Woolworths, a leading Australian retail firm, has announced that its supply chain arm, Primary Connect, has commenced building works on its new national distribution centre in the Moorebank Logistics Park in Western Sydney. The site will be co-located with the Moorebank regional Distribution Centre (DC), which will start construction later and open in 2025.
Set to open in 2024, the Moorebank national distribution centre will strengthen Primary Connect’s national supply chain and service more than 1,000 Woolworths Supermarkets across Australia. With cutting-edge automation and 75,000 square metres of floor space (almost five times the SCG playing field) across both sites, Moorebank will enable Woolworths to offer its customers an expanded range and improved stock availability in-store, according to a media statement by Woolworths.Woolworths, a leading Australian retail firm, has announced that its supply chain arm, Primary Connect, has commenced building works on its new national distribution centre in the Moorebank Logistics Park in Western Sydney. The site will be co-located with the Moorebank regional Distribution Centre (DC), which will start construction later and open in 2025.#
Woolworths will invest around $700-$780 million in the technology and fit-out of both distribution centres in partnership with Dematic and Vanderlande. Qube will invest around $440 million to build the distribution centres, with Woolworths signing an initial 20 year lease. Moorebank Logistics Park’s direct access to a dedicated freight rail line from Port Botany, with onward connections to the national rail network, will help take at least 26,000 truck movements off Australian roads each year.
Woolworths has a $2.3 billion investment programme planned across NSW over the next five years, which will support a further 7,500 ongoing jobs and thousands more during construction. The start of construction follows approval of both developments by the NSW Department of Planning in late 2020 and the recent appointment of Richard Crookes Constructions as the lead builder on the Moorebank national distribution centre.
Each distribution centre is targeting a Five Star Green Star Design and As-Built rating and will incorporate sustainability initiatives including solar PV systems, LED warehouse lighting and rainwater harvesting. Cutting-edge automation at the facilities will build tailored pallets for specific aisles in individual stores. This helps improve in-store product availability with faster restocking and reduces congestion in stores - ultimately enabling a safer work environment for teams with less manual handling demands.
“We have ambitions to offer a more tailored range of products in our stores. This has traditionally been constrained by what we can hold in our distribution centres. Once both centres are up and running, we’ll be able to carry up to 8,000 additional products in our range than we can in our existing facilities. This will help unlock a much better shopping experience for our customers. With unrivalled logistics infrastructure and connections to key port, rail and road networks, Moorebank is the ideal base for what will be our largest single supply chain investment,” Woolworths CEO, Brad Banducci said in a statement.
“This project is an important development for Woolworths, as well as for the local and broader NSW community. We look forward to partnering with Woolworths to deliver a building we can all be proud of, and to generate local employment opportunities by engaging more than 80 per cent of the workforce from the local Western Sydney region. At Moorebank, we’ll harness renewable energy at scale, with some 9,500 solar panels set to generate 5,550mwh of energy each year. This is equivalent to 880 households’ annual energy consumption and will offset about 13 percent of our power needs at Moorebank,” Richard Crookes, Constructions, MD Jamie Crookes said.
Fibre2Fashion News Desk (GK)
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