Deutsche Post DHL wants to go beyond offering a portfolio of ‘one-stop shopping’ services bydeveloping integrated and standardised industry solutions, according to senior executives. A new
business unit will lead development of the new products.Presenting the new DHL Solutions & Innovation (DSI) business unit at this week’s GermanLogistics Congress in Berlin, CEO Frank Appel said that as part of the group’s Strategy 2015, DHLaimed to become the innovation leader in the logistics industry and also market leader in sectorssuch as life sciences, technology and energy. The new unit would bring together the innovationactivities of the individual DHL branches and the group’s “worldwide expertise”, and create “future-oriented logistics solutions” for specific industries.
“Up to now customers have bought based on the modal split because the market is structuredthat way,” Appel explained. “Customers bought DHL products individually and then tried to integratethem into their supply chain.”
In future, DHL would integrate different services into integrated and standardised logisticssolutions. DHL needed to have “ready concepts in the drawer” that it could offer to customers as “large, medium or small solutions”, depending on the customer’s size, he said.
“We will offer one-stop solutions, not one-stop shopping. This is a big change to the past,”Appel declared.
In future, DHL will be open to working in partnerships with other suppliers in order to offercomplete logistics solutions, the CEO added. DHL would manage the industry solutions but customerswould have full transparency of which partners were providing the individual services, heexplained.
DSI head Petra Kiwitt, who will also be a member of the DHL Executive Committee, stressed: “Our customers expect sustainable solutions, understandable services that are easy to use anduncomplicated access to their service provider.”
Kiwitt presented two examples of customer solutions that had the potential to be developedinto industry solutions. One is the ‘Control Tower Concept’ under which DHL is managing the entireinbound supply chain for Airbus in Toulouse, including IT-based carrier and tender management,process management, monitoring and reporting. This end-to-end supply chain management optimisedcosts, improved quality and transparency, she stressed.
Another example was the fast creation of a programme for a mobile phone product recallinvolving one million items in 10 EU countries between March and October 2009. This concept couldbe developed into a standardised solution, she said.
The unit will work closely with DHL Global Customer Solutions (GCS), which handles the group’s 100 biggest customers, so that their needs can be fed into development processes at an earlystage. The DSI unit will also benefit from the DHL Innovation Center, located at Troisdorf, nearBonn, where groundbreaking logistics solutions such as the parcel robot, the carbon offsettingprocedure and the smart truck originated.
