Ergonomic benches for eCommerce leader – smooth workflows and a satisfied team

Eberlein & Kunz is an internationally active e-commerce company based in Berlin and ranked among the top 30 Amazon retailers in Germany. With a team of 80 specialists, the company specialise in selling over 6,000 products in categories such as groceries, organic and natural products, personal care and beauty, household items, as well as books.

Background & challenges in e-commerce

A click and just a day later, the desired package arrives at home. This type of shopping has become standard for many people – whether it‘s tech products, clothing, or groceries. To make this possible, there are companies like Eberlein & Kunz that specialise in the shipping, packaging, and storage of various products, mainly available through Amazon. The Berlin-based e-commerce company particularly focuses on supplements and premium food products like honey, tea, coffee, and confectionery.

As an Amazon Pre-Fulfiller, 95% of Eberlein & Kunz‘s products are offered and sold through the online platform. After a completed purchasing process, Eberlein & Kunz packages the goods, sends them to Amazon, and Amazon‘s teams in turn ship them to end customers. Only a few selected product lines are directly shipped to B2C or B2B customers (e.g., pharmacies).

Customer satisfaction is a top priority for Eberlein & Kunz. Therefore, a smooth workflow is essential to guarantee that over 5 million customers receive their goods as quickly as possible. For efficient processes, an optimised workspace is required that minimises unnecessary actions for the employees.

The health of the team is also a focus for the Berlin company: Especially in the receiving and packaging process, items or packages need to be lifted and loaded, and these actions should be as ergonomic as possible. Thus, it was important for the benches to adapt to specific challenges and not cause any poor posture for the employees. The greatest challenge was to find affordable, robust, and customisable workspace solutions for logistics. Additionally, employee ergonomics needed to be optimised.

Ultimately, Johann Eberlein, CEO of Eberlein & Kunz, saw all these aspects fulfilled in the products offered by Treston and approached the Finnish company with his need for new workbenches. What convinced Eberlein & Kunz right from the beginning was the configurator, which allowed them to precisely tailor the workstations to their requirements and equip them accordingly. Moreover, competent customer consultation during the customisation of the benches was convincing.

Flexibility is the key

Until now, employees worked in different small warehouses where workstations functioned but were not ideally tailored to the requirements. Due to increasing workloads and the need to optimise workflows, restructuring was carried out, mainly affecting the incoming and outgoing goods areas, and thus the packing benches. Now, the packing benches are placed directly at the conveyor belts and have been adjusted professionally.

Eberlein & Kunz chose Treston‘s Concept benches because the components, parts, and extensive accessories can be freely combined, allowing them to be customised to 100 percent for individual requirements. “What particularly appealed to us about the Concept benches was the fact that there is so much accessories available. So, we could attach a variety of compartments and drawers as well as a packing crown, making cartons and work materials easily accessible for the employees,“ says Johann Eberlein. Additionally, the Concept benches boast high stability with a robust steel frame, enabling them to carry loads of up to 500 kilograms.

Ergonomics & height adjustability

In the 30+ countries where Eberlein & Kunz is active, more than 10,000 packages pass through the packing and work benches daily. Given this physical challenge, preserving the health of over 60 employees and providing maximum ergonomics is crucial for the Berlin company. Therefore, height adjustability was essential for the new benches. For the Concept benches, Eberlein & Kunz opted for mechanical adjustability via a hand crank.

As it‘s mostly the same individuals working at a workstation, this version was sufficient since the height didn‘t need to be adjusted to different body sizes very often, but rather to the size of the products in some cases.

Result: smooth workflows and a satisfied team

“From configuring the packing benches in the user-friendly 3D configurator to quick quotation and very friendly support, all the way to seamless order processing, you immediately feel well taken care of by Treston. The work benches and add-on modules impress with their robustness and reliability even under high load,“ says Johann Eberlein, CEO of Eberlein & Kunz.

Ultimately, the acquisition of the benches significantly improved the structure of work processes, as the tables can now be placed directly at the conveyor technology, are height-adjustable, and materials are readily available at the workstations. This makes tasks smoother, workflows run more seamlessly, and employees are more content, appreciating the ergonomic design of their workspaces.