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“Your second warehouse for hexagon and socket fasteners” Eurobolt bv ‘s-Heerenberg, Netherlands It is more than three years since Phil Matten last visited Eurobolt. Still located in the German-Dutch border town of ‘s-Heerenberg the company has quickly settled into new, custom-built offices and warehouse. By early 2005 Eurobolt was rapidly outgrowing its 12,000-pallet warehouse and was taking temporary space at its freight forwarder and elsewhere close by. “We knew something had to be done to increase capacity,” says general manager, Harry Snijders, “Operating from three warehouses proved increasingly inefficient as we continued to grow – in the end we spent 30% of our resource simply moving stock between the three locations, which meant delivery times and reliability suffered. It has taken quite some time, and there were a few complications on the way, for example environmental issues with the land, but now we are here.” Remaining in ‘s-Heerenberg was important. The border town is ideally positioned between Eurobolt’s major markets and its supply route via Rotterdam. The company continues to take advantage of the nearby Rhine port of Emmerich, where incoming containers are off-loaded from barges and hauled by road the remaining 5 kilometres. “With fuel costs as they now are
this represents a significant saving, considering we receive over 1,400 containers every year,” says Harry Snijders. Once construction had started on the new warehouse, designed to meet Eurobolt’s specific requirements, things happened rapidly. “Construction began in November last year. We began moving product in April 2008 - around 19,000 pallets in total – and we cracked the champagne to celebrate completion end June. The new warehouse is 7,500 square metres in area and 13 metres high, providing 25,000 pallet locations in a conventional high-bay system, serviced by combined picker and side-stacker trucks on under-floor electronic guidance lines. One key upgrade was to change to overhead RF computer screens on the picking trucks and bar scanners to confirm locations. “It was an interesting challenge for the operators to go paperless,” says Harry Snijders, “but the change has improved our efficiency quite a lot.” The overall warehouse design is straightforward. Two receiving ramps and docks at one end, with clear floor space to offload containers and a nearby quality inspection office. Eurobolt now has a designated quality manager and carries out a range of standard tests in-house, continuing to send samples
from each consignment to an external professional laboratory for destructive testing. The company has always operated on a tight supplier base. That policy continues with virtually all the product sourced from ten factories, mostly in China, under supervision of purchase manager Lothar Markl, who has 35 years experience in fasteners. Eurobolt now also has a China-based assistant purchase manager who audits the factories, maintains close relations and expedites shipments. The despatch area is located below the commercial offices. An automatic shrinkwrapping line has replaced the previous heat shrink machine – delivering improvements in energy costs and load security. Four trailers, provided by the main delivery contractor for Germany, Belgium, France and local markets, are filled during the day. Eurobolt has around 350 regular customers throughout Europe, ranging Scandinavia to Spain and Italy in the South and from the UK and Ireland to east European countries. For long range shipments, individual contracts are negotiated from a selection of known performance carriers. The far end of the warehouse houses two Weighpack packaging lines for repacking products that have been plated or galvanised. Last time we visited Eurobolt we described it as a “tight ship”. It remains so, with a clear emphasis on keeping things simple and straightforward. Annual turnover is now over 20 million euros, and full time employees have increased to thirty-three. The key principles of the business, though, are still the same. The relationship with the customer is direct and responsive. All customers are distributors and fastener resellers – no end users are supplied. It is immediately evident that the business is simply not geared to do so. Although the company does respond to smaller orders from distributors, volume orders continue to represent the lion’s share of the business. Eurobolt still issues a weekly stock list to every customer – covering over 7,000 articles. Virtually all are sent by email, in either PDF or spreadsheet format, although, says sales office supervisor Patrick Jansen, “We still have one customer who insists on receiving over 60 pages by fax. He says it is important that he has the list in his hand every week. That’s why Eurobolt also sends