By STEVEN M. SWEENEY

11/24/2006 - ERIE —Jim Berlin keeps photographs of memorable moments on bulletin boards in the long hallway at his company’s corporate headquarters.

Pinned among the Logistics Plus employee picnics and children’s high school graduation snapshots is a portrait of Microsoft’s first employees, with a gangly Bill Gates seated in front.

‘‘Look at those guys. You wouldn’t give them a quarter,’’ Berlin said. ‘‘Now look at them.’’

Now look at Berlin.

What It Is

Logistics Plus today is the maturing $40 million a year in earnings business Berlin raised from his Jamestown home’s basement and a corner at GE Transportation’s Erie plant 10 years ago.

Though Berlin owns the former Union Station in downtown Erie, Logistics Plus only occupies a portion of the third floor there. His company has some warehouse space, but no trucks, no airplanes, no rail yard — yet Logistics Plus is near the top of its business in moving or arranging transport for parts or materials from China and India to Mexico, Erie, Indianapolis and points in between.

He strives to save the customer money.

‘‘When you say you need something ASAP, I can spend a lot of your money getting it there. Or I could have spent this much money for an hour later or a day later,’’ Berlin says. ‘‘That matters.’’

To move all that stuff for big customers like GE and small tool and die shops, Berlin employs more than 150 people in offices Erie, China, Poland, Mexico, India and a dozen other countries. His employees speak 40 languages and work day and night for their customers’ benefit.

But it’s not at all clear, at first glance, that anyone is working.

Donning a subdued open collar Florida-shirt and worn jeans, Berlin fits in well with his employees who come to work wearing sweatshirts, more denim and broadcloth pants or shorts.

‘‘Work and play don’t need to be two separate things. If you can enjoy your work, then it’s not like work,’’ he said.

Passion For Excellence

‘‘We give a (hoot) — I call it the ‘GS’ factor,’’ Berlin said about his unofficial slogan. ‘‘That skid of freight a customer needs isn’t just another job. He might need it on the assembly line to make a product and send it out to his customer. It matters.’’

Berlin had been a Lackawanna steel worker, a union organizer and lastly a truck driver for eight years when he moved to Jamestown in 1982. He worked here for Oneida Freight until it closed in 1985. He tried to find other jobs, but found nothing in trucking.

‘‘The 1980s were tough,’’ Berlin said. ‘‘I called the company I used to work for in Buffalo and asked for a job. They said they only had an opening as a dock supervisor. I said, ‘Screw you, I’m a Teamster.’ ’’

After six months without a job, Berlin called his old bosses in Buffalo to see if the job was still available. It was a supervisor’s job he would have kept until he was fired for trying to arrange overnight express shipments from Boston.

GE picked him up along with four others who lived in Jamestown, and business took off.

‘‘We commuted from Jamestown for five years, every day. The first five employees driving at 7 a.m. from Jamestown in my Dodge Caravan. If we’d been hit by a truck, there goes the company,’’ Berlin said. ‘‘I didn’t mind, especially when they made (state Route) 17 into four lanes.’’

In 1997, only a year after starting Logisitics Plus, GE named Berlin’s company a corporate best-practice winner. Logistics Plus earned the distinction again in 1998 by being the first in the conglomerate to successfully source parts and materials in Mexico.

‘‘By 1999, when GE went to Eastern Europe in search of parts, we went with them and opened up offices in Poland, the Czech Republic and Russia,’’ Berlin said. ‘‘Word of mouth spread us. Now we have 300 customers. It’s interesting. We have no sales force, no marketing — it’s all been by word of mouth.’’

At the urging of Erie civic and business leaders, Berlin established a headquarters in Erie in 2001 and purchased the Union Station in 2003.

‘‘We succeeded so well because I learned from Jack,’’ Berlin said of Jack Welch, long-time CEO of GE, who pioneered business efficiency principals now modeled throughout the world. ‘‘Two of the principals are boundrarylessness and empowerment.’’

Berlin uses those two principals, at least, to allow his employees to address problems on the spot and always think of new ways to get the job done.

Forward Thinking

In the Mexican office, Fransisco Tijerna rubs his brow and speaks in agitated Spanish over the telephone to a Mexican shipper. One of the trucks is stuck on the border bridge between Mexico and the United States, but Tijerna’s compatriots south of the border seemed less concerned than he.

‘‘Mexicans, I used to complain about them — but I am one of them,’’ Tijerna said laughing after he hung up the receiver. ‘‘The main thing we’ve got to work around is the cultural thing. It’s a different state of mind. We are like a big baby-sitter for the whole process.’’

Northern Mexico is different from the south and the area around Mexico City. Tijerna and others in Erie and Mexico have to work with it all.

The latest big project was a parts move between India and Mexico — with none of the project touching United States soil, except for the coordinators in Erie.

‘‘We can’t get bored,’’ he said.

Neither does Chinzo Ulzii.

As Logistics’ information technology manager, Ulzii is directly responsible for the brains of the operation — laptops, networking, satellites — everything. And like nearly all of Berlin’s employees, is a 20- to 30-year-old college graduate with a bright future.

‘‘You have to be consistent. IT is like a battle. All your soldiers are fighting all the problems in the system — it’s exactly the same thing Jim does with shipping,’’ Ulzii said.

Niche Found

There was a time when GE looked to find someone other than Logistics Plus to take care of shipping for the Erie manufacturing plant and the outcry was incredible.

Berlin keeps the letters and e-mails those supportive GE managers and supervisors sent to him and catalogued many of them on his company’s Web site, that say how wonderful his employees are and how dedicated.

‘‘You always try to find an answer and usually there is an answer — you find a way to make things happen and people are thankful for it,’’ Berlin said.

A more complete compliments list is available at: http://www.logisticsplus.net/customer/Testimonials.htm

courtesy of Jamestown Post-Journal