Page 15 - OPE Mar-Jun 22

MARKETPLACE
Chippers, Shredders & Splitters
A struggle
to meet demand
Supply chain woes and a local manufacturing setback have impacted chipper deliveries when they’re needed most. Andy Kerr reports.
“While this event has been an unexpected knockback, we have a resilient team that has a clear vision to come back stronger.”
Hansa’s Marketing & Communications Manager, Chloe Leung, is equally upbeat, despite the loss of momentum in what has been an impressive growth phase for Hansa, as evidenced by the backlog of orders leading up to the fire.
“Covid has actually been a boon to our business,” she says.
“Perhaps spending more time at home motivated consumers to invest in their home environment, and our sales increased significantly.
“We had never previously had such a large backorder for our chippers, which is why we have increased production capacity over 50% in the last two years and expanded our team from about 35 to over 50 people.”
As with many companies seeking to recruit, manage and moreover look after staff during these disrupted times, Hansa has recognised the need for a HR Manager to the challenge of growing its team during the pandemic.
Has the fire affected jobs? No, says Chloe: “Our team has actually grown by three since the fire. Some team members may be doing tasks that are outside of their normal roles,
but no one has left or been made redundant.” Due to the Covid situation, Hansa’s
office-based team had already been set up to work remotely. And, since the majority of the company’s component supply is local, Chloe Leung says Hansa has been affected less by supply chain issues than many other businesses.
“We were able to mitigate component shortages by communicating with our suppliers early and often to forecast and secure parts before issues arose.”
Since the fire however, the pressing issue has been the challenge of Hansa losing all of its active production space.
However, as Martin Vogel refers to above, the new building extension completed in December 2021 suffered much less damage and should be able to be recommissioned in a couple of months.
Best wishes to the Hansa team!
Robust category performance
Other suppliers reporting strong chipper sales include Hydralada, Taskpower and Steelfort.
At the latter, we caught up briefly with Steelfort’s Gavin Lowndes who says sales of big-ticket outdoor power products have exceeded expectations over the past couple
BY NOW YOU’LL be aware that misfortune struck the big name in local chipper manufacturing when
a significant fire broke out in the Hansa factory in Hamilton on February 12.
It caused extensive damage to the company’s entire manufacturing plant and was a cruel blow to a highly regarded business with ambitious growth plans.
“Needless to say,” Hansa MD Martin Vogel informs us, “manufacturing will not be business as usual while we rebuild.
“Fortunately, it appears that our new 2,000m2 building extension hasn’t suffered structural damage.
“We intend to set up manufacturing in this space once it has been resurrected in three months’ time [i.e., May], which should bring us close to pre-fire production capacity.”
Meantime, Hansa management has formed a plan to operate in split shifts out of eight different locations around Hamilton
to get the team back to work and resume manufacturing.
“As you can imagine, this is a logistical nightmare,” Martin Vogel continues, “therefore the production output is unknown at this point.”
Martin goes on to explain that as a result, production will be prioritised “based on confirmed customer orders and the ability to manufacture individual models.”
Sadly, some longer lead time inventory has been lost in the fire, which means the models impacted by this will have a longer delivery delay.
Hansa is initially resuming manufacture of its smaller product range, to be followed by commercial tree care models once “they have regained some rhythm.”
Speaking of which, the last stage of recovery, adds Martin Vogel, “is to rebuild the building that we lost in the fire to allow us to deliver on our growth plans.
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