Epsom Sand & Soil, based in Victoria, has maintained its family-owned heritage established over 46 years ago in 1976 while continuing to deliver for its customers.
The business supplies and transports a range of materials, such as sands, soils, quarry products, decorative stones, gravel and mulches to the building industry but also for home landscaping projects as well. Its operations also see it make mulch onsite by breaking down pallets and timber boxes to turn them back into a coloured mulch.
In addition, it offers a range of hire services for mobile mulching plants, semi-trailers and floats, excavators, trucks, heavy haulage, front end loaders, mobile screening plants and bobcats.
The company prides itself on a promise to its customers; they will only pay for exactly what they receive. Bruce Rock Engineering (BRE) Sales Manager, Michael Booker, says this was evident in his first meetings with the business.
“Epsom Sand & Soil are good to deal with and know what they want,” he says. “The spec of the first trailer was well thought out, it suited their application and it performed very well. After liaising with the fleet’s Assistant Manager, Will Mayer, for the second and third trailer, a couple of extra options were also chosen to suit their operations.”
In order to continue to provide these services, Epsom Sand & Soil turned to BRE three years ago for a tipper semi-trailer and have had two more delivered since. And by investing in a trailer builder with similar values of delivering the utmost quality, its efforts have paid off in the form of success.
“We’ve just found their products to be really good for our operations,” Will says. “We can get a 30-plus-tonne payload on our semi-tipper which is pretty impressive.”
The units from BRE have proven to be very reliable for the fleet, and according to Will, he hasn’t seen anything more durable.
“They’re a lot stronger and we can cart rocks and other bits of concrete,” he says. “There isn’t one crack in the first one we got from them, which does five or six loads a day and on average 2,500 kilometres a week in some pretty harsh conditions. It’s held up pretty well.”
Epsom Sand & Soil’s latest combination from BRE, a Single TaREX tipper trailer, arrived just one month ago and has already shown its value. The tipper is fitted with SAF-Holland disc brakes, like its siblings, and is tared in at around 5.8 tonnes to give the fleet a better payload. Due to a well-thought-out design, Will says it is very versatile and has the capability to excel in spaces where other units couldn’t.
“We can get them in anywhere,” he says. “We’ve found that they’re very easy for a lot of concrete plants where we can’t unhook trucks and trailers and where some of the bins are in a lot of awkward spots. This is one of the ways how dealing with BRE has paid off for us, as downtime is less when we get into some of those concrete plants. Before that we had to unhook trailers, and by the time you hook and unhook a truck and trailer you’re losing 15 minutes. Now we can be in and out of the same concrete plant in under six minutes and we can even potentially add an extra load on a busy day, so it’s really streamlined our deliveries.”
In his dealings with Michael and the team at BRE, Will has admitted to the same claim many other fleets in Australia can agree with – that BRE also goes the extra mile in customer service.
“The customer service there is really good, we’ve found them to have very good service,” he says. “If there are any problems, we can just give them a ring. There’s good communication throughout the whole process, too. They tell us when each trailer is going to be built and delivery times have all been close to what they were quoting. Our latest one was actually ahead of schedule from what they had told us.”
With extensive experience in dealing with the trailer building industry, Will believes BRE have mastered the art of manufacturing.
“While driving these things up and down some horrible roads, I’ve found that from a maintenance point of view they’re not getting cracks anywhere. We get a good life out of them, and that’s the benefit of dealing with BRE.”
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