Gable town Steffen Bersch is one of the rare species of German manager for whom the empty job market comes in handy. He would never say that, but it does show: In a demonstration hall near Würzburg, the boss of the warehouse equipment supplier SSI Schäfer had a yellow robot built that constantly removes medicine boxes from a plastic crate. The gripper arm, which is equipped with suction cups, selects the items using a 3D camera, QR scanner and electric balance before sorting them into waiting bins for picking. “Automation drives where there is a shortage of workers,” says Bersch.
At the beginning of March 2020, the now 52-year-old started in the small town of Neunkirchen in Siegerland to help his new employer out of the persistent doldrums. SSI Schäfer, one of the best-known German suppliers of warehouse technology, has seen stagnating sales at best for years, and several times there have been no profits. Now the loss of workforce, about which 42.6 percent of logistics companies are currently complaining according to the Ifo Institute, should bring his boss a faster turnaround than expected.
The group of companies, founded in 1937 near Siegen as a company for the “factory production of sheet metal goods of all kinds”, is one of the hidden heavyweights of the German economy. The company empire, from which little has leaked out in recent years, is still completely in the hands of the founding family.
Eleven granddaughters and 16 great-grandchildren of the founder Fritz Schäfer hold the shares in three independent groups, which achieved a total turnover of 2.6 billion euros in 2019.
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The equity attributable to them totaled 589 million euros at the end of 2019, and the balance on the shareholder accounts to a further 157 million euros. The parent company SSI Schäfer manages without bank loans. In the list “The largest family businesses”, published by the information network “Die Deutsche Wirtschaft” (DDW), the clan, which partly lives in Switzerland, ranks 119th.
But in the lead there was a huge crunch in the end. In 2017, a net loss of almost twelve million euros was recorded, and in 2019, the group’s net result fell again after a black zero in the previous year at 25 million euros.
Personnel costs have gotten out of hand, according to the annual report delivered for 2019, in particular due to the employment of 1,100 well-paid IT employees. In addition, there was unnecessary duplication of work due to organizational weaknesses.
Change of boss at record speed
At the end of July 2019, CEO Harrie Swinkels had to abdicate after only one and a half years at the top of the company to make way for interim manager Helmut Limberg. “Different views on the further strategic direction of the company” led to the separation, reported SSI Schäfer.
Tailwind from labor shortages and booming e-commerce
Now Bersch, who was born in Wattenscheid, is supposed to fix it. The Siegerländer recruited him from the board of the Düsseldorf mechanical engineering company Gea. The wear and tear of non-family managers is just as record-breaking as it is unusual. Until his death in 2015, the 91-year-old founding son Gerhard Schäfer had managed the company – for more than six decades.
Shortly after taking office in 2020, Bersch restructured the corporate organization that had grown from numerous acquisitions, transformed the self-confident principalities into four business areas and brought their heads to a joint management platform. There they should coordinate their projects with one another and leverage synergies. “In 2020 we returned to the black before taxes,” reports Bersch of the first successes. And you won’t have to report a loss in 2021 either.
So far, the Schäfer descendants have rarely taken care of uniform management. At first there was a clear overview in Neunkirchen-Salchendorf in Siegerland: until 1948 the company founder and four sons manufactured transport boxes, oven pipes and baking trays in the laundry room and an extension of his house. Just in time for the currency reform, a factory for the series production of the bestseller “Lager-Fix”, a stackable screw box with a viewing opening on the front, followed on the nearby village meadow.
In the mid-1950s, the sons expanded into an apparently dusty business area that only a few cared about: the establishment of warehouses with shelves and transport boxes. The quartet was spot on, as it turned out later. Today the parent company sells high racking, conveyor belts and warehouse software worldwide under the brand name SSI Schäfer – with 70 operational subsidiaries, eight production sites in Germany and abroad and around 10,500 employees.
The company structure became more and more complicated as a result. In 1969, the parent company spun off the original production business into a separate group, Schäfer Werke KG. The producer of steel and plastics technology, which achieved sales of 863 million euros in 2019 with 1075 employees, has had independent management since 1982, but has exactly the same shareholders as SSI Schäfer.
The same applies to the Schäfer Shop, which was founded in 1975 and which operates catalogs for commercial customers from Betzdorf in Siegerland. With a turnover of 235 million euros and a profit of four million euros, it is the smallest company in the Siegerland family, and also the best-known. Only: There is no operational connection with the two other sister companies.
Automation as a growth driver
Accordingly, Bersch remains on his own in the effort to stimulate business. One wants to focus anyway, he has given the direction for SSI Schäfer. From now on, the focus will be on supply chain management in the four customer segments of food delivery, pharmaceuticals, automotive and mechanical engineering, as well as in the fashion trade, which is burdened by returns. “We want to offer automation solutions for warehouses where there is still a high manual proportion today,” says the company boss, outlining the strategy. Ergonomic workplace facilities, a trump card when it comes to employee loyalty, are also high on the list.
The potential is considerable. The consulting firm McKinsey predicts an annual growth of seven to eight percent for this segment called “intralogistics” until 2024. Nevertheless, it is unlikely to be a sure-fire success for the winning countries, especially since they have set the goal of surpassing this rate. Even powerful competitors like Kion or Jungheinrich vie for customers in this area.
After all, SSI Schäfer has had some respectable successes in the past few months. The grocer Tegut, a subsidiary of the Swiss Migros Group with 290 supermarkets, commissioned the family business to build a logistics center near Fulda, the Danish freight forwarding giant DSV ordered suspended conveyor systems for its logistics turntables, the pharmacy chain Dr. Max is currently having a distribution center set up in Bucharest by SSI Schaefer. In March, Bersch handed over a partially automated logistics complex to Edeka near Schweinfurt.
How far the new boss will drive the focus in the end, however, remains to be seen. SSI Schaefer still makes ten percent of its sales with so-called “waste technology”. However, modern digitization, automation and supply chain technology are far from this business area. Behind the name hides the simple production of garbage cans.
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