All transport companies are alike. No two, however, are the same.
In the case of the 100-year-old Wettenhalls, the fundamentals always have applied even if the systems and protocols are vastly different than they were in 1925.
That immense journey is chartered in a sumptuous new coffee table book launched by the Colac-born company this month in which the anniversary celebrations, initially teased with the unveiling of a newly minted commemorative Kenworth T909 sporting a refrigerated trailer by Freighter Group adorned in a monochromatic livery of historic images, are set to culminate with several events to mark the occasion including a family field day and a gala dinner.
The book authored by Charles Happell is a well-researched volume that lays out the origins and remarkable history of Wettenhalls across four generations commencing with Reginald Amezdroz and a two-tonne Federal Knight tray truck.
The son of Swiss migrants, Reginald began freighting vats of cream from the western district dairy he worked, daily to Melbourne when a government regulation prohibited the transportation of perishable goods on passenger trains.
Today the national business though still plying its trade predominantly in Victoria, by concentrating heavily in the regional area southwest of Geelong, runs dedicated contract logistics operations in Sydney, Brisbane and as far north as Townsville in drastically different applications.
The Altona depot opened in 2020 and is one of four main company-owned sites it operates in the state.
Each includes a state-of-the-art workshop, automatic truck wash, cross-dock and warehousing facilities, offices and solar arrays.
Not the least impressive thing about its newest facility is the selection of prodigious high productivity units that come and go.
Though not widely publicised, Wettenhalls is a keen proponent of Performance-Based Standards and through its specialty Environmental Solutions Division (ESD) has made increasing strides in this area of the business in recent years.
“It continues to grow sustainably,” says Wettenhalls Managing Director Martin Kelly.
“In that market there are a lot of Blue Chip players. Once you start working with some of those on innovative solutions the opportunities just snowball.”
Now with a dedicated team double shifted that features driver-trainers, an operations manager and fleet controller, ESD works around the clock, having initially been bolted on to another division when it was first created in 2017.
“My dad always said there was money to be made in waste,” says Martin.
“It seemed like there was a need in the marketplace for someone who specialises in it. When I joined the company that was in the back of my mind and from there some of the relationships with these larger players in the market have really grown.”
A little of over three years ago, Wettenhalls purchased a business in the Southern Highlands of New South Wales that services a blast furnace owned by Boral.
Here they use B-double walking floor trailers to transport recycled wood to the furnace for a third-party. Another growth area for the business is in servicing infrastructure and major projects.
Today it accounts for a significant amount of company revenue. The increased capacity of longer combinations has afforded the fleet the flexibility to move bulk goods, and raw materials like steel on split quad axle trailers combined with 8×4 prime movers.
At present Wettenhalls is deploying six A-doubles for the North East Link to complement its single trailer fleet. They are moving up to 20 precast concrete sections on any given day.
Maximum weight is 85.5 tonnes under PBS, but is much less on these combinations due to overall height.
These combinations are pulled by Scania V8 prime movers and use a low profile drop deck trailer joining two 45-foot trailers coupled as an A-double with ballasts.
They are something to behold even only when being moved around the yard. With a multitude of single trailer applications still of paramount importance to the business, Wettenhalls had a benchmark from which it could refer as it looked to scale capacity during the planning and execution process.
It took about six months according to Martin.
“Because these culverts are coming from regional Victoria, we wanted to do half the amount of the trips,” he says.
“Once you know those parameters you know what it is you’re pushing for. Talking to Kenny [an experienced Wettenhalls driver] using an A-double would burn about 1.5 times the amount of fuel as a single trailer. Clearly, emissions have been reduced massively, not to mention the cost.”
While there are a few rigids operating regionally to load general freight mainly in the western district, Wettenhalls is first and foremost a prime mover fleet.
Altona alone handles some 50 heavy rigs mainly hauling skels and palletised freight.
“We’ve got a lot of PBS gear that might not be running at the optimum weights initially, but you build it in the anticipation of infrastructure upgrades,” says Martin.
“It’s a continual process of pushing the boundaries.”
He adds, “Basically every customer that we’ve got in the ESD division is being serviced with high productivity vehicles be it A-doubles or 20-metre quad-axle walking floor combinations with high capacity.”
Infrastructure projects in a country that looks to build for escalating population offer opportunities beyond the backyard. Growth achieved, most crucially, with balance, is the company’s lodestar.
“That pipeline is really strong in terms of tender activity and there are huge opportunities depending on the amount of growth,” says Martin.
“We are really interested in sustainable growth and being able to integrate those jobs into the business without breaking anything. We could easily double in size quickly but if your systems and processes and people can’t keep up with it then what’s the point?”
The bulk food component of the business remains its largest concern.
Wettenhalls has highly sophisticated systems in place for dry, chilled and frozen goods in sharp contrast to the ice and wet sacks Reg Amezdroz used to cool the Dairymaster steel cans of cream moved on those very first trips a century ago.
Working with some regional food factories, Wettenhalls is often a one-stop shop in which they will also warehouse, in addition provide transport, for its customers.
More recently it rolled out Thomax, a new warehouse management system, across the business. It’s integrated with the SAP system of a key account.
End-to-end, the process at the factory has been optimised so that carrying the raw materials and packaging can be provided at the Wettenhalls warehouse.
Having a container transport capability is also an advantage.
“We can unpack the containers, transport the raws to the factory and then move the finished goods out of it,” says Martin.
“It makes that whole process seamless. We’re always looking for ways to add more value for our customer relationships.”
Pumpa Manufacturing have delivered several PBS-approved mezzanine-style dry freight vans 4.6 metres in height and 20-metres long for light bulk food.
