Due to economic reasons, the MAHLE Group, headquartered in Stuttgart, plans to shut down its warehouse at the Schwäbisch Hall location by the end of 2018 and relocate its hydraulics and maintenance activities to the Reichenbach location in Saxony/Germany.
In the coming weeks, the company will consult with the employee representatives to flesh out the details. During the course of the planned measures, forced redundancies will be avoided as far as possible. From now on, the 87 employees of MAHLE Behr Service and MAHLE Industrial Thermal Systems will be offered vacant jobs at other locations as well as partial retirement and voluntary redundancy schemes. They may also be transferred to local companies. The joint venture Behr Hella Service, also based in Schwäbisch Hall, is not affected by the plans.
In Schwäbisch Hall, MAHLE primarily operates a central warehouse for the spare parts specialist MAHLE Behr Service (MBS). At the end of August, it employed 55 people. In addition, 32 employees from MAHLE Industrial Thermal Systems (MITS) deal with servicing and maintenance for cooling systems and heat exchangers as well as assembly and repair of hydraulic pumps and engines.
“The decision to discontinue our activities at the location was not taken lightly. But we must make sure that MAHLE Behr Service remains competitive in Europe,” explained managing director of MBS, Torsten Waldhelm. Decentralizing the warehousing tasks by assigning them to the relevant series production locations will ensure much greater profitability. The administrative functions will be merged with the existing services at the group headquarters in Stuttgart.
The German production locations of MAHLE Industrial Thermal Systems are also under heavy cost pressure. In order to stabilize the location in Reichenbach in Saxony, with more than 300 employees, while improving its overall competitiveness, it is intended to relocate the hydraulics and maintenance activities from Schwäbisch Hall to Reichenbach. “We will be able to make better use of the available space there and deploy the employees flexibly in series production or maintenance, depending on order levels,” stated Dr. Michael Löhle, MITS managing director.
