V-LINE is a family-owned business that was founded more than 45 years ago. It manages the supply chain for international corporates, ensuring the availability of spare parts for maintenance, repair, and operations (MRO) purposes.
“We see ourselves as a procurement service provider,” explains Tilman Mieseler, Chief Executive Officer of V-LINE GROUP. “Clients contact us with demands for spare parts, and we source the items they need through our worldwide network of supplier connections.”
This is a far more advanced service than simply buying and selling on. V-LINE will procure the desired items and organise the logistics to get them where they need to be. It then inspects the spares for quality, consolidates them in V-LINE’s own warehouses and ships them to the customer’s locations in the required time.
The V-LINE GROUP has ten locations worldwide. The main location is the company’s HQ in Hanover, Germany, where around 150 people work. Another procurement office is located in New Jersey in the USA, with a staff of 30 people. Within one of its main markets, V-LINE founded a fully localised office in Jubail, Saudi Arabia. The staff of V-LINE MIDDLE EAST of over 40 experienced people sources supplies from the Gulf states while representing the global business within that market.
“Furthermore, we have representations and partnerships in the Far East, in South Korea, China and Japan, as well as representatives and offices in Mexico and Brazil,” Mieseler tells us. “We bridge the markets between suppliers and our customers worldwide, from the Gulf states over Asia and Europe to Northern and Southern America.”
V-LINE’s Mission: Fulfilling Your Mission
Despite its global reach, V-LINE is able to provide the hands-on support its customers require.
“Our mission is to help our customers to fulfil their mission,” Mieseler says. “We are flexible and provide tailor-made solutions. All of our customers want to get the items they need in time, at cost, to a quality threshold and in compliance with regulations. But they still require different approaches. Some pick the items up through their own freight forwarders, others get them delivered at place. Some ask us for special labelling of their shipments, some want us to carry out particular inspections on their behalf. Our services are customer-centric and focused on the needs of our customers.”
This customer focus differentiates V-LINE within the market, alongside the experience, connections, and relationships its people bring to the table. It enables V-LINE to expedite delivery times and achieve the price advantages its customers need.
Transforming Supply Chains
Anyone working around industry supply chains is more than familiar with all the challenges in the sector. Covid, Suez Canal blockages, piracy in the Red Sea, and the ongoing war in Ukraine are all just some recent examples that the industry is responding to. The biggest challenge and opportunity at the same time, however, is to keep pace with the digital transformation in general, implementing new technologies into the daily business and into services. The V-LINE GROUP as well is transforming to meet this challenge.
“A significant part of that transformation comes from new technologies and even introducing AI to some process steps,” Mieseler says. “The other transformation has been ongoing for many years, in the services we are adding for our customers to increase our value proposition. We differentiate ourselves from our competitors by offering more holistic services. These include e.g. Master Data Management (MDM) or Inventory Optimisation that brings huge benefits to our customers.”
V-LINE’s internal processes focus on innovative solutions. The aim is lean processes and how to get there, e.g. using algorithms based on structured data for internal data processing and automation. On top, V-LINE has founded its own business development department to explore which trends and innovations are emerging, and to develop new innovative solutions. V-LINE strives to use these to solve today’s and tomorrow’s customer challenges on a more sophisticated level.
“The phrase ‘AI’ is used very often, almost as a buzzword, but we try to see where it can fit into our services and be used to automate, facilitate, and expedite, making processes leaner,” Mieseler says.
As an example of the changes that V-LINE is implementing, Mieseler points to the problems many of its customers are experiencing with inventory. It is a challenge V-LINE is rising to.
“Very often our customers’ inventory grows to the extent that they have too much dead stock,” Mieseler says. “There are overstocked items sitting for years in their warehouse, and obsolete items that need to be liquidated. We can help avoid the creation of dead stock by optimising the inventory through data analysis which we offer to our customers. We have partnered with a company experienced in mass data analysis and deep learning, enabling us to draw the right conclusions from the data. By doing so, we can leverage significant improvement in working capital reduction while increasing parts availability.”
V-LINE has just launched vending machines as a service that provides industrial parts, consumables, and PPE for its customers. Special about it is that V-LINE takes care of the replenishment of consumed items. “This is another challenge we help our customers to solve. With these vending machines, the required material is provided directly at the point of use: in the production area,” Mieseler explains. The customers have a 24/7 material availability, easy access, less operation downtime, and they gain full consumption transparency. With this service, V-LINE was a front-runner, launching it in the Saudi Arabian market.
“We try to stay close to the core of our business, procurement services for spare parts, and around this we look upstream and downstream to identify the services most needed by our clients,” Mieseler says. “We do this internally, with our partners and in close collaboration with the end users.”
All of this is made possible by V-LINE’s people, and the knowledge and experience they share in sourcing products and providing excellent customer service.
“In Germany, there is a highly competitive job market,” Mieseler tells us. “The market has become an employees’ market, so it can be difficult as an SME to compete with offers of huge corporates in the region. We have a great focus on internal apprenticeship. We are successful in finding new people and keeping the staff, so we are doing something right.”
Looking to the future, Mieseler forecasts qualified growth.
“Many are expanding aggressively but we are moving into markets and industries that make sense to us,” Mieseler says. “We as a service provider believe in strong and long-lasting partnerships with our suppliers and customers. Thus, we focus on the holistic picture for sustainable collaborations.”
Tapping the full potential of its services, the V-LINE GROUP seeks out customers with a certain volume of demand, in spare parts-intensive industries and a shared vision of total cost of ownership reduction.
“The price of the parts matters, and to some customers, it matters most, but there can always be a trader offering one part or another cheaper,” Mieseler observes. “We instead help reduce the total transactional costs. We act on behalf of the customer, taking care of the whole procurement process. We offer our customers the peace of mind to focus on their core business, which is not buying spare parts, so we can support with our core competency: managing global MRO complexity.”
