Rhenus - Green Warehousing

The challenge

Rhenus, a logistics service provider with around 33,500 employees, operates more than 120 warehouses worldwide in its Warehousing business unit to ensure the dispatch and onward transport of goods of all kinds. Rhenus has already caused a stir with one of the most sustainable warehouses in the industry. Tilburg is the company's internal best case.
In the Cross Innovation Lab, Rhenus has set itself the challenge of how existing data from the warehouses can be used to save as much CO2 as possible at all sites in the future: "How might I make warehouse knowledge and data accessible in order to motivate employees and managers and give them incentives to implement solutions for CO2 reduction? #visualisation #gamification"

Output

Rhenus not only answered the question with a cross-innovation process, but also sent a new cross-functional team into the race (Green Warehousing Team), which consisted of people from a wide variety of international locations and positions. Together with the creative minds, the problem and challenge could be analysed from all perspectives and addressed in a joint solution development process.
The result is an internal Rhenus online tool that enables warehouse managers and technical directors, among others, to display CO2-relevant data on the site's resource consumption in real time. Various gamification elements, such as a ranking list of the warehouses with the lowest CO2 consumption and medals, which also encourage collaboration, are intended to create an incentive system to save more resources and to support each other in a corporate culture that is fundamentally characterised by competition. By maximising the transparency of resource influencing factors, all users can learn, for example, what measures other locations have taken to reduce their CO2 consumption and calculate how corresponding measures would also affect their resource consumption, also in comparison to all other locations. The solution developed can be integrated into the Rhenus business analysis service.

Creative minds: Niels Boeing, Marie-Pascal Gafinen, Claudia Friedrich

Company stakeholders: Isa Kohn, Erika Jarif, Dennis Batenburg, Yannick Le Capitaine, Soumia Debrosse, Susana Valladares, Pawel Jagiello, Eliza Istrate, Lisa Lehle, Dewelina Tomaszewksa-Stepien

Format & method

In the Cross Innovation Lab, companies come together in changing constellations over a period of six weeks to work together on product developments in a stimulating environment. Experts from the creative industries are specifically involved in the process.

• Field research: At the beginning, the challenges of the companies are analysed in a new kind of depth in collaboration with creative professionals - and their fresh perspective from the outside.
• Workshop phase: In a total of four workshop/lab days, the companies develop new solutions together with selected creative professionals.
• Feedback loops: Between the labs, a concept review takes place with all participating companies in order to further improve the products through joint feedback and exchange.

In the iterative work process, companies develop new products or product adaptations in a significantly reduced amount of time.