TWS opens logistics centre for key OEM customer

Recently Trelleborg Wheel Systems (TWS) inaugurated a new logistics centre Mönchengladbach, Germany. This new facility will supply its customer, Nacco Materials Handling, with industrial tyres on a just-in-time basis.

The Nacco plant is located some 100 kilometres away from Mönchengladbach, in Nijmegen, The Netherlands. The factory there produces forklifts and lift trucks under the Hyster, Yale and Utilev brand names. Or, as plant manager Wim van Dam observes, perhaps “produces” is not the right word, as Nacco doesn’t manufacture a single vehicle component itself and “merely” assembles all the delivered components. “In this respect we are of course completely dependent upon our suppliers that products, for example tyres, arrive with us in the factory at the right time,” explains the Nacco manager. This is particularly the case as vehicles cannot be built “in advance”, rather the plant produces only as many as customers order, and to their specifications: According to van Dam, ten vehicles are assembled every day. Andreas Karnein from Trelleborg Wheel Systems Deutschland GmbH explains that this means 60 tyres – six per vehicle; four at the front and two at the rear – are needed daily.

This is where TWS and its 100 per cent subsidiary Interfit Industriereifen und Service GmbH comes into the picture. The company’s brand new Mönchengladbach warehouse supplies the Dutch firm with the tyres it needs, both Trelleborg products and other brands from different manufacturers, according to customer requirements. “Our new facility is the first of its kind within the Trelleborg group,” shares Nicolas Nollé, director global OEM for the  Industrial Tires business unit at TWS. However he makes no secret of the fact that the concept could set a precedent for collaborative work with other customers and the supply of their tyres. TWS views this as a step that goes beyond just tyre manufacture. As is also reflected in the new slogan “going further”, the company intends to incresingly grow in its role as service provider for its customers. After all, Nollé shares with Tyres & Accessories that some of the tyres now coming from the Far East are good products, and therefore companies like TWS have been confronted to a certain extent with growing competition.

“Anyone can manufacture products. We want to distinguish ourselves with our service. We thus offer our OEM customers added value,” he explains. In the case of Nacco, for example, TWS has created efficiency for the Dutch firm. Forklifts and lift trucks are amongst the most important pieces of machinery in the world, and TWS ensures that the vehicle manufacturer can produce what its customers expect: Delivery of the vehicles they’ve ordered at the right time. In order to ensure that everything runs smoothly when it comes to fitting tyres, both parties work closely together and have established, for example, a joint quality management system. Furthermore, once a week TWS and Interfit receive a list covering Nacco’s production planning, and on the basis of this the five employees in the approximately 2,400 square metre warehouse/logistics centre can prepare and mount the correct tyre and wheel combination. “Suitably loaded stillages are trucked to Nijmegen up to twice a day,” explains Andreas Karnein, who according to Nollé significantly propelled “project Mönchengladbach” and also drove the 2010/11 integration of industry tyre firm Watts into the company.