PDF [1.6 MB] - Kolbenschmidt Pierburg AG

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Newsline Consignment stores common practice at Pierburg GmbH Maximum level of supply certainty Neuss. Manufacturers of advanced products have to keep up with the latest developments – not only where R&D are concerned but also in all other areas of their business. One such innovation is the modern warehousing concept Neuss-based Pierburg GmbH introduced in 2005, making logistic management much more efficient and therefore contributing significantly toward the success of Pierburg. The consignment store model introduced makes stock control much easier. With the suppliers, the store facilitates the work of all participating companies. The improvement of stock management has helped to enhance the business performance of Pierburg GmbH. Management assistant Corinna Krause-Pieper points out that “purchasing logistics play a key role in the value-added chain of a company.” And she should know: after all, her responsibilities include the smooth performance of all activities in this connection, especially managing high information requirements. Says Krause-Pieper: “Interfaces to production and manufacture in the different plants, to the purchasing and sales functions as well as direct contact with customers, suppliers and logistic services involve a lot of communication.” This high level of communication is necessary as the stores are located on the premises of Pierburg GmbH but are not under the control of Pierburg. In fact, the store is managed by the supplier who rents the location in order to store his goods there. “The stocks remain the property of the supplier until the customer – in this case Pierburg – takes them out of the store; after removal, the supplier then invoices the material using a special software system that monitors all movement of goods. A removal notice is automatically created and transmitted to the supplier who can then bill the goods.” The big advantage offered by this type of store is as follows: “Only when an item is actually removed from the store is it invoiced. This reduces the amount of capital tied-up!” Improved performance indicators – especially liquidity and return on capital employed – are crucial factors making the model particularly interesting and helping to optimize profits. The consignment store of Pierburg GmbH in Neuss offers a basic area of 90 m 2 on which suppliers store their castings, stamped, sintered and turned parts. There are 265 pallet locations at the company headquarters; of these around 200 are currently in use. To test the communication capability in a small network, a consignment store with initially five suppliers was tried out in a pilot phase in 2005. Since then, consignment stores have been set up at all four German plants of Pierburg. Smooth operations have since convinced many suppliers of the advantages of such a solution. The selection of suitable suppliers is also important. “It is not a question of contacting the supplier with the biggest turnover. In fact, it is more important to involve suppliers whose 18 Composing: René Dahlmanns stocks are valuable and generally in store for longer periods of time,” says Tobias Kasperlik, purchasing director of the Pierburg group. Commenting on the selection criteria, he adds: “It is important to choose suppliers who have high inventories.” Another benefit that should not be underrated is that the area on the company premises can be used efficiently as the supplier rents the location, does not need to maintain his own warehouse facility and only has to cover the cost originally associated with the delivery. As the stock has already been qualityinspected and agreed quantities are always readily available, Pierburg is assured of an excellent supply certainty, coupled with minimal management expense, so that the overall concept is extremely efficient. “The immediate and safe link-up of the suppliers to the Pierburg group must be seen as another important advantage of the consignment store since suppliers who offer their goods quickly and reliably are fundamental to the high quality of the end product.” In fact, the consignment store is a win-win solution as both parties can enhance their efficiency and therefore strengthen their business relationship. “Once the team is well established and the processes of the suppliers and Pierburg have been clearly communicated, the project very definitely contributes toward the commercial success of a business,” says Udo Nenning, Pierburg’s management board member responsible for logistics, purchasing Consignment store – an important key to increasing liquidity. As Corinna Krause- Pieper notes: “Purchasing logistics play a role in the value-added chain of a company.” and sales, noting that last year Pierburg managed to reduce its stocks by nearly € 65 million which is nearly 20% of the Pierburg purchasing volume in Germany. Photo: Markus Feger
