KLU welcomes Arne Heinold as Assistant Professor for Transportation
Professor Arne Heinold has come full circle. Ten years after graduating Kühne Logistics University’s Master in Global Logistics program, Heinold, previously interim professor for operations management at the Otto-von-Guericke University of Magdeburg, was appointed to the role of Assistant Professor for Transportation at KLU in April this year. His research, which has a focus on maritime logistics, has received several awards while Heinold himself arrives at KLU with invaluable industry experience, having worked in logistics for duty-free giants Gebrüder Heinemann.
With his appointment, Heinold became KLU’s first graduate (Masters in Global Logistics class 2013) to take up a professorship at his alma mater. Yet ironically Heinold, who earned his bachelor’s degree in economics at Kiel University, says his original reason to do a postgraduate degree at KLU was to move away from academia.
“I had this economic background and I wanted to do something very close to the business and KLU was the place to be, so that's why I ended up here for my master’s degree,” he explains. “When I graduated KLU, it was perfectly clear for me that I wanted to work for a company to try out all the theories and methods I had been learning for five years at university.”
A traineeship at Gebrüder Heinemann was followed by a requirements manager position at the duty-free firm and responsibility for communication between the IT and logistics departments. Having spent almost four years with the company, gaining invaluable practical experience working in Singapore and contributing to the ramp up of a new warehouse at Frankfurt, Heinold realized his interest lay “in taking a dive deeper into logistics methods and trying to understand them in a detail that is not possible in regular studies.”
Focus on Sustainable Transport
Heinold, who originally hails from Hardebek, a small town an hour north of Hamburg, then took up a research position at Kiel University looking into sustainable transport and the development of an eco-labeling system for transport, earning his PhD along the way. “The DFG-funded (German Research Foundation) research group in Halle and Kiel I was working with had this idea of an eco-labeling system, which is similar to the color system used to indicate the energy efficiency of products such as washing machines,” he explains of his research. “The idea was to transfer this to the transportation sector, so when you order something online you can not only select the price and delivery time, but also the eco-label. “The idea was to bring up another metric to offer companies a competitive advantage by informing customers that there is a green eco-label on this product compared to a red one on a competitor’s. At the same time, it offers customers the opportunity to indicate their environmental preferences.”
Postdoctoral work, which he performed next to his interim professorship at the Otto-von-Guericke University, involved exploring the potential of 5G telecommunications technology on port operations.
“Kiel has a small port, which doesn’t have container ships but roll-on, roll-off roll ships with a single ramp,” he explains. “The question is, when we have this 5G technology, what should the port do differently in loading and unloading these types of ships? By setting up a simulation environment we were able establish value of information such as the position of every trailer or knowing in advance what the storage plan is and thereby create explainable loading and unloading strategies for the port.”
Heinold’s findings have been published in several international journals, among them Transportation Science, Journal of Industrial Ecology, and Transportation Research Part D and E.
His research, meanwhile, has been recognized with several awards, including the prestigious Wissenschaftspreis Logistik 2022 and Jacqueline Bloemhof Award on Sustainable Supply Chains 2023. Heinold also brings with him plenty of experience as an educator, having taught classes in logistics, production, and operations research at the undergraduate, graduate, and executive levels.
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