that customers were happy with the product, but not at all with the service,” Grant says. For Grant, this discovery resulted in a huge overhaul for Jungheinrich Australia, starting with the branding. “The service levels were not of a standard expected by Jungheinrich. Customers would receive a superior
