Agricultural technology is the core competence of long-standing Niederweningen-based Bucher Landtechnik. In the 1980s, the venerable brand turned its focus increasingly to precisely this core competence. It discontinued production of the popular Bucher tractors and transitioned to becoming a trading company with products from leading world manufacturers. Quite in keeping with the company’s motto: ‘What we do well today, we want to do better tomorrow.’ Forty years later, the company once again tightened its focus. In 2013, its permit to store its replacement parts in its own warehouses expired on fire safety grounds. And costs for the in-house solution at that time were also a matter of debate. Technology director Marcel Kipfer therefore put out an international tender for the replacement parts logistics for all traded brands. The nod went to Planzer. Kipfer: ‘We were looking for someone whose mindset was a good fit with ours. The family-owned company from the Limmat Valley also fulfilled our requirements in terms of availability and flexibility. It offered us a lean project team and a good interface to our IT landscape.’

The conditions set forth in the tender were ambitious: there were fewer than seven months to the migration of 28,000 parts. The Planzer outsourcing team put together a highly capable project organisation with an experienced project management team and strictly scheduled status reports. The concept encompassed not only the physical transfer of the articles to Planzer and the entire replacement parts management, but also a series of potential optimisations in terms of efficiency and costs. In 2017, the replacement parts were shifted from Planzer Embrach to Planzer Härkingen. They could be more efficiently stored and processes in the ASPW. A second outsourcing stage took place in 2019, with a further 25,000 articles from three Grunderco locations.

Today, Bucher Landtechnik’s outsourced replacement parts logistics are handled in the state-of-the-art logistics centre at Planzer Härkingen. There are currently roughly 60,000 articles from different Bucher trading partners in stock, whether in the conventional high-bay rack warehouse, the ASPW or the bulky goods warehouse for oversized items. Year after year, some 8,500 deliveries are shipped ex stock from Europe and the US with approx. 46,000 items in good receipt. It amounts to purchase orders to the tune of 35,000 picking orders with 270,000 picks in total. In two-stage picking, parts from the ASPW and the conventional warehouse are ‘married’. Our pickers operate on the goods-to-person principle and are assisted by pick by light. The picked goods roll off the ramp in Härkingen in the form of 50,000 packages or roughly 2,200 pallets per year. The standby service is available to customers every day from 6:00 am to 12:00 midnight. Orders by the cut-off time at 6:30 pm are delivered the next day. Depending on the requirements of the order, the delivery is carried out with the overnight service from Quali-Night, the normal parcel post or as cargo with Planzer Transport.

In 1807, Heinrich Bucher opened a small smithy in Weiler Murzlen on the Zurich cantonal border. In so doing, he laid the foundation for the Bucher family company in Niederweningen. Subsequent generations built the company into a globally active technology company for machine and vehicle manufacturing. The company has over 50 production and development locations on five continents with over 12,600 employees. Bucher Landtechnik AG belongs to Bucher Specials, one of five divisions of Bucher Industries. The company is the leading provider of agricultural technology products and smart farming applications in Switzerland.