The long journey starts at 1:30 p.m. on a Tuesday in city of Fürth in Middle Franconia, Germany. A truck puts on its blinker and sets off in the direction of Nuremberg. Its cargo: a few dozen toy excavators packed in lightbrown boxes. Its destination: Portugal. The goods will be on the road for a total of three days, lashed down in a white “swap body,” as the transport containers are known in freight-forwarding parlance. DB Schenker, whose logo is emblazoned on the truck, has long been part of the road scene in Europe. The fact that children in Portugal, 2,200 kilometers away, will soon be playing with these toy excavators is the result of a logistical mega-achievement. At its center: DB Schenker’s hub in Nuremberg, the Franconian metropolis. The branch in southern Nuremberg is the most important hub for the European land transport network. Around 2,500 metric tons of goods are delivered, moved and forwarded here every day. “The whole system is designed for efficiency. All the cogs have to mesh. That’s the challenge we face every day,” says Niko Vollmer, head of the Collection & Distribution (“CoDi”) department at DB Schenker’s Frankfurt headquarters. “We give customers a guarantee that we will meet the deadlines.” At the heart of the Nuremberg office are four large transshipment halls. Around the clock, trucks from all over Europe are unloaded here and their goods distributed for onward transport. Even deep in the night, up to 65 forklifts and electric pallet trucks (fulfillment robots) scurry across the 10,000-square-meter area, heaving the pallets from the delivery ramps on one side to the destination ramps on the other side of the halls, where they are loaded onto new swap bodies. Beforehand, the dispatchers have collected all the information digitally and passed it on to the relevant departments. The Linehaul Network System (LiNeS), which is used by the European DB Schenker community, is one of the tools that help with this. The application records all data on deliveries in intercompany traffic, stores production schedules, and indicates precise times for arrivals and departures at the terminals. At 4:30 p.m., the toy excavators from Fürth arrive in Hall Two. At 4:35 p.m., a forklift driver forks the pallet and moves it to Hall Local service For DB Schenker in Nuremberg, 100 trucks are dedicated just to short-haul transport. And two eTrucks, each with a range of around 100 kilometers, make deliveries throughout the region. Via air freight Every month, 6,500 shipments with a total weight of 2,300 metric tons are handled and checked for safety in the company’s own X-ray facilities. A question of efficiency Every day, around 2,500 metric tons of goods are received and forwarded at the Nuremberg location. Niko Vollmer, Head of Collection & Distribution at DB Schenker in Germany Bernd Drossel, Branch Manager Nuremberg Land at DB Schenker in Germany Integration location Nuremberg offers a full range of transport solutions – from trade fair freight forwarding, to ocean and air freight, to logistics. From Nuremberg out into the world Every day, around 130 trucks swarm out from the DB Schenker hub in Germany’s Franconia region, headed off in every conceivable direction. 19 20 21 22 23 18 From to A B How do goods get to the department store shelves? Most products travel many kilometers to get to the locations where they are needed. And in order for this process to happen smoothly, pallets have to be scanned, trucks have to be loaded and data has to be managed – around the clock. A visit to the Nuremberg hub of DB Schenker in Germany History It was 135 years ago that Schenker opened its first branch office, in Nuremberg. New center In 2014, the branch office on Bremer Street opened for business. Widely connected 430 European locations can be reached from Nuremberg. Many objectives 84 European destinations are served from Nuremberg. Nuremberg is one of the most important hubs within the European land transport network. 13 14 16 17 15 6 7
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