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2024-10-18
POLISH COMPANY – GLOBAL AMBITIONS – INTERVIEW WITH CEO OF EUROPA SYSTEMS
In this industry, there is a constant need to develop solutions that add great value for customers. Expectations are growing year on year as consumers’ habits and needs change”, says Michał Zborowski, CEO of Europa Systems, about the specifics of intralogistics operations and the digitalisation of warehouse systems.
Europa Systems – Integrator, manufacturer and solution provider in the areas of Warehouse Automation and Production Logistics.
Europa Systems has successfully implemented more than 1,000 projects in 35 countries over 30 years, providing today a state-of-the-art service available to the customer 24/7. The company provides turnkey supply chain automation solutions that deliver operational excellence in factories, warehouses and distribution centres.
Our conversation coincides with an important anniversary for Europa Systems: the company is celebrating its 30th anniversary.
This is true. Europa Systems was founded in 1994. Initially, we sold components for warehouse systems, i.e. rollers, conveyors – simple mechanical solutions. Our customers included mainly companies in Western Europe, primarily in Germany.
In 1999, we designed and implemented the first turnkey transport system – transporting 23,000 tires per day for the multinational company Bridgestone. It was a huge challenge. The automotive market, especially the tire sector, is very demanding, with no room for error. Bridgestone is a corporation with very high expectations, which appreciated working with us and thus we gained our first major customer. This was an important step in the company’s development.
As we acquired new customers, we upgraded our services and met the expectations of different market segments. We currently operate in the retail, e-commerce, FMCG, tire & battery, heavy industry, wood and paper industries.
Year 2014 was another important date for Europa Systems. We joined the international industrial and investment holding company Thumos Capital Ltd, part of which are well-known and strong companies such as Paged Sklejka, Paged Meble, Paged Energy.
Intralogistics is an industry that does not stand still and, above all, abhors a vacuum. In order to be competitive in this market, it is necessary to continuously develop new products and improve existing solutions, so as to be able to guarantee customers ever-increasing storage capacity and more efficient handling of processes. As of 2019, Europa Systems has an R&D department that plays a key role in promoting innovation and growth in our company. Our engineers and designers have developed, among other things, ES Robo Wash & Dry – an automatic washing and drying system for heat-insulated containers (TKT) used mainly by grocery chains, or autonomous robots such as AGV (Automated Guided Vehicle – ES Gear) and AMR (Autonomous Mobile Robot – ES Smart) with applications in the retail industry.
In 2020, we acquired Edocs Systems from Rzeszów to better develop our automation and IT competences. It now operates as Europa Systems Rzeszów. This acquisition was a response to the needs of our customers, who also wanted us to design automation and IT solutions. There is a current trend – customers expect a one-stop-shop from a single supplier. They ask not only to provide the mechanics, but also automation system solutions and IT systems to manage the flow of goods.
We felt there was a lack of IT solutions on offer, so we took the decision to integrate an existing, experienced company into our structure. Since then, we have grown rapidly – at the time of the acquisition, the Rzeszów branch had just a few employees, today the team has more than fifty specialists.
From our observations and experience, this is where the whole world of intralogistics is heading – companies such as Europa Systems are supposed to be the central “point of contact” and fulfil all customer expectations. The services provided should be tailored to individual customers’ needs and effectively address their unique problems – in other words, be “tailor-made”. At the same time, intralogistics (in other words, everything that goes on inside warehouses) is completely invisible to the end user, and there is nothing wrong with that. Consumers go to the shop, see the products and don’t have to wonder how the product got into their hands? It is just that we expect the fruit and vegetables we intend to buy to be freshly delivered to the shop shelf from the field or orchard.
The company’s location near the German border was no coincidence: did the company want to focus on customers from the West from the beginning?
Yes, by the way, even today gross revenues for our company come from Western European markets. We convinced players from the DACH area, i.e. Germany, Austria and Switzerland. However, we will not stop there. Over the next few years, we will be developing our position in France, Spain and the UK, among other things. Our ambitions go beyond Europe – across the Atlantic, but maybe we’ll talk about that a little later (laughs).
What kind of cooperation do you rely on more? That is, to have a few large proven customers, or, rather, a business with many points of contact, i.e. many smaller customers?
Both. We also want to diversify the sectors we serve, and we are successfully doing so. We started with conveyor system components for various sectors, followed by projects for tire companies and the realisation of dedicated solutions for retail and the wood sector. Finally, there was e-commerce. Why so? Firstly, we want to grow, to learn new things, but we also want to diversify our risks and not just focus on one sector. I am convinced that the area of food retail will always do well, but it is nevertheless worthwhile to diversify the domains of action.
The need to diversify areas was forced by COVID, for example – in some sectors we felt a clear decline in investment, while others such as e-commerce showed clear increases and previously untapped potential. The demand for food and necessities has been and will continue to be constant. With the closure of stationary shops, shopping moved online – this was a game changer for many in their business model.
Our long-standing cooperation with major customers such as Lidl reinforces our conviction that trust, partnership and facing market challenges together pays off – and leads to mutual business growth.
The company’s head office is located some 45 kilometres from Szczecin, which was not an accidental decision on the part of the founders, since the services were aimed primarily at German customers. But didn’t opening a company with big ambitions in a small town bring difficulties?
At the time, the biggest difficulty was convincing residents to take on a permanent job other than their original occupational profile. For years, a State Agricultural Farm operated in the area of Żabów, where the company is based. During the transition, the inhabitants of these areas experienced the consequences of political change very strongly.
