DPD invests €38m in Polish and German sorting hubs
European parcel and express firm DPD has opened one of the largest sorting facilities in eastern Europe, at a site in central Poland, and has also upgraded a key hub in Germany. The international parcel and express network owned by France’s La Poste said the EUR 32m facility at Stryków, near Łódź, represented its biggest investment of its kind in Central and Eastern Europe.
The company said the facility was three years in the making and one of the “most modern sorting facilities” in the region, claiming that it will “change the quality standard of the courier industry in the Polish market.
The centre has been build on a nine-hectare site, with a 13,500 square metre warehouse and 2,500 square metres of office space, and can support 300 vehicles per night.
For DPD, the Stryków location forms the centre of a diamond-structure for its network in Poland, connecting the largest distribution centres across the country.
Rafał Nawłoka, the president of DPD Poland, said the location had good transport links with Warsaw and Poznań, and was a “business opportunity that cannot be missed”.
“This state-of-the-art investment is established in the heart of Poland, where all the major domestic communication routes meet,” he said. “Together with our business partners, we sought optimum logistic solutions and the central location of Stryków fulfills the requirement of optimising costs.”
Nawłoka, who said the project had created 450 jobs, would be very cost effective in the long term, and would pay back its “substantial” investment in a very short time.
One of the largest hubs in DPD’s European network, the Stryków facility boasts a fully-automated EUR 16m sorting system supplied by Dutch firm Vanderlande.
The system comprises two parcel sorting machines, capable of processing 35,000 parcels per hour overall, as well as a machine for small parcels and envelopes that can handle 8,000 items an hour.
Melle, Germany
Upgrades to the Melle hub have increased the hub’s sorting capacity by a third
Meanwhile, DPD has also invested EUR 6m euros to improve the efficiency of its international hub in Melle, north-west Germany.
The company said its investment was underlining the significance of the facility in the Osnabrück district.
DPD has installed a fourth processing line adding capacity to sort an extra 5,000 packages an hour, bringing the Melle depot’s total capacity to 20,000 packages an hour.
The company has also added 25 extra loading and unloading bays and has expanded the depot area by 24,000 square metres to a total of 69,000 square metres.
DPD said because of the extra sorting capacity, it would be able to handle packages connecting directly to more international destinations.
At the moment, the site has 26 direct cross-border connections, to destinations including Barcelona, Birmingham, Paris, Lyon, Verona, Malmö, Turku and Poznan. The depot also links with all DPD’s locations in Germany, with 75 direct routes.
The Melle depot has now been running since December 2007, with about 600 employees based there including delivery staff.
