Our North American Facilities
In our last newsletter we focused on the great folks that make up our North American sales team. Therefore this month we wanted to share with you some more information on the facilities and capabilities that the sales team have at their disposal in North America.
North American Headquarters, East Coast Warehouse and Manufacturing Support – Knoxville, TN
Area Four Industries America shares this 60,000 square foot building with its sister companies, TOMCAT and James Thomas Engineering.
Geographically Knoxville is ideally located to serve our customers in the Eastern and Central time zones with major markets such as Florida and the major population centers of the Atlantic Coast all within a day’s drive of this Eastern Tennessee city of approximately 190,000 people. Knoxville has a rich tradition of truss design and manufacturing with James Thomas Engineering, originally beginning truss manufacturing in the city back in 1990. In 2014 James Thomas Engineering also became part of the Area Four Industries group of companies and since then all brands within the group are represented by this facility which is situated around five miles east of the city center.
The Knoxville building includes 60,000 square feet of indoor production, warehouse and office space as well as a large outdoor staging and “test build” area. Local manufacturing support is provided to compliment the companies’ other major manufacturing centers in the Czech Republic, China and Italy, producing MILOS, Prolyte and LITEC products. Further product support is also provided from this location for the EXE Rise range of electric chain hoist products and the increasingly popular Mobiltechlifts line of telescopic lifts.
As well as full production capabilities this location also supports the majority of the companies’ administration tasks with the finance, design and HR departments also located under this one roof. Our east coast sales team also get to call Knoxville home.
West Coast Sales Office and Warehouse – Thousand Oaks, CA
Although ideally situated to serve its eastern customers from its Tennessee location, Area Four Industries America knew that in order to support its western and centrally based customers it would eventually need to open a second location further west. Therefore in 2017 plans were put in place to find a west coast facility that could provide more localized support for those customers and allow Area Four Industries America to have multiple warehouses and a sales team at their desk for a combined twelve hours per day. This plan came to fruition in January 2018 when we were very proud to open the approximately 25,000 square foot facility in Thousand Oaks, California.
Thousand Oaks sits on the border of Ventura and Los Angeles Counties and is less than an hour’s drive from the major production centers in Burbank and Hollywood. Further afield Las Vegas, San Francisco, Phoenix and tens of millions of people sit within a day’s drive of this location.
The CA location’s role is focused purely on carrying large stocks of the most popular products and to provide a base for our west coast sales team. However this facility is unique in that it also houses the companies’ first purpose designed training facility in North America with a forty-person capacity training room in-house. Since opening in early 2020 this resource has already hosted pre-pandemic in person training events, provided online training opportunities and will hopefully be put back into use for in-person training as soon as local health regulations allow.
Just as the Knoxville location serves “double-duty” so does the California operation with the TOMCAT and James Thomas Engineering brands also being serviced out of this location.