DHL Consulting Strategy: CREATING IMPACT THROUGH INSIGHTS

We start small in Bonn, Germany: Our first team members are just two young consultants fresh out of university. Under the name Inhouse Consulting, our aim is simply to support the top management of the then Deutsche Post World Net (now DHL Group) and create value for its many customers. We initially up the size of the team to ten – and after three years, we are 40 members.

With our success in Europe, it is time to expand. We open an office near Miami, Florida, to provide consulting expertise to various DHL clients in the Americas. And just a year later, we set up a Singapore office to be closer to the DHL management team in the fast-growing Asia-Pacific region.

At the same time, we also launch various skills-building initiatives and introduce First Choice training to improve our service performance and processes.

We achieve two major milestones: Sabine Müller becomes our CEO, and we become the number one consultancy for DHL Group. Thanks to our work on the Group’s first Delivering Tomorrow study, “Towards Sustainable Logistics”, we are able to establish our sustainability credentials.

For our employees, we introduce peer counseling to offer the best-possible support and development opportunities, and we hire high numbers of international and female team members, underlining our commitment to diversity and inclusion.

We move into new offices in Bonn and then, a year later, change our name to DHL Consulting – with a new branding, a new website, and an appetite for digitalization. Our team members enjoy increasing acknowledgement of their expertise, winning numerous high-profile awards for their work on clients’ projects.

At the same time, we sharpen our focus on diversity by holding our first-ever female recruiting event, and we go paperless as part of our commitment to being digital and sustainable.

The innovations keep coming. We unveil a new open-plan office design to encourage creativity and flexibility while expanding opportunities for hybrid working. Then we launch a tool to help businesses decarbonize their supply chains, followed by our Generative AI & Intelligent Automation (GAIA) chatbot. We also refresh our own brand – and, to cap it off, win a prestigious Forbes consulting award.

Now we have 150 consultants of 33 nationalities, nearly half of whom are women, and yet our creative ethos and commitment to excellence remain unchanged. So, here’s to the next 25 years of DHL Consulting!