I am 25 years old and have been working for Muller Martini since 2011. As an employee of the Spare Parts Service Center (ESC), I help to ensure 24/7 availability. That means regular night and weekend assignments for me, with the occasional "unforgettable" experience.
Muller Martini's on-call cellphone has a very loud and unmistakable ring tone, which ensures that I'm immediately wide awake even in the middle of the night. If the emergency phone rings at night or at the weekend, I'm required to be on site within the next half hour. That's not a problem for me, as my home is only a few kilometers away from the ESC.
I receive the key data for the order during the telephone call or by e-mail, and I'm even able to check the availability of the required spare parts from home on a notebook. When I arrive on site, I enter the order, if it has not already been opened via the web shop, and prepare the necessary documents, such as the delivery note, invoice, export list or waybill. I then select the material in the spare parts service center, pack it and notify our transport partners.
Most of the urgent cases are for customers in the US and Germany. Deliveries throughout Europe (with the exception of Scandinavia) are made by courier by road, deliveries overseas are taken by taxi to the airport and from there to the customer as quickly as possible. If there's an emergency when I am on call, I do everything myself. There are exceptions for large, heavy parts, when I can call on someone from the warehouse team. They then take care of the internal transport and packaging.
Contacts for customers around the globe
I'm only in the warehouse during on-call emergencies, otherwise I'm in the office. There, I'm part of a team of seven people – including our boss and a trainee commercial clerk. I already spent six months at the ESC during my apprenticeship as a commercial clerk. I never lost contact to it after that, and after completing my apprenticeship I jumped at the chance to fill a gap that had arisen in the team, which has worked out well.
The correct title for my role is ESC Export Clerk. I have now been working in this department for five years and I still really enjoy it. We are allocated to specific areas, but support each other whenever necessary. I serve Latin America as well as direct customers in Africa, the Middle East and various island states such as Mayotte, French Guiana, Guadeloupe and Malta.
Every day I receive e-mails with price and availability inquiries, which I either answer myself or with the help of the technicians in charge. Usually, customers log in to the web shop first, which already provides various information and photos. Then they contact us to make a precise inquiry and request a quote. The more information I can get, the faster we can deliver. If I receive a picture of a defective part as well as the machine type and machine number, I can easily retrieve the information. Of course, it's even faster if the article number is also available.
First quality checks, then dispatch
The majority of our operations in the spare parts service center are handled during normal daily business hours. We commercial clerks in the office place the orders by drawing up the picking lists, printing them out together with all the necessary documents and taking them to the spare parts warehouse, so the warehouse staff can do their job. We walk this route from the first floor to the basement three or four times a day.
Some 110,000 different spare parts are kept by Muller Martini in its warehouse. When you are dealing with these matters on a daily basis, you automatically get to know the designation and intended use of many parts – for example, of wear parts such as rubber suckers or certain screws and nuts. Each spare part is allocated to a specific group and its classification indicates how often it is requested.
90 percent of parts orders are dispatched on the very same day. If a part is not in stock, we immediately organize its procurement from one of our suppliers. After production, all externally manufactured spare parts are sent to Zofingen, where they are subjected to quality checks. They are only dispatched once these checks have been completed.
