Haastattelussa Rainer Bürkert

At first I think we must learn that both sides, suppliers and customers, have the same problem. There is, on the one hand, the problem that there are fewer and fewer skilled people available because when you look at the demography, people are running out at the end of the time as skilled people. And on the other hand, there is a huge pressure on productivity because our competitors are sitting in Asia, manufacturing also high-quality products, and so we have to get more productive very quickly because we will never be able to produce cheaper than them. So we have to produce smarter than they do. And this on our side has to need to cut out all interfaces because today the handling of data and the handling of goods goes through too many hands. This is a huge problem. Very ugly, you have 21 to 30 interfaces until a screw or washer is very nicely neat. And we, together with our customers, want to cut it down to one or two interfaces, having a common database, having a common supply base. You know this when you look at companies like Amazon; there you have this common database, but the problem you face is they never talk with you about quality assurance. They will not talk to you about having one parcel at the end of the day. If you place an order with 20, 50, or 100 different items, you will get 100 different parcels very often. And what we do is having a common database, common information, and then having a common delivery, one hand on-site delivery with a high service, high quality level so that the customer at the end of the day knows: I will never run out of these products. I can concentrate on developing my innovation, my products, and Würth in the background is doing the rest for me. Our customers are talking about thousands of different items, mainly what we deliver C-parts, but inside C-parts articles they are also A and B and C, so things that are running frequently and things that are running not that frequent. And especially very often half of them are special articles only used by this company but all around the world in this company when you think about Mercedes or others. And so it makes sense to have a hub where all the C-part articles are stored. We have decided for Europe, having it in Germany because it's the center of Europe, and there we have millions of different articles, between six and seven million on hand. And out here in Finland we store the core parts, our custom parts. And if he needs one of the not here on us, we will deliver them so that the Finnish colleagues have the ability to fall back on this huge assortment without having the need of storing everything, but they can provide a hundred percent service to their customers. And our idea is also to have strong teams in language and in knowing the local needs out here with the customers so that the customer feels that yeah, these are people who understand my problem, but having a strong backbone for them centrally in terms of purchasing, in terms of data handling, in terms of logistics. At the end of the day, they're creating a strong supply chain for them.