Perhaps Andrei Sibiryakov should have taken the left turn a little slower. Just under 80 kilometres an hour on fresh snow was too much for the Porsche Cayman. When he put his foot on the brake, he already knew it was too late. Slowly the small sports car slid towards the Lada parked at the edge of the road. Then came the crash. At Sport-Auto in Datchnaya Street, the only Porsche workshop in Novosibirsk and, in fact, within a radius of several thousand kilometres, the technicians soon reach a diagnosis. “The car needs a new front spoiler,” they explain, “and the right fender and right main headlight have to be replaced, too.” The master mechanic logs on to the Porsche IT system. “The spoiler and fender are in stock in Moscow, but the headlight is currently unavailable in the whole of Russia.” It will have to be shipped to West Siberia from Germany – to be more precise, from the central spare parts warehouse in Ludwigsburg near Stuttgart.
Andrei Sibiryakov doesn’t want to wait two or three weeks, which is how long it can take to transport the headlight by road. So the part will have to be delivered as express freight and sky hop from Germany to Moscow and then from there to Novosibirsk. Sport-Auto sends the order to Germany by e-mail through Porsche Russia in Moscow. It is Wednesday, 11 a.m. local time in Novosibirsk when the order arrives in Ludwigsburg. There it is six o’clock in the morning. Two hours later an employee at the Schenker office in Filderstadt near Stuttgart pulls a shipping order from Porsche out of the fax machine: transport a right headlight for a Porsche Cayman from Ludwigsburg, 50 kilometres away, to Novosibirsk, 5,000 kilometres away. The shipment will be ready for pickup at 3:30 p.m. that day.
A routine case for Schenker. For just under two years, the Deutsche Bahn subsidiary has been responsible for organizing and realizing the supply of all spare parts to Russia for Porsche. Whenever a part is needed, Schenker delivers it. The subsidiary of the German rail group is one of the global players in the international transport business. It is right at the top when it comes to car industry logistics. Schenker delivers parts from all over Europe to the Audi plant in Györ, Hungary, where the TT Roadster is produced. The forwarder uses rail shuttles to transport car components from the Opel factory in Bochum to the Astra assembly plant in Antwerp and from Zaragoza to Eisenach. At the BMW plant in Leipzig it supplies components for the 3 Series directly to the assembly line.
Logistics is an unwieldy term for highly complex interrelationships, a world of many small, but tremendously important, interconnected processes. Logistics means “ensuring the availability of the right goods in the right quantities in the right condition at the right place at the right time for the right customer and at the right price”. The accepted definition may be long-winded, but it is accurate. In more simple terms, you could say: logistics is the lubricating oil of the world economy. The division of labour in the global factory is generating steady growth in the flows of goods travelling around the world – and the demands on point-to-point transport are also increasing. Germany is a logistics world champion. The giants of the industry – Schenker, DHL and Kühne + Nagel – are no longer just fleets of vehicles with a few trucks, but globally operating businesses, enormous spiders in the highly differentiated transport web, equipped with complex IT tools and satellite-controlled communication systems. The industry generates an annual turnover of 165 billion euros. In Germany, 480,000 people are employed by the logistics industry, and this figure is rising.
Logistics encompasses everything from letter delivery to container shipment as well as supplying factories with steel tubes and service stations with fuel and frozen pizzas. Logistics specialists ensure that white roses from Kenya arrive fresh in the flower shop around the corner and that the cooking pots ordered from the home-shopping channel are delivered to people’s doors. Millions of euros are lost when a car factory comes to a halt for an hour because containers of urgently needed components were delayed at the port. Time is money – this maxim applies nowhere more than in the logistics industry. And yet the costs do not necessarily depend on the distances travelled. “When a container travels from Shanghai to Potsdam,” explains a logistics expert, “the ship’s journey half way around the world only accounts for one fifth and the overland transport from Hamburg to Potsdam for four fifths of the freight costs.”
