Helmut Göttlicher works as a brochure dispatcher for Zeppelin Baumaschinen GmbH in Garching. Since he started to work for Zeppelin in 1973, he has been responsible for the availability of brochures and the like. Bauma 2019, will be his last one as an active Zeppeliner – but he is sure he will come back as a visitor even when he is retired.

Mr. Göttlicher, your job here at bauma is to ensure that all brochures and leaflets are available for our customers. How does your job look like?

Well, my jobs starts some time before bauma – I need to organize all the logistics and make sure that our material is delivered on time to the exhibition site. This year, we have about 8 t of paper material available (that corresponds to ten europaletts): user’s guides, service manuals, spare parts catalogues etc. Most of the material is in German, but we also have some brochures available in English. In general, in cooperation with Caterpillar, we can provide nearly everything – also all the documentation for older, used machines, in all the languages. I even managed to get some service manual in Chinese for our customers.

This is your thirteenth bauma. Among Zeppelin colleagues you are our “bauma king”, alongside Kurt Kerler, with the most experience. Can you remember your first bauma back in 1980? What was your task?

In 1980, bauma still took place at another site, at Theresienwiese in Munich (famous for Oktoberfest). Back then, we only had six exhibits – people went crazy for our brochures. There are many “gatherers” who keep Caterpillar brochures in folders and always wanted to have our material. Ever since we have excavators in our portfolio, the amount of brochures increased enormously. The logistics part got more complex over the years.

Is there any event you remember in particular?

Well, bauma has grown over the years and everything has become more complex. One year, we had a container full of Caterpillar caps for the machine operators – people went crazy for them and we distributed about 20,000 of them in a very short time. I don’t remember we ever had such a hype again.