A New Home, a New Era Larson-Juhl recently moved into a brand new home. In this article, 4walls puts a number of questions to managing director Jonathan Burrage about these impressive new facilities.
What were the reasons for moving to the CSC? Larson-Juhl had outgrown its previous premises in recent years and this was starting to impact on our service levels to our customers. We had extended into two additional buildings in order to deal with the volumes demanded by the trade. What facilities are housed at the CSC? The CSC provides us with a single operations centre, focussed on every aspect of customer service. Rather than refer to our new home as Head Office, we felt that Customer Service Centre (CSC) captured the commitment and ambition of every member of the team to recognise that in every action they are serving a customer. Some may be purely focussed on internal customers (their colleagues) but at the heart of everything we do there is a need to provide the best possible output for our many external customers both domestically and across the world. Once fully operational, we will be able to despatch customer orders faster than we ever have. This has been our key driver in this move. Lead times will shorten dramatically as we house every product under one roof. Furthermore, with all of the team working from the same state-of-the-art building, departments will be able to interact seamlessly without the historic delays caused by geographic separation. In order to accommodate all of the departments in our old facilities, we also had to operate over multiple levels in both our office and operations environments. This added further complexity and delay. The CSC brings our office based teams into a single open plan space and our operations teams all operate across a single ground floor environment. We have worked closely with an industry leading storage provider to maximise the volume we can hold in what is a smaller footprint. Operating up to heights in excess of 10 metres, we are able to hold more stock in this one facility than we could across our previous three. Our teams are currently getting used to our new facilities, operating new vehicles and managing new systems. It’s been an extremely frenetic period, managing our dayto-day operations whilst also coordinating the movement of every department into the CSC.
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How many Larson-Juhl employees work at the CSC and how are they adapting to the new facilities? All of us! We have been focussed on ensuring we bring a multitude of different departments together to be One Team. It might seem obvious but even the most simple change makes a big impression. Where we previously had three canteens, we now have one ‘breakout’ area. This provides a relaxing space for all colleagues whilst also enabling a more casual environment for informal meetings throughout the day. Our warehouse colleagues are enjoying a bright, purpose built working environment, operating a fantastic array of new vehicles and machinery.
