Forward Roll

At Herma in Filderstadt, near Stuttgart, Germany, it is a normal morning: in the course of the next few hours, between 150 and 200 label printers from all over Europe will be ordering self-adhesive materials – and will expect delivery overnight in many cases.

Around 500 metric tons of self-adhesive materials – roughly equivalent to a fully-laden Airbus A380 in weight – leave the plant by truck from noon onwards every working day, distributed on average on some 600 pallets.

In return, they are replaced by the influx of approximately the same volume of raw materials every day. The associated logistics are seriously challenging, given that Herma supplies all its customers in every corner of Europe from its Filderstadt plant.

‘Nevertheless, we have deliberately chosen to have a single, central production site, where we can oversee all processes directly and achieve efficient manufacturing based on short distances,’ says Herma managing director Dr. Thomas Baumgärtner.

Herma has been expanding rapidly not only in Germany, but also internationally, at a quicker rate than the market as a whole. Today nearly 70 percent of its revenues from self-adhesive materials originate outside Germany.