The Royal manual typewriter is preserved in a glass case at BDP International headquarters overlooking Independence Hall in Philadelphia. It's a reminder of the freight forwarder's origins in 1966, when Dick Bolte launched his company with the help of a $1,200 loan.
Today the family owned company has a presence in 140 countries, with 1,200 employees and net revenue last year of $95 million. BDP is small in comparison with such mega-forwarders as Panalpina, which had net revenue of just under $4 billion last year, and which, like BDP, caters to chemical shippers. But BDP's ability to retain and expand its business with companies such as DuPont - a customer since 1973 - has helped it survive the consolidation wave that has claimed bigger rivals such as Fritz, now part of UPS Freight Services; Circle International, now part of EGL Inc.; and Air Express International, now part of DHL Danzas.
DuPont signed a five-year contract extension with BDP in 2001. Another big customer, Dow Chemical, last year awarded BDP a five-year contract as global lead logistics provider for its containerized ocean cargo.
BDP, which derives 65 percent of its revenue from chemical companies, is also expanding beyond basic forwarding and brokerage services. Last fall, its consulting subsidiary, Centrx, received a contract from BOC Gases to evaluate the cost of transportation for liquid helium from a new production plant in Qatar to BOC customers in Asia. BOC Gases wanted Centrx to look not only at its own costs, but those of other companies bidding for rights to the plant's production. "We spent quite a bit of time with Centrx scoping the project and making them aware of the issues so they could quantify them. They did it perfectly," said Carlos Nulman, director of international helium for BOC Gases, based in Murray Hill, N.J.
BDP had not done any work for BOC Gases previously, but personal relationships between Centrx personnel and BOC executives led to the contract.
BDP executives say personal relationships with customers are vital. "The key is to educate management to maintain personal relationships and personal service," Bolte said. "When a customer has a problem he wants to reach out and say, 'Help me take care of it.' "
Bolte, 69, is still chief executive of BDP, but his eldest son, Rich, is president, and his six other sons also work for the company. Rich Bolte started with the company at age 15 as a messenger. He later worked on the documentation desk and drove a forklift before moving into management.
Ken Wensel, BDP's senior vice president for strategic global development, credits Dick Bolte with bringing his sons into the business at an early age and making them learn it from the ground up. "As a result, they have earned the respect of the organization," he said. While Rich Bolte is the company's president and his brother John is the chief operating officer, some of their brothers are not in senior management. "They understand their role," said Wensel, a 25-year BDP veteran. "They never exercise their relationship as family members to circumvent their responsibility of reporting to me."
Besides adding new customers, BDP has increased its business with existing customers. Rohm & Haas has used BDP as its primary ocean forwarder in the U.S. for many years, but it recently hired BDP to handle the chemical producer's international air business, said Ron Reynolds, inter-regional supply manager in corporate logistics for Rohm & Haas. BDP also is helping Rohm & Haas improve documentation and other processes.
A key to BDP's survival of the consolidation in forwarding has been an early and continuing emphasis on technology. In 1982, it became the first company to transmit data electronically to U.S. Customs under the Automated Broker Interface program. Two years later, it was the first to transmit export declaration information electronically to the Census Bureau. And in 1989 it became the first to establish an electronic data interchange link to ocean and air carriers for bills of lading and bookings.
BDP's technology spending this year is expected to hit $10 million, largely due to a project called Xpedion, a multi-year initiative to replace BDP's homegrown system. "A lot of our customers have disparate systems," explained Jennifer Gold, director of information-technology project management. "We offer a unifying operational infrastructure so they can manage all of their international shipments in one place."
One of Xpedion's components is BDPCustomer.com, a web-based customer service portal introduced last year that provides access to global service application tools, industry links and service alerts.
This fall, BDP will introduce a rate-management component to Xpedion. Next year it will add a new export-operations component to the Xpedion platform, with import-operations likely in 2005, Gold said.
G-Log, a Shelton, Conn.-based technology services provider whose clients include DuPont, is supplying the basic order-management and shipment-management tools to support the export and import components of Xpedion. BDP is doing the regulatory portion.
BDP has 20 offices in the U.S. and 28 outside the country. Seventeen of those overseas offices are in Asia, where BDP bought out its joint venture partner three years ago. Its biggest operation in Asia is in Singapore, reflecting the city-state's prominence as an oil-refining and petrochemical center. Another booming area is neighboring Malaysia, where business "is growing like wildfire," Rich Bolte said. Looking further afield, BDP Asia-Pacific opened offices in India in 2001 and in Sydney and Melbourne, Australia, last year.
While BDP has traditionally specialized in serving the chemical and pharmaceutical sectors, its customers also include such companies as Heineken; Meijer Stores, a grocery chain in the Midwest; Trek Bicycles, whose customers include Lance Armstrong; the Hanes division of Sara Lee; and Perseco, the logistics arm for McDonald's, according to Rich Bolte. "We clear Happy-Meal toys and arrange for their movement to distribution centers," he said.
Asia has been the main focus of BDP's overseas expansion, but it also has offices in Mexico, Canada, Brazil and Europe. Last year it began a phased acquisition of a Belgium-based logistics firm, TI, that will be completed in 2004. The acquisition is designed to improve BDP's ability to provide lead logistics services in Europe.
