John Wolz

“When Europe started becoming one market, European distributors realized they had common interests,” the executive secretary of the European Fastener Distri-butor Association explained about the organization now representing five national groups.
Bernd Stapf, retired from a fastener career with Bossard and Borstlap International, now assists EFDA president Bernhard Berrang and vice president Steve Auld in directing the mutual activities of the German, French, UK, Spanish and Italian distributor associations. There are 170 distributors with sales totaling Euro 3.2 billion (US $3.85 billion).
In an interview with Fastener-News.com during Fastener Fair Europe, Stapf noted their challenges are very similar to North American distributors. “All distributors need to find more value for their customers, ” Stapf pointed out. “That struggle is the same for colleagues worldwide. If you don”t generate more value then you add cost to a product.”
The search for ways to add value was “an outside reason to get together,” Stapf added.
Just as U.S. manufacturers question the valuation of the Chinese Yuan, the value of China”s currency effects Europe “even more and can make it difficult especially for our smaller manufacturers to overcome,” Stapf observed.
“Our European manufacturers also need protection for intellectual property, fraud and trademark violation,” Stapf declared. They must meet ISO requirements. Europeans also have the issues of hexavalent chromium and insulation for electric appliances and cars, face zero defect or ppm improvement requirements and are constantly enhancing productivity.
“We should not build any more barricades against Asian products, but all imports do meet the European industrial demand for documented, constant and reliable quality,” Stapf suggested.
“In fact it”s true that a very cheap market price is a disagreeable situation for everyone working in the market,” Stapf added. “Unfortunately a cheap price mostly is applied to nonconforming quality levels. Very often buyers are impressed by the price and not able to judge the related quality. So we are really interested in fair pricing but we need a serious competition, not a muddled barrier.”
Though Europe didn”t face a single specific fastener law such as the U.S. Fastener Quality Act, there are several legal impacts of the European Common Market. Distributors took a proactive approach of encouraging manufacturers that “the easiest protections are lot traceability, headmarking and lot numbers.”
Distributors and manufacturers also face challenges in recycling and environmental protection.
Stapf estimated that 30% to 40% of fastener distributor sales involve some form of “scheduled deliveries” or “just-in-time” programs. Those require suppliers and customers “team up to optimize product flow, quality and packaging,” Stapf pointed out.
The European Fastener Distributor Association is a confederation of the British Association of Fastener Distributors, Fachverband des Schrauben Grosshandels (Germany), Association des Distributeurs Francais en Elements de Fixation (France), the Asociacion Espanola de Distributidores de Fijaciones Metalicas (Spain) and the Unione Distributori Italiani Bulloneria (Italy).
EFDA meetings are held in English and each national association sends one delegate to two annual board meetings where they work on “action programs together on common interests.”
“My task is to coordinate,” Stapf explained. “It is not an easy task to bring all the different national interests together,” but the “different cultures are what make Europe and stimulate ideas.”
The full EFDA meets every three years with the next session in 2006.
EFDA creates a platform for people to communicate, Stapf said.
One EFDA role is to encourage family-owned distributors to “exchange” junior staff across borders to educate and stimulate new ideas.
Stapf described recent French and Dutch defeats of the proposed European constitution as “not voting against the European idea but voting against economic fears and bureaucracy.”
“With globalization everyday we lose workplaces. Some countries have 10% to 12% unemployment. People think governments haven”t done enough to protect them,” Stapf observed. “When asked if they would like the borders back, nobody wants to turn back.”
E-mail: bernd.stapf@bluewin.ch \ �2005 FastenerNews.com