Above all, the goods have to arrive at their destination on time. That’s why Andrei Sibiryakov’s headlight, for example, is not transported to Novosibirsk by truck, which would be significantly cheaper, but is loaded onto an aircraft. It’s Thursday afternoon at Hahn Airport in the Hunrück hills, 3 p.m. local time, one-and-a-half days after the accident. The headlight for Andrei Sibiryakov’s Porsche is just being loaded into the hold of an old DC-10. The part has already travelled some distance today: from the Porsche warehouse in Ludwigsburg to Schenker in Filderstadt, then onto a truck and up the autobahn on the way to the airport. Only 41 hours have passed since Andrei Sibiryakov’s accident when the DC-10 takes off punctually for Moscow at 8:20 p.m.
When goods are transported to Germany by sea from China or India, the journey time isn’t counted in hours or days, but in weeks. And the imponderabilities are on an entirely different scale from an afternoon traffic jam on the autobahn. Problems with customs, striking port workers or severe storms on the high seas are just some of the hurdles that can lead to detours. Spontaneous decisions then have to be made about calling at other ports or taking a few more containers on board. But that takes time. As a result, a week’s delay can easily accrue on the China route. That’s an enormous challenge for the transport planners of the major logistics firms. Logistics no longer only involves the safe transportation of freight over distances of thousands of kilometres; it has also become the art of delivering goods to the factory at predetermined times. The car industry takes this to extremes by demanding that components be delivered to the assembly line at precise times determined by production processes and irrespective of how far the parts have to travel.
These global flows of goods come together at Hamburg. The bank of the Elbe with its storage bays piled high with brightly coloured steel containers has become “the stockyard of galloping globalization”, as it was recently described in a report on the world’s eighth largest port. The container, a metal box measuring 20 feet long, 8 feet wide and 8 feet tall, is the global currency of logistics. Calculated over the year, Hamburg has almost five times as many containers as inhabitants. If you were to put all the containers end to end, they would create a line of boxes stretching almost three times around the world. Hamburg is just a stop for most containers. The port links the workshops of the world – China, India and Korea – with Scandinavia, the Baltic region, Russia and southeastern Europe.
And with Hanover. That’s where Schenker runs the state-of-the-art Production Supply Centre for Volkswagen. “The parts that arrive here every day in 130 trucks have to be fitted in 700 VW Transporters according to a timetable measured in seconds – and this has to be achieved without interrupting production at the factory,” explains Jürgen Buch, who is in charge of Schenker’s operation in Hanover. An invisible hand maintains order in the seemingly chaotic bustle of forklifts and electric carts. Nothing is left to chance and little to human judgment. The supply centre and the neighbouring factory are networked together by central computers; intelligent and flexible IT systems maintain the flow of materials in time to the rhythm of the production process. They control communication between the suppliers, Schenker and Volkswagen.
Everything the suppliers deliver from all over Europe – 2,000 different modules and countless individual parts – has to be transferred from the trucks to the warehouse and then from the warehouse to the factory over a 360-metre bridge, a process has to be synchronized with the assembly line – with the right part always at the right place at the right time. This even applies to such apparently trivial things as the instruction book for the radio, which has to be in the glove compartment in English – not another language – if the vehicle is being built for the British market. Even the tiniest mistakes can come back to roost. “VW employees at the factory must be able to rely on the fact that the parts have been supplied in the right order,” says Jürgen Buch. “Assembly workers automatically reach for the next component. If they need grey door panels for a car and we supply black ones, the vehicle can’t be delivered on time.” In the worst case, the assembly line has to be stopped.
Saturday afternoon in Novosibirsk. The mechanic at Sport-Auto is getting ready to leave for lunch when a courier drives into the yard. The driver pulls out a parcel. It’s the right headlight for Andrei Sibiryakov’s Cayman. After passing through six transshipment stations and travelling 400 kilometres by road and 5,000 kilometres in the air, it has finally reached its destination. Three days and four hours have passed since the accident. The mechanic thinks for a moment before calling Andrei Sibiryakov. He can collect his car in two hours.
