Business Competitiveness
GEA and Business Competitiveness
Express services allow companies of all sizes to maximise the efficiency of their production, logistics, inventory management, and sales.
- They facilitate exports by small and medium-sized companies, especially where they are far from their markets or in developing countries. Express services allow them access to high quality, rapid delivery services that they could not provide themselves.
- They enable firms to reduce purchasing costs, by increasing the area from which inputs can be sourced and facilitating sourcing from cheaper suppliers.
- They facilitate cost-savings on inventories by enabling better concentration, rationalisation and location of warehouses.
- They provide extensive logistics support services to companies, enabling them to delegate responsibility to professionals in the sector who seek the most cost-effective way of transporting goods and paperwork on their behalf. This both relieves companies of the burden of running their own transport departments and vehicles, and allows managers to focus on their core business.
- They improve companies’ handling of returns and complaints – for example, by allowing next-day delivery of replacement equipment to customers or quick turnaround of repairs.
- They improve the effectiveness of companies’ R&D activities, by facilitating their decentralization. For example, 80% of survey respondents in Germany reported that this helps to reduce the time-to-market of new product developments by enabling R&D centres to be based in locations which provide maximum participation in leading research associations.
- They facilitate improved stock-management and production techniques, reducing firms’ storage costs, losses due to stock-outages and disruption caused by failure of machinery on production lines
See our industry reports for full details.