Synnex has unveiled the fruits of a $45 million investment – its fully automated logistics centre in western Sydney, which will add 100 new jobs and be able to handle thousands of items a day.
The distributor held a major launch event at the site in Lidcombe yesterday, with hundreds of guests from across the channel, along with a number of VIPs, including Malcolm Turnbull, federal minister for communications, and Synnex chairman Dr Matthew Miau, visiting from Taiwan.
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Synnex Australia CEO Kee Ong said the new centre "shows the Synnex commitment to the local ICT market".
Last financial year, Australia represented $1.6 billion of sales for the tier-one distributor – or more than 4 percent of its global $24 billion revenue. The company has grown from 40 staff to more than 400 in the 15 years since it launched in Australia.
Minister Turnbull said it was a great facility and great for the City of Sydney, "the heart of Australia's IT industry".
He also touched on some of the government's IT plans, including its strategy to ensure all services and interactions with federal government should be available to be completed online by the end of 2017.
"We will shortly be announcing… a revised cloud computing policy that will dramatically increase the availability of cloud services to federal government agencies," Turnbull added.
"The box huggers of the world have to relent and embrace the cloud, and that applies to government as well as private sector."
According to Auburn's mayor, Hicham Zraika, the logistics centre is one of the largest investments by a Taiwanese company in Australia.
High-tech automation allows Synnex to stock a significant volume of goods within the 10,000sqm building: more than 9000 pallets can be stacked in a warehouse measuring more than 100 metres in length and 29 metres high.
Dr Miau told CRN the site was one of the most automated centres across Synnex's global network of 30-40 warehouses. It shows the importance of Australia to the Taiwan-headquartered company.
"It is interesting to note that in Australia, the ICT market is ranked number 11 in the world. It is a large market for the Australian economy, and also ICT in Australia [represents] roughly 5 percent of the total GDP, which is a large number," said Miau.
While the facility offers lights-out automation, it will also need people; Synnex will hire 100 full-time equivalent positions in the next three years.
The technology behind the new logistics centre is an automated storage and retrieval system (ASRS), which goes hand in hand with a sophisticated data analytics engine running behind the scenes.
Dr Miau said "We have developed our own software with a lot of effort behind it. We have our own in-house software development team. That's one core competency of Synnex – call it management. Because we have the correct data, speedy decision making can be done."
This back-end data helps resellers by feeding into Synnex's online ordering portal, which was launched in February.
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