Posted on January 30, 2009 - by Justin Hartman

Schenker Logistics – a brilliant ORM example

Last Friday I posted a video titled “What happens to fragile boxes?” in which I managed to capture some boxes being mishandled by a delivery person at Schenker Logistics.

While I wasn’t expecting a response from the post in question I was extremely impressed when I received an email from Sean Carolan the operations manager for Schenker in South Africa on Tuesday.

Hi Justin

I am the operations manager for Schenker in South Africa. One of my colleagues in Germany sent me the link to your blog (what happens to fragile boxes).

I cannot view the clip, but judging from the text it did not look good, and I would like to get to the bottom of it and address the relevant driver/staff member regarding this.

Please could you send me the clip in, as well as advise in which area this delivery was taking place (and the time)?

We train our staff, and try and enforce good practices throughout the delivery process, and when incidents like these go by ‘unnoticed’ it is good that we do get feedback.

I immediately responded and sent all the relevant details to Sean who then, it seems, went on a fact finding mission and managed to get to the bottom of things.

Just this morning however I received another email, this time from Andrew Dinnie – General Manager of the Western Cape, in which he tries to address some of the comments in the post. I thought it relevant to post some of his remarks in the email as it addresses the issues quite nicely.

The delivery was a scheduled delivery to BMW parts dealership in Town. The boxes on the video which were planned for that delivery are robust automotive parts not TV screens. They happened to be very light (5-6kg’s) and hence the proceeding method of handling. We do not condone the method and have already addressed this issue with all our handling staff. We are fortunate that to date there are no recorded damages and we have confirmed with this dealership that they maintain their support for our services.

I would also like to remark on a comment made on your blog by Sean Nieuwoudt, who is incorrect when he says that our east London branch is under liquidation. It is 100% owned by DB Schenker and continues to trade healthily, as in the past.

Now I’m no rocket scientist nor am I a specialist in online reputation management (ORM) but the way in which Schenker Logistics handled this situation is exceptional. By all accounts this measly blog doesn’t attract a massive readership and it would have been easy for the guys at Schenker to simply ignore this yet they decided to tackle the issue head on.

Tim Shier, marketing manager for both Quirk eMarketing and BrandsEye, recently wrote about the SAA ORM crisis in which he details 10 points for companies to consider when dealing with ORM. I’m not sure is Schenker knowingly knew what they were doing but they’ve done a sterling job at managing their online reputation by dealing with this somewhat minor issue.