Liebherr USA has moved into a newly expanded headquarters "campus" in Newport News, Virginia, as part of a $60 million investment.
Dr Torben Reher, managing director, Liebherr USA, says: “Apart from investing in research and design for cutting edge technology, we have a long term focus while looking at our business and the relationships with our customers.
"We want to grow together and our new site is the evidence for this approach.”
According to Reher, the campus will significantly increase production operations for concrete pumps and repair capacity for mobile and crawler cranes, as well as for construction equipment.
“For example, we will now be able to do boom alignments for mobile cranes up to 750 tonnes.
"Furthermore, the new shop will be a lot closer to our many customers in the Northeast region, which will lead to lower logistic costs.
“The new shop is also equipped to handle the growing numbers of Liebherr earthmoving equipment.”
Peter Mayr, managing director of Liebherr USA, says: “We will be able to expand our offerings in relation to training our in-house dealers and dealer technicians, as well as provide this service professionally to our customers.
"In our workshop, we will not only focus on pre-delivery inspections and standard repair work, but also recondition machines in bays allocated to complete this task.”
Additionally, Liebherr has increased the eight repair stations for the earthmoving division from eight to twelve.
Liebherr says the new warehouse incorporates the latest safety features and provides a 50% increase in storage capacity.
It also has a dual shuttle vertical lifting machine to increase small component picking speed and storage capacity, the company adds.
From 13-21 March, more than 30,000 SKU numbered items were relocated to the new warehouse.
Oliver Frey, Liebherr's general manager of warehousing and logistics, says: “The short duration of the move, along with accuracy of how items touched down in their intended storage locations was the result of months of planning and hard work,”
Frey reveals Liebherr's main focus in planning for the move was on minimising any interruptions to its customer supply chain.
“During our closure, the spare parts teams did an amazing job diverting orders to other Liebherr warehouse sites throughout the United States and to our factories.
"Customer impact was very minimal,” he adds.
According to Liebherr, the move was conducted with enhanced cleaning and social distancing measures in place to ensure the health and safety of the employees, contractors and the local community.
Approximately 500 people work at Liebherr’s Newport News campus.
Many of them are now working in the new office, repair shop and warehouse facilities at 4800 Chestnut Avenue in Newport News.
The move was carried out in collaboration with the City of Newport News, W.M. Jordan Co, HBA Architecture Interior Design, Kimley Horn, Peak Logix, Kardex Remstar and Apple Moving Systems.
