Moving Europe

Michael Schilling,
managing director of
Dachser’s European Network
Management & Logistics
Systems business unit
mont-Ferrand offers daily connections between
France and Germany, Belgium, the
Netherlands, Luxembourg, Italy, Spain,
Portugal and the Maghreb states.
Switchover
Outwardly the Eurohubs are no different
from the branch offices: indeed, during the
day they operate as regular branch offices.
From 8 p.m. in the evening, however, a complete
switchover takes place and the hub gets
into action. It functions as an autonomous
operating unit, with a separate team and dedicated
workflows. Eurohub operations in
Überherrn, for example, are overseen by six
office and administrative staff members, with
around 75 more in the terminal. In the offices,
the computers are booted up at around 6 p.m.,
while in the terminal things start getting busy
from 8.30 p.m., with one truck after another
pulling up at the bays. By 11 p.m. the number
of arrivals totals 67, which means a new truck
every 2.4 minutes. First, the trucks operating
the more local routes are unloaded, followed
by those coming from further afield.
Today, a trailer combination with swap bodies
arrives in Überherrn at 9.50 p.m., having
left the branch office in Orléans, France, at
2.30 p.m. After registering his freight at the
gate, the driver is allocated an unloading bay.
The Eurohub in Überherrn utilizes a total of
117 bays for over 90 destinations. 25 bays are
reserved for unloading, the remainder for
loading operations.
At bay 83 the unloader is already hard at
work. He transports the pallets that have arrived
from France on pallet trucks from the
swap body into the terminal and hooks them
up to the in-floor drag-chain conveyor. The
conveyor system is 420 metres long, moves in
a clockwise direction and completes a cycle
through the entire terminal to the respective
loading bays every 16 minutes. “Its rhythm
determines the heartbeat of our timed-tothe-minute
transshipment operations,” says
Eurohub manager Wild.
The hub system
hh is the natural
consequence of our vision
of what network competence
means Michael Schilling
To ensure the pallets on the drag-chain conveyor
find their way to the right destination,
the shrink-wrapped goods are clearly labelled
with the country code for Sweden together
with the respective route number. These are
the identifiers for the “unhooker,” who detaches
the pallet at the bays for Scandinavia
and makes it ready for the loader. The latter
scans in the pallet and loads it together with
other groupage consignments via the Scandinavia
bay onto the corresponding blueand-yellow
swap body, where the team of
In keeping with the principles
of the flow of goods, pallets
are transported by drag-chain
conveyor from the unloading
bay to the respective loading
bay for their destination
COVER STORY
drivers is waiting. The next stop is Dachser’s
branch office in Jönköping in Sweden, from
where the goods are shipped to Stockholm.
They arrive in the Swedish capital at 5 a.m.
on the morning of the following day. It has
taken the pallet just 48 hours to complete its
journey across Europe from consignor to
consignee.
Quality comes first
Precise, to-the-minute timing demands a
concentrated, uninterrupted and smooth
workflow. Even at peak times, when more
than 4,000 consignments and over 1,000
tonnes a day pass through the terminal,
there’s no chaos or shouting. “Chaotic conditions
impede getting the job done properly,”
Oliver Wild believes. “And that’s something
we can’t afford. Our teams’ motto is:
quality, quality, quality. Because this is
critical for the entire network.” To ensure
optimum quality day in, day out, per- �
DACHSER magazine 17