Ready on time – Starco opening new Central Warehouse
Five months after its foundation stone was laid in December 2011, Starco’s new central warehouse in Winsen, 30 kilometres south of the German city of Hamburg, is virtually ready for business. The company reports that the relocation of staff and stocks from its previous warehouse in nearby Lüneburg is almost complete, and Starco is set to benefit from the major expansion in capacity the new central warehouse delivers; the Winsen facility offers 11,400 square metres of indoor storage with 12 metres headroom (a doubling of the previous six metre headroom) giving space for 20,000 euro pallets. A further expansion that will bring capacity up to 30,000 euro pallets is already being planned, and the location can handle additional expansion when the need arises.
As Starco GmbH managing director Axel Werner explains, “The new central warehouse gives us an immediate fourfold increase in storage capacity, which will enable us to improve the entire logistic flow and handle faster deliveries – with more products on stock, more space to manoeuvre and better access for trucks and containers, we expect to achieve a dramatic improvement in our daily operations.”
The location of the new central warehouse – close to the A1 and A7 motorways, to Europe’s largest railway marshalling yards and international port facilities in Hamburg and to the headquarters of many local trucking companies – will also enhance daily operation and make it possible to ship orders out of the warehouse later in the day, thus extending the time each day during which Starco can prepare customer orders.
Starco believes that the opening of the new warehouse, together with the implementation of the latest logistics IT systems, will confirm that its strategy of centralising a major part of its stocks in one location will bring advantages to both customers and Starco regional entities alike. Whilst regional entities will continue to hold locally popular products on stock, the central warehouse strategy will ensure that products in the Starco catalogue can be shipped from the central warehouse to the customer within 24/48 hours – a considerable improvement on the previous diversified warehousing strategy, whereby Starco entities often had to source and move products between regional warehouses to fulfil orders.
“Starco is growing steadily and the Eastern and Western European markets have evolved considerably in the last decade,” Werner added. “The new central warehouse and IT infrastructure will ensure that Starco is able to sustain this growth and improve both profitability and performance.”
The new warehouse is located at -Starco GmbH, Benzstrasse 21, D-21423 Winsen Tel: +49 (0) 4171 / 60 80 – 0 Fax: +49 (0) 4171 / 60 80 – 11.
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