A strong team for the DIY stores

“If we do something, we do it right!” Steinel’s guiding philosophy doesn’t lack for confidence and high standards. “While others focus on time pressure and the need to generate profits, we value innovation and longevity.” The company’s market position shows that the technology company has done its homework. Starting in the eastern Westphalia town of Herzebrock-Clarholz in 1959 as an electrical engineer developing and building heating resistors, Heinrich Wolfgang Steinel turned his garage workshop into one of the world’s leading companies for heat tools and sensor-controlled LED light fixtures.

Management, development, and logistics are still located in the town of Herzebrock-Clarholz, near Gütersloh. Other development centers are located in Liberec, Czech Republic, and in Einsiedeln, Switzerland. In the Leipzig-Mölkau district, Steinel develops and produces all plastic and injection molded parts. The main production facilities are located in Curtea de Arges in Romania and Chisinau in the Republic of Moldavia. Both locations supply the central logistics operations in eastern Westphalia, which serves as a launching point for Steinel products as they enter the global markets via the DACHSER network.

For 10 years now, Steinel has been working together with the nearby DACHSER logistics center of eastern Westphalia-Lippe (OWL) in the town of Bad Salzuflen. The DACHSER branch is among the best performing in European groupage. “We value a high frequency of departures with synchronized transit times, and maximum transparency through cross-Europe tracking and tracing, extremely competent delivery service to demanding customers in the DIY and professional sectors as well as online retail. With DACHSER, we are always in good hands,” says Sven Hensdiek, director of transport logistics at Steinel. To him, intelligent technology and intelligent logistics always go together.

Challenges to logistics

The DIY industry in particular presents major challenges to logistics. “Customers in the DIY and online retail sectors across Europe have high expectations when it comes to response times,” says Marc Sürth, head of customer service outbound and quality in the OWL logistics center. “So it’s crucial for us to schedule daily departures out of Bad Salzuflen to all European destinations within DACHSER’s European network.”

For Nils Reiprich, director of logistics at Steinel, DACHSER’s European network is a solid advantage: “Every day it’s “faster, better, more,” so we have to keep up as suppliers. To do that, we need not only innovative products but also innovative logistics processes.” Shipments going from A to B in time is a given. “DACHSER also provides me with a great deal of transparency across its entire European logistics chain. That’s very helpful to me and our customers for planning all of our logistics processes.”

Steinel’s transport logistics chief Sven Hensdiek thinks very highly of Liane Gruber, who handles the Steinel account within the customer service team at DACHSER’s eastern Westphalia-Lippe logistics center. “If she tells me that a solution that we’ve been seeking works, I can rely on that 100 percent. If she tells me it won’t work, then it’s the same thing, and we don’t need to discuss it further. That’s unique,” says Hensdiek about the special mutual trust with the entire DACHSER team that has become ingrained for over a decade.
This partnership, which is based on extensive networks, logistical expertise, reliability, and mutual trust, says Hensdiek, helps to keep Steinel’s logistics operations ready for the new digital challenges of the marketplace. As the retail industry continues to grow with e-commerce and dropship strategies, the future increasingly lies in greater individualization, smaller and smaller batch sizes, and greater responsibility for logistics operations by manufacturers.

“As inventors, we don’t just want to keep pace with developments. Instead, we always want to stay one step ahead of everyone else,” says Hensdiek. In logistics, professional partners like DACHSER are needed for that. “A saying from my university days has proven to be true: quality is when the customer comes back and not the merchandise.”