Avantor® and H.Essers: celebrating 10 years of growing together
Avantor® and H.Essers are celebrating the 10-year anniversary of a productive and growing collaboration. What began with a few hundred pallets is now a robust operation with 46.000 pallets at Dry Port Genk (BE). Today, the two companies partner to provide value-added services to handle a wide variety of goods and the highest customer service levels.
Supporting growth
Avantor is a leading global provider of mission-critical products and services to customers in the biopharma, healthcare, education & government, and advanced technologies & applied materials industries. To support the growth of their activities in Europe, Avantor needed a warehousing and distribution partner, as Jonathan De Deken, VP of Distribution Europe at Avantor, explains: “We wanted a more qualitative approach to our warehousing and distribution services. We engaged with H.Essers, initially to completed small volume projects, but quickly realised we could expand this collaboration to include our core distribution business needs.”
In 2019, Avantor moved operations to Dry Port Genk to supplement warehousing capacity needs. H.Essers now acts as an integrated warehouse for Avantor’s distribution network. Today because of the successful collaboration 46.000 pallets are stored in Dry Port Genk.
“One of the reasons for this growth is our shared focus on delivering customer excellence. Thanks to good teamwork over the last 10 years, the Dry Port operations is a success story,” adds Jorrit Cuppens, Business Unit Manager at H.Essers.
A broad product portfolio, a wide range of services
“At Avantor, we create added value for our customers by offering access to a broad portfolio of high-quality products and equipment,” continues Jonathan De Deken. “H.Essers supports this by acting as an extension of our team by providing warehousing capacity – including unloading containers, sorting goods, picking, packaging and labelling to ensure we continue to meet our customers’ needs.”
Jorrit Cuppens: “Indeed, this is not only a matter of warehousing at an ever-growing scale, daily our team prepares 6.000 to 7.000 packages for Avantor’s customers, all according to the company’s requirements including high service levels.”
As Avantor sells a wide variety of goods, the Dry Port Genk warehouse features several zones for storage under the right conditions. They include temperature-controlled sectors and storage space with foam extinguishers for flammable goods. In addition, H.Essers also manages temperature-controlled, GDP compliant truck transports.
The ongoing collaboration does not come without challenges, but Marc Vrancken, Operations Manager at H.Essers, and his team have been providing solutions for many years. “We have a great team that has grown more agile and has acquired the flexibility to deal with changing situations. And, most importantly, we gather valuable insights on each occasion and use them to evolve further,” he states.
Looking forward
This special 10-year celebration is an occasion to look back at where the partnership started, but it’s also an opportunity to look forward to the future.
Jorrit Cuppens: “We will continue to support Avantor’s growth in Belgium and Europe by expanding our warehousing activities according to their needs. To that end, we’re working on a roadmap for the following years. The development of other activities, such as multimodal transports, is in consideration. In addition, our mutual focus on innovation and technology ensures that the operations will always be carried out in the optimum way. We are looking forward to taking the next steps in our relationship and continuing our good cooperation.”
Jonathan De Deken: “We’re always looking for ways to improve our processes, such as working in a paperless or paper-light way or adapting setups to allow for further specialisation. As for technology, H.Essers is exploring ways of optimising and automating container unloading. Automatic or semi-automatic order picking is another area we’re researching. And, most importantly, we want to keep building on this strong foundation to continue our mutual success in serving the customer.”
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