KION North America opens new aftermarket distribution and training center

KION North America has announced the opening of its brand-new Aftermarket Distribution and Training Center in Summerville, South Carolina. This new location, just 5 miles from KION North America’s production facility, triples the warehouse space for high-demand spare parts. The new location also offers a Sales and Service Training Center for in-person and live events, which will support over 1,600 dealer technicians and sales representatives in 2022.

The distribution warehouse increases floor space by 86%, vertical storage by 80%, high rack storage by 64%, and small parts storage by 30%. This allows KION North America to increase the total number of parts in stock to more than 30,000 SKUs to best serve its customers. The Aftermarket Distribution Center utilizes brand new Linde Material Handling warehouse equipment for highly efficient storage and picking process. The opening of this new location has also provided additional jobs in the Summerville, South Carolina area.

Daniel Schlegel, Vice President of Customer Service, commented, “the new Aftermarket Distribution Center and the new Sales & Service Training Facility are important milestones of our North American growth strategy. It puts the necessary foundation in place to provide state-of-the-art aftermarket support to our high-performing Sales & Service Dealer Network. The entire project execution took 11 months from planning to launch, and it also substantially improved the work environment for our Customer Service team.”

The new training center will support roughly 400 dealer technicians and sales representatives in 2022. In addition to in-person training, the training center will produce up to 20 live webinars in the new virtual studio. KION North America will support an additional 1,200 service technicians and sales representatives throughout North America through live webinars in 2022.

Bob Menges, Customer Service Technical Training Manager, added, “the new Training Center is specifically designed for service and sales/product training. It features a state-of-the-art classroom and a dedicated hands-on training lab where trainees, whether service technicians or sales representatives, can seamlessly move between classroom training and hands-on training to optimize the training environment and experience.”