Following a contract signed at the beginning of the year, the Rhenus Group is providing DAF Trucks with complete supply chain services for its expanding dealer network in Russia and the wider CIS region.
Rhenus is currently establishing warehousing in the Moscow region from where its transport subsidiary, Revival Express, will distribute spare parts to DAF partner companies in Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan. The service includes truck and air freight, as well as customs solutions. DAF has eight dealerships in Russia and two each in Belarus (Minsk) and Kazakhstan (Almaty).
“Following meticulous planning for the project, which also involved adapting IT structures, we’re ideally prepared to satisfy customer requirements,” said Olaf Metzger, managing director of Revival Express. “Working together with the Rhenus subsidiary Copex, we successfully completed the test consignment of truck spare parts for DAF Trucks to our warehouse in the Sherrizone FEZ in the Moscow region in June.”
Copex Cargo is Rhenus’ Dutch subsidiary and the agreement involves Copex picking up truck parts produced at the DAF Trucks facility in Eindhoven. Rhenus’ Contract Logistics division has just announced that it is expanding activities in Eindhoven with the addition of a 55,000-square-metre logistics facility on the nearby Ekkersrijt industrial estate, its eighth facility in The Netherlands.
In addition to supplying the goods to the warehouse near Moscow, Rhenus also completes all the documentation and handles the customs formalities through Rhenus Customs Broker.
Metzger said that because the Russian government has moved customs operations to the country’s outer borders, the Rhenus customs and logistics terminal (pictured), which was opened in Krasnaya Gorka, not far from Smolensk, in May, will play an important role in the future shape of supply chains for its customers.
“We’ll make use of the cross-docking process for our customer DAF Trucks too in order to distribute the spare parts to the authorised dealers without having to ship them the extra kilometres via the warehouse in the Moscow region,” added Metzger.
The Krasnaya Gorka terminal has more than 2,200 square metres of warehouse space and room for and 400 trucks to park.
“Our terminal is the first bonded warehouse that an international freight forwarder has been able to build on the Belarus/Russian border in the Smolensk area,” said Metzger. “We enjoyed broad support for our building project from the outset, both from the Russian customs authorities and the worlds of politics and administration.”
In 2009 the Russian government decided to move bonded warehouses and customs offices out of the greater Moscow area to the country’s borders in order to ease the pressure on traffic in congested urban areas.
