#yourmdexpertise with Sabine

Sabine, please tell me a little about yourself. What excites you most about your job?

After my business degree, I started working in logistics in 2011. By working on various internal and external projects, I had the opportunity to continuously expand my technical and process knowledge. Since 2019, I am now responsible for logistics at MD(D).

Together with my team and colleagues at the sites, we work on continuously optimizing the processes in logistics, which I still enjoy very much. The fact that logistics also has to react very flexibly and ad hoc to unforeseeable events time and again is what makes it so appealing to me.

What is MD doing to reduce the CO2 footprint in logistics to a minimum?

To answer this question comprehensively, two aspects have to be considered: transport on the one hand and internal optimization on the other.

The biggest and also most obvious effect in terms of CO2 savings can definitely be achieved in the area of transport, whereby in an increasingly global environment we naturally have to move more and more transport volumes at the same time. However, to focus only on transport is, in my view, too short-sighted. There are other potentials in logistics that can contribute significantly to CO2 reduction.

Let's start with the area of transportation. What is MD doing here specifically to reduce CO2 emissions?

In the area of transport, the greatest potential for saving CO2 emissions is clearly transport reduction. Our task is therefore to reduce the number of transports to a necessary minimum.

To achieve this, we are working flat out on the subject of localization - both in raw material procurement and in production. This means that on the one hand, through discussions with our suppliers, we agree that products are produced in the region where they are needed, and we do the same for our own production. For overseas shipments, which are still necessary despite localizations, we have maximized consolidations and utilization of ocean freight containers through packaging optimizations both internally and with our suppliers. As a matter of principle, we handle the majority of our overseas shipments by sea freight in order to avoid expensive and more emission-damaging air freight. However, if we need to transport goods more quickly and the transit time for sea freight is too long, we increasingly use rail freight, especially for China.

In addition to overseas shipments, we have already implemented improvements in the area of land freight. Here, the big levers are both the avoidance of special trips through clever, forward-looking procurement strategies and, at the same time, precise production planning, as well as the avoidance of empty runs through intelligent consolidation and transport planning.

In addition, we naturally also pay attention to climate-friendly behavior when selecting our transport service providers for all trade lanes.

?And what else is MD doing in logistics to reduce the CO2 footprint to a minimum?

A major issue is the reduction of packaging and thus also of packaging waste. The packaging optimizations with our suppliers mentioned above have had a positive effect here, where we have saved a lot of unnecessary outer packaging. We have also switched our semi-finished products completely and our raw materials to a very large extent to reusable packaging. In addition, as far as possible, we have dispensed with unnecessary inner packaging such as bags, films, etc.?Another adjustment screw we turned was to optimize the packing density of our finished products. This saves us cardboard packaging and at the same time helps our customers to reduce transport volumes - a win-win situation.

Digitization is a big topic everywhere at the moment, and we have not been idle in this field in recent years either, and are happy that we now work 100% paperless in intralogistics, thereby also contributing to global CO2 reduction.

The last aspect I would like to mention here is the optimization of the utilization of the hall height in our warehouses. At our plant in the Czech Republic, we have already replaced our 3-meter high shelving with 9-meter high shelving in order to utilize the entire height of the hall. This gives us more volume in the same space and thus reduces energy consumption in relation to the volume stored. Next year, the same conversion will take place at our plant in Mexico.

That's already a lot of topics that you are focusing on. In your opinion, is there any further potential or limits?

There is certainly further potential, and it will be our task to develop it and then implement it. However, it is also clear that the automotive industry is demanding more and more flexibility as well as faster reaction and delivery times. The challenge is therefore to continue to drive forward the reduction of CO2 emissions, of course, without making our processes slower as a result and thus losing flexibility.

?Sabine, thank you very much for the super interesting interview!