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“Your second warehouse for hexagon
and socket fasteners”
Eurobolt bv
‘s-Heerenberg, Netherlands
It is more than three years since Phil this represents a significant saving, considering from each consignment to an external
Matten last visited Eurobolt. Still located in we receive over 1,400 containers every year,” professional laboratory for destructive
the German-Dutch border town of says Harry Snijders. testing. The company has always operated
‘s-Heerenberg the company has quickly Once construction had started on the new on a tight supplier base. That policy continues
settled into new, custom-built offices and warehouse, designed to meet Eurobolt’s with virtually all the product sourced from
warehouse. specific requirements, things happened ten factories, mostly in China, under
By early 2005 Eurobolt was rapidly rapidly. “Construction began in November supervision of purchase manager Lothar
outgrowing its 12,000-pallet warehouse and last year. We began moving product in April Markl, who has 35 years experience in
was taking temporary space at its freight 2008 - around 19,000 pallets in total – and fasteners. Eurobolt now also has a
forwarder and elsewhere close by. “We knew we cracked the champagne to celebrate China-based assistant purchase manager
something had to be done to increase completion end June. who audits the factories, maintains close
capacity,” says general manager, Harry The new warehouse is 7,500 square relations and expedites shipments.
Snijders, “Operating from three warehouses metres in area and 13 metres high, The despatch area is located below the
proved increasingly inefficient as we providing 25,000 pallet locations in a commercial offices. An automatic shrink-
continued to grow – in the end we spent conventional high-bay system, serviced by wrapping line has replaced the previous heat
30% of our resource simply moving stock combined picker and side-stacker trucks on shrink machine – delivering improvements in
between the three locations, which meant under-floor electronic guidance lines. One energy costs and load security. Four trailers,
delivery times and reliability suffered. It has key upgrade was to change to overhead RF provided by the main delivery contractor for
taken quite some time, and there were a computer screens on the picking trucks and Germany, Belgium, France and local markets,
few complications on the way, for example bar scanners to confirm locations. “It was an are filled during the day. Eurobolt has around
environmental issues with the land, but now interesting challenge for the operators to go 350 regular customers throughout Europe,
we are here.” paperless,” says Harry Snijders, “but the ranging Scandinavia to Spain and Italy in the
Remaining in ‘s-Heerenberg was change has improved our efficiency quite a South and from the UK and Ireland to east
important. The border town is ideally lot.” European countries. For long range ship-
positioned between Eurobolt’s major The overall warehouse design is straight- ments, individual contracts are negotiated
markets and its supply route via Rotterdam. forward. Two receiving ramps and docks at from a selection of known performance
The company continues to take advantage of one end, with clear floor space to offload carriers. The far end of the warehouse
the nearby Rhine port of Emmerich, where containers and a nearby quality inspection houses two Weighpack packaging lines for
incoming containers are off-loaded from office. Eurobolt now has a designated quality repacking products that have been plated or
barges and hauled by road the remaining 5 manager and carries out a range of standard galvanised.
kilometres. “With fuel costs as they now are tests in-house, continuing to send samples Last time we visited Eurobolt we
described it as a “tight ship”. It remains so,
with a clear emphasis on keeping things
simple and straightforward. Annual turnover
is now over 20 million euros, and full time
employees have increased to thirty-three.
The key principles of the business, though,
are still the same. The relationship with the
customer is direct and responsive. All
customers are distributors and fastener
resellers – no end users are supplied. It is
immediately evident that the business is
simply not geared to do so. Although the
company does respond to smaller orders
from distributors, volume orders continue to
represent the lion’s share of the business.
Eurobolt still issues a weekly stock list to
every customer – covering over 7,000
articles. Virtually all are sent by email, in
either PDF or spreadsheet format, although,
says sales office supervisor Patrick Jansen,
“We still have one customer who insists on
receiving over 60 pages by fax. He says it is
important that he has the list in his hand
every week. That’s why Eurobolt also sends
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