It was not easy to recruit a qualified team that could meet the expectations of Western customers. At this point I’d like to pay my greatest respect to the entrepreneurship of the founders who built such a team in the 1990s.
And is it easy to get skilled workers today? We are, let me remind you, almost 50 km from a university town. It is small and large distance at the same time.
A specific feature of this part of the West Pomeranian Voivodeship is the need to compete with employers on the other side of the border, whose offers are often much more attractive. Polish employers are also racing against each other. Many companies wishing to provide services to German customers are locating their factories and warehouses here. This results in a very strong employee market in the border counties. We are experiencing this too. But we have a principle – we don’t “worry” about problems, we just “deal with them”.
At Europa Systems, we employ over three hundred people, more than 80% of whom are highly qualified engineers and technicians.
I think two elements have determined that we are seen as an attractive employer. Firstly: we have a variety of projects, which means that our engineers can develop their skills in different areas. This is a key thing, because it is how we catch talent on the labour market. Secondly: we go out and work closely with universities. We are proud that, on our initiative, a specialisation in “Automation and robotics of manufacturing systems and intralogistics” has been launched at the Rzeszów University of Technology, in the field of automation and robotics.
What can students count on: internships, employment at Europa Systems?
The specialisation lasts for three semesters and during this time students not only learn modern engineering solutions, but also get the opportunity to do an internship in our company. It is, to put it very positively, a talent incubator for us, while it allows students to acquire practical knowledge. We want the students of the Rzeszów University of Technology to take a broader view of the industry in which we operate. Therefore, among the subjects taught, we will find the standards of technological solutions used in Europe as well as in the United States.
You, as the company’s CEO, welcome the increasing automation because it means a reduction in the workforce, which translates into lower costs. I just wonder if automation in the warehousing industry will soon mean that not so many workers will be needed and today’s students will be left unemployed. This vision may discourage them from taking up your patronage course.
The answer to the question of how much the automation of storage systems can harm the labour market is more complex, but not necessarily complicated.
As we can see for ourselves from the car window when travelling around Poland, warehouses today are “moving closer” to cities so that suppliers can respond more quickly and flexibly to consumer needs. And there is less and less space in the suburbs of cities ergo every square metre of warehouse has to have more capacity, to be highly “productive”.
The intralogistics systems required by our customers today are increasingly complex and therefore becoming more expensive. A roller conveyor like 20 years ago is no longer enough – today it has to be plugged into a system that has to have a certain capacity. Solutions are becoming more and more advanced. Consequently, working with them also requires higher qualifications. The whole skill is that we integrate intralogistics solutions and keep the systems up and running according to the rigour set by the client, so that they can fully concentrate on running their business. For this, highly skilled professionals are needed – currently students of automation, robotics and IT.
This vision encourages people to study at Rzeszów University of Technology and beyond.
Smaller but more efficient warehouses closer to the cities probably translate into ecology, because you don’t have to haul these goods so far away.
Of course! Supply chain optimisation also has an environmental dimension. We cannot push out of consciousness the fact that our actions have a measurable impact on our surroundings and the environment in which we live. Encouragingly, in our business, more and more companies are asking themselves and Europe Systems this question: what effect will the chosen storage solution have on the environment, on people?
Let us return to the “human element” for a moment. A few years ago, we implemented a project at a client (it was not at all large) and as a result of the changes implemented, he reduced his workforce from dozens to 20 people. The workers who terminated their employment with us immediately found employment with other warehouse companies in the area – often in senior positions. Believe me, there are more vacancies than hands in this industry.
With automation, we can make better use of human resources (I don’t like this term in relation to people, to colleagues). Few of us would want to drive a forklift all our working lives. Thanks to the fact that today equipment can partly replace line workers, they can retrain for more value-adding roles, e.g. as a logistics infrastructure system operator. Workers have to be trained for new tasks, which must cost money, but in the end it is very beneficial both for the company and for the workers themselves. In my opinion, there is a huge business and social potential ahead of us to help people “befriend” technology and put them at the centre of it.
We started with the company’s 30th anniversary, so now the question is what Europa Systems is planning for the next three or four years.
We have very ambitious plans. We want to be a significant company in the intralogistics solutions provider sector. Although our natural areas of operation are the German-speaking countries, we are also expanding in Italy, France, Spain and the UK. We do not forget Poland and the countries of the Central and Eastern European region.
We hope to finalise the acquisition in the US soon and be able to win customers from across the Atlantic. In fact, this is already happening today – we, a small Polish company from Szczecin, are receiving enquiries from American companies looking for new suppliers and competitive solutions. The challenge will be to efficiently transport our mechanical solutions across the ocean; I am not worried about the transfer of automation and IT solutions: our automation and IT specialists are very efficient, as they have proven more than once at ‘sites’ in various locations in Europe.
The US is the world’s most developed logistics market, so the task sounds very ambitious.
In this case I will surprise you. The US market is very large, it is a very different potential from Europe, but in the area of intralogistics the best seems to be ahead. I do not feel that I am an expert, but after talking to our American partners, I have the feeling that they face similar challenges to us, e.g. young people do not want to work in warehouses driving forklifts.
European companies are more automated than American ones. Now there is a boom in logistics and automation in the US. The increases will be more dynamic than in Europe. We have an appetite for this market, and the paradox is that it may not be as difficult as it seems at first glance. The US warehousing market is structured differently, more demanding and therefore has to be learned. With Polish entrepreneurship and ambition, I am convinced that we will soon be able to boast about a company in the USA.
Source: WPROST
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