On April 19, approximately 500 guests enjoyed the evening festivities of a Customer Appreciation and Grand Reopening of Thompson Tractor’s Oxford/Anniston, AL, branch. The catch of the day was catfish and was served in the service bays of the newly renovated facility. Others enjoyed barbeque after a casual tour of the buildings and looking at equipment displays. The #22 Ward Burton Cat race car was also at the location for guests to check out.
Jim Fuller, service manager of the Oxford/Anniston branch, stated, “We more than doubled our size. We’ve added an office complex for our service department, added a chassis dyno for over-the-road truck repair, and generally improved our appearance and our ability to perform what we do here.”
The utility shop also has increased in size, which means the company has a full-size and full-line machine shop. The facility also boasts a complete hydraulic shop. “In the machine shop we can do anything that is needed to be done. We have lathes, milling machines, drill presses, radial drills and virtually everything needed for machine work. Our hydraulic shop now allows us to perform virtually any hydraulic repair,” he said. Thompson Tractor has added a total of 16 additional service bays. “This is a great asset to all of the service we performs here including, earthmoving, lift truck and engine service,” Fuller said.
Also, new to this branch is the installation of a new SuperFlow dynamometer which can run a complete battery of computer assisted tests on a variety of truck models for the Thompson Power Systems division. This is the fourth Thompson branch in Alabama to install a truck chassis dyno system.
Ground breaking for this project was in May 2000, with actual construction beginning in June 2000. New space was built at the rear of the main building. The offices in the front of the building were temporarily moved to the new space while the front offices were completely renovated. The contractor’s completion of the building construction was in October 2000. Additional grounds and facilities work, which saw some delays due to cold and wet weather through the winter and into early spring, have just recently been completed,” Fuller said.
Before the expansion, there was 13,750 sq. ft. of shop work area. After the new addition was built, there is now a total of 36,000 sq. ft. of shop area. Thompson also included a 7,500 sq. ft. service work area, which was added for service offices; break area, service locker room and tool room. The total combined square footage of the shop and service work area is 43,500.
According to Fuller, “The amount of business being done at the Oxford/ Anniston branch has already justified the expansion. To find workspace, our service personnel were working out on the yard, under tents and in a rental building. Our parts department had to have additional space for the volume they were doing at this store. We absolutely needed the extra space, and hopefully, this expansion should allow us to grow for another 10 years. With 42 mechanics working out of this facility and 22 outside field service trucks based here, we have a lot going on and need plenty of space.”
Another factor that contributed to the expansion was the surrounding area.
“The Oxford and Anniston areas are growing and what is helping to drive the growth, is the construction of the Honda plant in Lincoln, AL. Additionally, we have a real aggressive mayor in Oxford, and the city of Oxford and the city of Anniston are working closely on continued growth and prosperity for the area. With the closing of Ft. McClellan, they are working on changing it into an industrial complex. They are also in the process of putting bypasses around Anniston. We foresee a lot of new business in both the near future and long term” Fuller noted.
“We have a state-of-the-art repair facility here …I’m tickled to death that our dealer principal saw fit to make this expansion for us. It allows us to do what we do, to make the working conditions better for the employees and to make our access better for the customers. I worked with Mike Reuter, project manager for Thompson, on this construction project and he was very informative and helpful and really made a big difference on this project. Without his help, this would have been a lot harder to accomplish,” he added.
For more information, call 256/831-4104.
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