he financial press regularly publishes lists of the 100 biggest companies in Germany, sometimes measured in terms of sales, sometimes by market capitalization. Rheinmetall AG, too, features in these lists: for example, the corporation’s sales of € 3.5 billion in 2005 prompted the Süddeutsche Zeitung, a prestigious Munich daily, to rank the company in 95th place in June 2006. We are indebted to Economic Historian Martin Fiedler of the University of Bielefeld for the following finding, which appeared in 1999 in the “Zeitschrift für Unternehmensgeschichte”, a learned journal dedicated to corporate history: as far back as 1907, exactly a hundred years ago, Rheinmetall numbered among the top 100 companies of the German Reich – measured, that is, by headcount. Unlike parameters such as sales, cash flow, market capitalization or nominal capital, the number of employees – especially if one wishes to compare the size of a company over a period of a hundred years or more – is an indicator “which in a sense is timeless and requires no elaborate methods of conversion”. When we look at the numbers employed by the 100 largest companies in Germany in 1907, it is striking how great the gap is between the very largest German corporations and Rheinische Metallwaaren- und Maschinenfabrik (Rheinmetall’s predecessor), which ranked 98th on the list. At the very top are two state-owned enterprises: the Prussian-Hessian Railway with 486,381 employees, and the Deutsche Reichspost with “only” around half as many (277,116). Ranking third and sixth, respectively, come the first private-sector companies: Krupp in Essen with a workforce of 64,354, and Newsline In 1907, exactly a hundred years ago, Rheinmetall already numbered among the top 100 companies of the former German Reich. Siemens & Halske and the Siemens- Schuckertwerke in Berlin, which together employed 34,324. And Rheinmetall? The annual report for 1907 puts the number at 3,048 workers, who earned an average of 4.68 Reichsmarks per shift (in those days the money was better at Krupp!). Rheinmetall also employed a thousand or so Privatbeamte (literally “private civil servants”), as salaried workers were then known. Founded just 18 years earlier, Rheinmetall could not compare with giants like Krupp and Siemens, but it was already on a par with many companies that are still household names to this day: Thyssen & Co. (steel) in Mülheim, Farbwerke Hoechst (dyes), die Gewerkschaft Zollverein (coalmining), the German-Austrian Mannesmannröhrenwerke (pipes), Blohm & Voss (shipbuilding), WMF (cut- lery and tableware), Buderus (casting), to say nothing of Deutsche Bank, the most capital-rich company of the age. All of these companies had workforces numbering roughly 4,000 in 1907. A hundred years ago Rheinmetall was still far from being a management holding company. In 1907 the company had four production plants, including two in Düsseldorf-Derendorf – the recently rebuilt-on site of former Werk 1 and the Germania factory directly across from it, now occupied by a DaimlerChrysler plant – as well as the steelworks in Düsseldorf-Rath and the former Dreyse-Werk at Sömmerda, faraway in Thuringia. The firing range in Unterlüß was in Rheinmetall hands by this point too. The company owned no subsidiaries, though it did have a number of minority holdings: the Reisholz pipe plant in Düsseldorf-Reisholz, originally founded in 1899 by Heinrich Ehrhardt as Press- und Walzwerk AG, and now part of Mannesmannröhren-Werken. Rheinmetall also had an equity partici- 19 pation “in a foreign plant for producing steel and war material”. An intriguing detail, but the annual reports published in this period unfortunately make no mention of the name or location of this mysterious plant. In his article in the “Zeitschrift für Unternehmensgeschichte”, Martin Fiedler rightly notes the many gaps in studies of this kind. Indeed, in a table produced by Fiedler himself relating to a later period (1938), Rheinmetall-Borsig is missing. The merger with Borsig- Werk in Berlin in 1936 nearly doubled the number of Rheinmetall employees compared to 1935. By 1938, with a workforce of 45,438 – the figure cited in that year’s annual report – the muchenlarged company had clearly joined the ranks of Germany’s corporate giants: a fact which escaped Fiedler’s attention. In 1907 already in the top 100 The Reichsbahn and Reichspost (the state railway company and the postal service) remained unchallenged as the nation’s largest employers, followed by the artificially created industrial conglomerates IG Farben and Vereinigte Stahlwerke, trailed in turn by Siemens, Krupp, Gutehoffnungshütte (another Ruhr Valley heavy engineering company), the Veba energy concern, Friedrich Flick KG, AEG and Reichswerke Hermann Göring. Then, in 12th place, would have come Rheinmetall-Borsig AG, which – in contrast to 1907 – had since grown into a massive industrial concern. Apart from plants in Berlin- Tegel, Düsseldorf, Sömmerda and Unterlüß, “Rheibo” had major subsidiaries and trade investments, especially in Berlin; but the company maintained large-scale production facilities in Switzerland and the Netherlands as well. To this extent, Rheinmetall-Borsig in 1938 was even bigger than Röchling, Rheinmetall’s later majority shareholder. Dr. Christian Leitzbach
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Page 5 and 6: Newsline Submarine simulators from
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Page 11 and 12: Neckarsulm. With revenues of € 70
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