The first guest in this semester´s Guest in Classroom event – a series of presentations throughout the semester – was David Cikurel, Associate Partner from DHL Consulting. What is more, he is an alumnus (2014) of our MBA International Management program!  David provided useful insights into the structure of Deutsche Post DHL (DPDHL) and a current project.
First David gave a comprehensive overview of the various businesses that comprises DPDHL, including Post and Parcel, Express, Global Forwarding, Supply Chain, and eCommerce Solutions. He further elaborated that DHL Consulting, the in-house consultancy of DPDHL Group, consults senior management but also customers of DPDHL in supply chain optimization through two service lines where management consulting focuses on topics such as, business and functional strategies, product design & market entries, process optimization and external client consulting is more of a narrower focus and mainly works on supply chain strategy, design and optimization projects.
After the first half of the introduction, David took questions from the students regarding the DPDHL’s structure and services offered.
Regarding the concrete project, David informed the group of the DHL European Fulfillment Network (EFN). Since the COVID-19 pandemic greatly accelerated e-commerce, where the worldwide market grew about 19%, the DHL EFN leverages DHL’s experience and physical footprint in European logistics while efficiently pooling together customers in a distributed, multi-customer network. The DHL EFN allows for meeting increasing end-customer needs while balancing costs.  
Many benefits accompany the DHL EFN which makes it a compelling product for retailers that are looking to grow their e-commerce and improve their delivery offering without having to sell through e-commerce giants such as Amazon. EFN enables next day delivery in key European markets, offers fast implementations, operates under full transparency, is scalable through pay-per-use commercials, and can offer cost savings as high as 20% on total fulfillment costs per order through savings in last mile delivery costs via leveraging domestic shipping.  This becomes even more relevant in the age of COVID as sales continue to increase through online platforms and companies must improve their supply chain resilience by switching to different network nodes to keep sales running and avoid disruption to sales channels.
After David concluded with lessons learned as a project team, he took further questions from the students. Based on the number of questions of the student group, it is apparent the presentation provided many useful insights into the EFN and engaged everyone involved.
Thanks, David, for being our Guests in Classroom!

text: Gabrielle Boimann, Class of 2022
screenshots, slide: MBA, David Cikurel