14


Issue 6 2013


///GERMANY


Don’t worry if you repeat yourself


If you don’t cover Germany, you can’t claim to cover Europe properly. Indeed, many companies have services, not several times a week, but several times a day. And there is still plenty of innovation even in this most mature of markets.


Dachser does the daily to Duisburg


When British companies mount an export drive, or move into exporting for the first time, more often than not the country at the top of their list is Germany. It is now home to 80 million people, making it the biggest country in the EU, and Berlin is its second-biggest city after London. Once they have landed their


first export order, getting the goods to destination should pose no problem. Groupage services from the UK to Germany have developed to the point where many companies offer daily, or multiple- daily departures. Dachser is a case in point. A


German-owned company, it now offers daily direct links from its three UK hubs at Dartford, Northampton and Rochdale to seven of its hub centres in Germany. The rest of the 30-strong German network can be reached through a hub-and-spoke network, meaning that no part of the country is more than 72 hours away from the UK and most are within 48 hours, explains Dachser UK managing director, Nick Lowe. Dachser is constantly looking


to add more direct groupage runs. At the moment, these are predominantly to


the heavily


populated and industrialised north- west of Germany, but he hopes soon to add regular direct runs to Berlin and, probably later, Munich (Dachser already runs some direct services there whenever there is enough traffic.) It’s a simple calculation: “The


more volumes we have, the more direct services we can run.” Berlin is an attractive market.


Not only is it the largest city, but it is once again the reunified Germany’s capital and, unlike many capital cities, there is also a fair amount of industry. It can also be a useful


gateway to eastern Europe. Dachser’s overall business to


Germany is growing strongly, as is that to Europe as a whole. Consignments, tonnage and turnover to Europe were all up by the order of 20% in the first seven months of 2013 compared with 2012, and Germany generally accounts for roughly a third of its total groupage business. That would indicate that Dachser is gaining market share, but there is also now some underlying growth in the market. Dachser does much more than


services to Germany, and one of its appeals to UK exporters is that it can offer a single collection or delivery for all the customer’s traffic,


regardless of where it is


going to or coming from. Dachser is also operating combined UK and European platforms for many of its customers, able to call off consignments as required, whether for Bolton or Berlin. One of Dachser’s other


differentiators is the quality of its IT service, Lowe continues. “We can offer bar code tracking in real time and because our network in Germany is so comprehensive, we can offer 98% coverage. We can also do daily KPI reports and offer digital signature capture. And because it’s real time, we can give the information pretty much instantaneously.” The service to Germany is in fact


very reliable and achieves around 98.5% on-time delivery. The few problems that arise are mostly due to delivery restrictions and the odd problem encountered en route to Germany with congestion or the Channel crossing. As one might expect from a German company, the system has been designed and


refined very thoroughly. On the rare occasions that something does go wrong, exception reporting brings it to attention very promptly. Maintaining quality of service


is vital because there is plenty of competition in the German market, and it is tending to increase. New operators though will have a hard time replicating the comprehensive offerings


of the established


operators. Some of the pallet network


operators have developed German products, although Dachser’s domestic network is already very akin to a hub-and-spoke system, with the added benefit that it can cater for other types of cargo like cartons, long items (by special arrangement) or intermediate bulk containers. That said, there is probably room in the market for new competitors, Nick Lowe believes. Dachser handles a huge mix


of business in both directions. There are an increasing number of direct deliveries to retailers in Germany, along with office supplies and speciality chemicals in both directions. Into the UK – which is the


heavier flow, as the trade statistics might


suggest – there are all


manner of goods but a greater emphasis on industrial products. And while there is an imbalance (the ratio at the time of writing was 38:62) the gap between flows out of Germany and those from the UK is closing up, Lowe believes. “A 50-50 split would be ideal, but that probably wouldn’t reflect the market,” he comments. The UK though is exporting


more, helped by the weakening of the Pound against the Euro, while the Government’s efforts to


encourage exports are beginning to bear fruit. There are some extra costs


involved in operating trucks in Germany, notably the ‘Maut’ truck tolls on the motorway and main road system. These are quite heſty, but Dachser has countered them by operating larger, better filled vehicles and using different types of equipment such as swapbodies to improve utilisation. This has helped to contain the extra costs, says Lowe. There is also a member of Dachser staff, a ‘King of the Maut’ to advise the rest of the team. Many German cities also


impose delivery restrictions so having a knowledgeable German partner is invaluable. Central Berlin, for example, has a strict two-hour delivery window,


for


example and even smaller towns and cities impose limits, oſten necessitating the use of smaller delivery trucks or even electric vehicles.


Making room for more food


Dachser is investing about €50 million in three sites in Germany Langenau, Kornwestheim, and Schönefeld as part of its new European Food Network. The logistics provider simultaneously started up the new transhipment and storage facilities in the summer. A 5,200sq m transit terminal and


a 7,500sq m high bay storage facility with 15,000 pallet storage spaces in Langenau went into operation in mid-August


explains branch


manager of operations at the Ulm logistics centre, Robert Mittermeier. Over the last few years, Dachser’s Swabian facility, just off the A7 autobahn, has evolved into one of the largest food warehouses in the corporation: currently a total of 54,000 food pallets can be stored in various temperature zones. Dachser has also steadily


expanded its food logistics business in Kornwestheim near Stuttgart and, after only eight years, it became urgently necessary to relocate into a larger transit terminal. “Sausage and ham from the Black Forest, along


with other Swabian delicacies, are shipped out of Kornwestheim to locations all over Europe. We have an additional 6,000sq m of logistics floor space for our customers, with a temperature range of two to seven degrees. One part of the hall was additionally equipped with shelving,” says branch manager Bernd Schäfer. “The (existing) food transit terminal was converted into a warehouse. This means that we can now offer our Kornwestheim customers food storage capacity in different temperature ranges.” And at Dachser’s Logistics Center


Berlin, in Schönefeld, a 7,200sq m food transit terminal went into operation in June. This facility allows 76 trucks to be loaded and unloaded simultaneously and the transit area has been fitted with energy-saving


LED lighting, reducing annual CO² consumption by roughly 48 tonnes, reports branch manager Olaf Schmidt. Here, Dachser has taken over procurement and distribution of coffee for the Dallmayr Company, including an array of additional


services such as constructing display cartons and mixed cartons, as well as quality controls. “Dachser Food Logistics has


grown steadily over the past few years; in 2012 alone, we achieved an increase in sales of over 13%,” affirms


Alfred Miller, managing


director of Dachser Food Logistics. “We anticipate additional growth momentum with the launch of the European Food Network and the Vivengo product group on 1 October. In preparation for this, we had to acquire additional capacity in a timely manner. This is the only way we can maintain stable operations in our network during the peak capacity periods of four- day weeks, and offer our customers a consistently high level of service quality at the same time.”


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