Prologis Unilever and GENCO Announce Grand Opening
The Unilever Mesquite site is designed to distribute all of Unilever's Home & Personal Care products including Dove®, Suave®, and all ® to customers in a single shipment and within a short amount of time. The Mesquite site will serve Louisiana, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas. GENCO has been a third partylogistics partner since 1989, and will continue to act as Unilever's facility operator, employing 100 people on-site.
Unilever HPC-NA, ProLogis and GENCO formed an alliance to both plan and develop the site. ProLogis, provided design engineering expertise that allows the new center to support multiple operations including consolidated fulfillment and customized pallets.
According to Fred Berkheimer, Vice President, Logistics, Unilever Home & Personal Care – NA,"This facility will give Unilever tremendous efficiency and improvements in customer service, with the ability to deliver every Home & Personal Care Product to most of our customers in a single day and in a single shipment."
Greg Arnold, Senior Vice President for ProLogis said, "We have a strong alliance with Unilever, in assisting and creatively meeting their distribution needs. This facility in Mesquite represents a new facet to our relationship - implementation of supply chain strategy."
Herb Shear, Chairman and CEO of GENCO said, "GENCO is very pleased to be a partner with Unilever and ProLogis in the development and operation of the Mesquite Facility. We are dedicated to helping Unilever achieve world class supply chain metrics."
About Unilever
Unilever is one of the world's largest consumer products companies with annual sales of approximately $47 billion in 2002. It produces and markets a wide range of foods and home and personal care products including Dove®, Suave®, Wisk®, Lipton® teas, Ragu® sauces and Skippy® peanut butter. Unilever operates in 88 countries around the globe and employs approximately 258,000 people.
In the United States, Unilever sales were approximately $11 billion in 2002. It employs approximately 15,225 people and has 59 offices and manufacturing sites in 21 states.
About ProLogis
ProLogis is a leading provider of distribution facilities and services with 208.3 million square feet (19.4 million square meters) and 1,729 distribution facilities owned, managed and under development in 92 markets throughout North America, Europe and Japan. ProLogis continues to expand the industry's first and only global network of distribution facilities with the objective of building shareholder value. We accomplish this through the ProLogis Operating System® and our commitment to be ‘The Global Distribution Solution' for our customers, providing exceptional facilities and services to meet their expansion and reconfiguration needs.
About GENCO
GENCO Distribution Systems is Unilever's third party logistics partner at the Mesquite site. Unilever and GENCO began their alliance in 1989 with the opening of the Warrendale, PA Distribution Center, and currently operates distribution centers and the centralized returns center for Unilever. Founded over 100 years ago, GENCO Distribution System, Pittsburgh, PA, is a recognized leader in full product lifecycle logistics management and reverse logistics management. GENCO services a wide array of retail and manufacturing clients including Wal-Mart, Unilever, Target, J.C. Penney, Kmart, Braun, Revlon, IKEA, LeapFrog, Becton Dickinson, Kimberly-Clark, Kraft Foods, Reckitt Benckiser, Hewlett Packard, Hershey Foods, Levi Strauss, Novartis, Eckerd, Master Lock, Moen and ACCO. For more information, visit www.genco.com.