Along with Barker Trailers, they are preferred partners for specialised bulk equipment such as bins and walking floors.
Freighter Group and Vawdrey are more often engaged for the curtainsider spec.
Wettenhalls uses Marcus Coleman of Tiger Spider as their engineering firm on much of their innovative heavy vehicle designs.
“That’s how we build our knowledge talking to guys like that who are in the know as well as the trailer manufacturers,” adds Martin.
That relationship goes back long before road transport to university where Marcus was actually Martin’s football coach at Uni Blues in the highly rated Australian Rules Amateurs league.
Martin’s journey at Wettenhalls officially began in 2014 when he came across after spending the initial seven years of his career at PricewaterhouseCoopers where he was working in the private clients division.
He is a self-described “country boy who married into the Amezdroz Family” with a professional services background.
The previous year, as a result of a management buy-out, largely funded by the Amezdroz Family, Wettenhalls was purchased back from private equity, the grounds for affording a revised leadership structure.
Wettenhalls had, around the time, acquired Rodon Transport, a Brooklyn-based outfit which served as its entrée into the construction sector and later on projects for big consortiums like the West Gate Tunnel, regional rail upgrades and Victoria’s ‘Big Build’.
Martin basically cut his teeth in the organisation initially on the integration, and then running, of that business unit.
“That helped me build my transport specific skills,” he recalls. “I had a good background in dealing with finance and numbers and the skills learnt growing up on our family farm translate well. But for transport itself I really needed to live and breathe it.”
When Chief Executive Officer Mike Lean, announced he was leaving last year Martin put his hand up for the Managing Director’s role knowing he had a great team of staff and mentors around him.
The fleet, until earlier this year, was evenly split between PACCAR – mainly DAF CFs – and Scania product, when Head of Fleet Marcus Prato, introduced several Mercedes-Benz Actros units. Specifically for the new Actros units, Wettenhalls has been able to negotiate decisive flexibilities around their contract maintenance arrangements.
The Kenworth is quite a statement particularly in a fleet of some 200 trucks, few of them small, nearly all of them cabover top shelf European variants.
Approximately 70 per cent of its mobile assets are powered by Euro 6 standard drivetrains.
The first Kenworth in the fleet arrived in 1967 when it had no more than a handful of trucks.
This followed the introduction of its first refrigerated van purchased circa 1965 second-hand from Freighter. A new Transicold unit was suspended under the chassis.
Up until then the company had been building its perishable goods gear inhouse, with the cream carrying trailers framed, insulated then sheeted with plywood.
The Wettenhalls 100 Years book details, through dozens of interviews with extended family and long serving staff, a mosaic of memories, historic nuggets and once buried anecdotes such as the border hopping operation into Moama adapted in the mid-1970s to comply with disruptive government trade protectionism of the railways.
That first green and cream truck differs notably from the maroon and yellow vehicles today, one of the best colour schemes of any heavy vehicle fleet on the road.
It can now also be seen on three recently introduced Tesla Model 3 company cars that are perfectly suited for high frequency carpooling and inter depot travel.
The cars can be charged comfortably in three hours on site using electricity from the solar systems.
“There’s always a conversation about fuel allowances or fuel cards or company cars and it helps to get around all of that sustainably,” says Martin.
“Often, they are used during daytime and you come back and plug them in. That’s been more than sufficient.”
Wettenhalls is also avidly pursuing low emission battery electric and fuel cell vehicle options.
In addition to being finalists in two other categories: Women in Leadership and Investment in People, Wettenhalls was also recognised as the Application of Technology category winner at the Australian Freight Industry Awards (AFIAs) for its successful adoption and rollout of JOST’s JSK37 sensor coupling across a subset of its heavy vehicle fleet.
Every truck, meanwhile, in the entire fleet is fitted with a Guardian driver fatigue camera from Seeing Machines. Wettenhalls was one of the first companies to invest in the technology.
Telematics partner MTData is also utilised for its latest 7000AI Series device that monitors driver behaviour and vehicle data, streamlining communications between drivers and their fleet managers during transport journeys.
The latest MTData units have five external and internal cameras.
“The Guardian system has definitely saved lives,” says Martin.
“We see all the footage. You’ll interview the driver after they’ve been told to pullover, and they don’t even realise they’ve had a microsleep. It’s an expensive outlay at the start but if you don’t have them, it’s a lot worse — It’s cheap in that context.”
Innovations, like the aforesaid, are nothing new at the business. In fact, they date as far back to the Amezdroz & Menzies prewar outfit applauded in the in 1939 by the Colac Herald for what it described as “dependability and speed, combined with a proper regard for the handling of goods entrusted to their care.”
That goes for people, too. Wettenhalls has several recognition and reward programs the pinnacle of which is the Ned Club for 20-year servants to the business.
Of which there were well over 20 drivers inducted into the club launched late last year. Named in honour of Ned Amezdroz, Brett Amezdroz’s late father, the Ned Club will have its second inaugural dinner later this month.
Brett, who is Martin’s father-in-law, currently serves on the Board as a Non-Executive Director. Heritage is of vast importance not only to maintaining Wettenhalls’ strong multi-generational culture but in forging future directions.
While the consumer economy is sustained by population growth transport and logistics for food will continue to grow according to Martin.
“Where we’ve got specialised solutions, and specialised equipment which itself is a barrier to entry, those are the markets we like to play in,” says Martin.
“In 30 years-time a lot of the commodities we transport today I think we’ll still be transporting. It’ll just be smarter, more efficient, safer.”
