Bundesliga team Borussia Dortmund has outsourced the complete warehouse logistics for its merchandising items to the logistics services provider Rhenus. Rhenus has been looking after the storage of these products, making deliveries to all the club's fan shops and processing online orders from fans at its logistics centre in Dortmund since the end of June.
Rhenus will also take over deliveries to the planned "Experience the World of BVB" centre from the spring of 2014 onwards. The new service centre, which will measure 2,000 square metres and be located next to the SIGNAL IDUNA PARK stadium, will provide a black and yellow (club colours) activity centre and meeting point for fans of the long-standing club based in the Ruhr region.
"Logistics is not part of our core business. So we're placing our confidence in the expertise of a specialist from the region, which will handle our customers' orders quickly and reliably and also cope with individual customer wishes in a flexible way," says Carsten Cramer, BVB Director of Marketing and Sales, giving the reasons for the new partnership.
The logistics services provider will not only handle the warehousing operations for the merchandising items - ranging from the swimwear collection to the smartphone cover, the kettle grill or the black and yellow letter-box - but also provide value-added services. Rhenus will, for example, assume responsibility for flocking, i.e. marking football shirts, and process invoices and any returned goods.
"We also provide an opportunity for fans to place advance orders so that new products can be delivered to them at home as quickly as possible - for example, the new football shirts at the start of the season," says Heiko Nowak, Managing Director of Rhenus Contract Logistics West.
Rhenus is able to cope with seasonal fluctuations in volumes or those caused by the results of games in a flexible way at its multi-user warehouse in Dortmund, which has more than 100,000 square metres of storage space. "The team's success in the Bundesliga, the German Cup and the Champions League or a prominent new signing play a major role in ensuring that a very large number of orders are placed within a short time and we need to process them promptly. We're ideally prepared for this at our centre," Heiko Nowak explains. Rhenus not only works for BVB at its logistics centre in Dortmund, but also for other customers from industry and commerce and the high-tech sector - and those requiring document logistics.
Source: Rhenus AG & Co. KG
