Setting High Standards

We will not compromise on delivering high quality, reliable, and safe material handling and storage solutions, even at the risk of losing a sale, says Brian Miles, Regional Director, SSI Schaefer in the interview with Bob Gill, editor of Logistics Insight Asia.

Brian Miles arrived in Asia in 1984 to set up a Singapore distributorship for German material handling specialists SSI Schaefer. With the Asian tigers beginning to roar, it was not long before the company realized that there was the considerable potential over in the Far East. The distributor became a wholly owned subsidiary and, later, the operational hub for a rapidly expanding regional network of Schaefer sites.

Today, Brian Miles oversees an area that extends from the Middle East right down to Australia and New Zealand, encompassing 12 offices and two manufacturing plants (Malaysia and China), with further expansion in the  pipeline. The healthy growth is reflected in sales revenue, which doubled between 2003 and 2007 to reach some 100 million euros.

Q: WHAT ARE SOME OF THE KEY FACTORS BEHIND SCHAEFER'S RECENT GROWTH AND SUCCESS IN THE REGION?

A: To give customers the level of service they need you have to have people on the ground. So to develop

the market in Asia we decided to establish our own subsidiary companies, staffed by our own designers, project managers, and sales and service people to provide a real local presence.

Planting these roots shows that you're in a country for the long term, which provides further assurance to the customer. With the distributor approach, you are only as good as the guy representing your portfolio, and the allegiance can change at any time.

We are also one of the very few companies that is a "one stop shop", in that we provide all the hardware - plastic containers, racking, conveyors, sortation systems, etc - plus all the necessary design, project management, and integration services. Thus we are able to carry out turnkey projects using our own resources.

- Extracted from Logistics Insight Asia, Jan-Feb 2008, C-Level Conversation, page 18-19.

For the full article, please go to Press