KNAPP Deutschland Celebrates 15th Anniversary
Published on: 21 December 2022
KNAPP has been active in the German market since the 1970s, when they blazed the trail for automated pharmaceutical distribution. A few decades later, KNAPP founded the subsidiary in Heusenstamm after having diversified into other industries. This year, KNAPP Deutschland GmbH is celebrating 15 years of success by looking back on their beginnings and successes.
KNAPP Deutschland’s collaboration with the company headquarters in Austria has been a successful one. Their story began in 2007, when KNAPP Deutschland GmbH was founded in Heusenstamm, near Frankfurt am Main. Frankfurt was a logical location for the subsidiary. Several intralogistics companies were already headquartered near Frankfurt and proximity to the airport means that KNAPP Deutschland is never far from their customers. The offices were recently expanded to offer more space for customer workshops and internal meetings.
Joachim Erhard, Managing Director of KNAPP Deutschland GmbH from the very beginning, recalls: »We started out with two people in sales and one person in administration. We’ve always emphasized teamwork and we still do, even though our team has grown to almost 135 people. What pleases me is the fact that everyone who was with us at the start is still with the company today.«
Flagship projects and long-term partnerships
There have been plenty of successes, such as KNAPP Germany’s first major order in 2009, which was for Germany’s largest online retailer. It was the largest shuttle warehouse at the time and was implemented in a record 15 months. Other projects soon followed for well-known customers in all the sectors KNAPP is active in to this day, including general wholesale, online retail, fashion, food retail and production logistics. Further highlights included participating in the International Supply Chain Conference in Berlin and at LogiMAT in Stuttgart. These two major events have repeatedly resulted in forming new and important partnerships.
Emphasis on customer service
The subsidiary in Germany has grown quite rapidly over the past few years. Their Customer Service Department has added several Resident Engineers who are responsible for maintaining ten different systems, as Joachim Erhard explains. »Thanks to competent field service and our Resident Engineers working at the customers’ sites, we’ve developed very close relationships with our customers.« KNAPP Deutschland also collaborates closely with other KNAPP subsidiaries in Germany, including Dürkopp Fördertechnik in Bielefeld, KNAPP IT Solutions in Würzburg and KNAPP Smart Solutions in Gelsenkirchen. At KNAPP Deutschland, the future looks bright.
