In 2016 the Motus operation began with Andy Harris hiring a van and his wife Emily processing orders from home, with natural growth in the intervening years seeing the fleet grow to over 70 vehicles transporting craft beer and other beverages across a large area of NSW and SE Queensland.
The business has two warehouses in Sydney and one in Brisbane, as well as warehouses in Canberra, Newcastle, Coffs Harbour and Byron Bay).
Distribution for the alcohol industry was not Andy’s first career choice.
“I said I would never do transport,” says Andy.
“My dad owned a transport company here in Sydney. He owned that business and I’d worked in it when I was younger. It was a taxi truck business.
“Later, I went to uni and then I actually got into the alcohol industry, I left my family business in transport and then worked in the alcohol industry for 15 years. I was in sales and marketing and I was once a brand manager for Bundy, looking after key accounts.
“I met my wife on the first day in the industry she worked in safety, in her uncle’s pub. Emily was managing the pub while at Uni, then worked in Safety for the like of Kennards Hire and Coke.
“I saw that in the alcohol industry, they’re all complaining to me about transport. I thought, it’s just got to be done better. Now, we’re kind of breathing fresh air into transport. We’re big on customer service, we’re big on our own staff, and the environment is something that you have to be good to.
“We want to make sure that we do the right thing and hybrids are the first step into that and it’s a relatively low risk. It’s not a massive capital outlay.
“When you’re in it, you can sort of pick where it can be improved. My real customer is pubs, clubs, restaurants. I tell the beer suppliers that we are an extension of their business and make sure that we do what their customers tell us. All of our drivers are a customer service person.
“You’re told when you’re going to deliver it, it’s got to be there at four and if it’s not there at four, there’s a problem. It’s making sure that we work in with the venues and make sure that we’re doing our job, and if we are late, we tell them and say sorry. I think this industry has gone away from saying sorry, you know, yes, there is traffic and yes, there are other things and people do understand, you’ve just got to let them know.”
The business’ customers are mainly breweries, but they also include wineries or distributors of wine, or multiple beverages. There’s a lot of diversity in the industry, there are not big corporates like Coles or Woolworths influencing buyers.
A business owner makes an individual decision on what they put on tap at their pub. They might have contracts with the big breweries, but they still support independent product.
Motus use the Carton Cloud system to run the distribution process, getting the idea from one of their customers, the Pirate Life brewery.
“We were working with them and they said that this software is great,” says Andy.
“We found that Carton Cloud was very much tailored for us. It helped my wife get away from being on the phone all the time. I’d get home after doing deliveries and she’d be doing routing until 11 o’clock at night, before we got it.
“It helped with everything. A lot of transport companies only use about 60 per cent of the software and don’t use 100 per cent. Emily and her customer service team use 100 per cent of that software.
“It’s quite funny, Emily’s actually taught a lot of our competitors how to use that product. I don’t mind because I know that they’re never going to use it to the extent that we do. Technology is a great thing if you use it properly.”
In the past, Andy’s Dad’s transport business would supply handhelds to every single driver or inbuilt units. Now, drivers at Motus just use their own phone. The system will do invoicing every week which is auto generated. Every item in the warehouse can be barcode scanned, it can also bottle scan.
Carton Cloud has evolved with Motus, after starting on the Gold Coast in Australia. It is now in the US and Canada. Some of the bigger businesses Motus deal with are starting to use it for their own inventory.
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