Geesink Norba

Source: Manufacturing Digital

Date :26/07/2007 11:01:01

Take it away

The familiar refuse collection truck is rarely given much thought, but it’s more than a truck to take away rubbish – it is a front line tool in the fight for environmental survival, and Geesink Norba has developed it into the best possible machine for its purpose.

Written by John O’Hanlon & produced by Kiron Chavda

Geesink Norba, based at Emmeloord in the Netherlands, is a member of the American Oshkosh Truck Corporation. Oshkosh is the world’s largest supplier of refuse trucks which, apart from Geesink Norba, owns the McNeilus, Kiggen, Oshkosh, Pierce and Medtec brands. Altogether it has a global market share of about 25 percent, says Managing Director Dion Stuifmeel. Stuifmeel is an enthusiast for his firm: “I could talk for three days about the company and the market without notes and without repeating myself!” he avers.

The company has four manufacturing sites – the main one at Emmeloord, which manufactures bodies and tailgates, one in the south of Holland making compactors (large static units that compress the refuse for containerisation), the Norba facility in Sweden, which makes refuse collectors as well, and a site in Romania where and refuse collectors and compactors are manufactured.

The group’s customers are mainly local authorities and municipalities or the contractors to whom these entities outsource their waste disposal activities, such as Veolia in France or ECT in the UK. The completed units are placed on the truck chassis, which can be from DAF, Iveco, MAN, Mercedes, Renault, Volvo, Scania or almost any other truck manufacturer, either at the factory, or increasingly at Geesink Norba’s regional office.

Local assembly

The UK office is at Pontyclun in Wales, and because of the particular requirements of the UK market many vehicles are assembled here using bodies from either Holland or Sweden, though the Emmeloord plant is able to produce customised vehicles for all the European markets. “It makes logistical sense to do this, and in many markets there are customers who prefer it if there is a part of the production that takes place in the local market,” says Stuifmeel.

The way rubbish is dealt with varies from country to country. Transit stations with compaction facilities are commoner on the continent than they are in the UK, he says. “If you look at the western European market you find that in Germany and also in Belgium and the Netherlands it is almost impossible to find landfill these days. Most of it has to go to the incinerator. France is developing in the same direction, and as pressure on landfill increases, I think the UK will go the same way.”

Another characteristic of the market has been consolidation among national waste processing companies. Instead of buying or replacing refuse trucks at need, as they used to, these companies look to consolidate contracts, ordering up to 50 vehicles at a time, delivered at points over a year. This is partly to give them leverage on price, Stuifmeel explains, but it is also about lead time and project planning, which means that production must be very accurately controlled. “We’re getting more and more into customised products that are engineered to order. This might mean four or five minor changes but it can mean a fundamental design change, with the initiative coming from the customer.”

Outsourcing for flexibility

To accommodate these changes Geesink Norba has made some fundamental changes. It used to have a high degree of vertical integration, manufacturing most of the parts it used. That was fine as long as demand was consistently high, but over recent years demand has been fluctuating, as economic stagnation in key markets like Germany for example has resulted in deferred spending on infrastructure.

“Even in the UK we have seen fluctuating demand after DEFRA funding came to an end. But by outsourcing you can reduce costs and also gain a lot of flexibility. The most important thing we have been doing over the last two years is to increase our levels of outsourcing, particularly on the Geesink product.”

“We made some big changes here involving both people and systems. It's been a tough job to do, and if I had known beforehand what would be involved I might have thought twice!” he admits. “But now all of our prefabrication parts have, and all our cylinders and hydraulic rams, a major area of componentry, have been outsourced.”

In 2005 Geesink Norba set up a new factory in the centre of Romania to manufacture its standard GPM 2 model, now renamed Valu€Pak, allowing the Emmeloord facility to concentrate on production of the more advanced GPM III. GPM II was developed over 20 years, and the accumulation of improvements, re-engineering and new options generated a product with an exceptional reputation. It had analogue electronics, though, and when Oshkosh acquired the company it brought with it its unique Command Zone technology, which gives the driver a positive interface with the rear loader and its equipment, with an information display screen allowing diagnosis of the whole system.

The system can be used for fault diagnosis and troubleshooting either from the cab or from a remote location. “It is in effect a cam bus system. You have a single wire that carries a whole lot of signals, and receptors that can distinguish between the signals,” explains Dion Stuifmeel.

The introduction of GPM III was an opportunity to upgrade all the manufacturing and related processes. However no model should be seen as a standard product. There were more than 1,000 options available on the earlier model. Many of these were made standard on GPM III, basically because so many customers chose them – the remainder were reviewed and rationalised by Geesink Norba’s own product development group – about ten engineers working on product development and testing.

“Our test facility is very important to us because at the top of the refuse collection market it is all about performance and reliability. For example we developed a new integrated split lifter to work with the cam bus system. This is a fully automatic lifter for containers, and we have made it go through a million cycles in testing – that is the equivalent of at least eight years’ of intensive use.”

Quietly improving the environment

Performance comes second only to safety in Geesink Norba’s list of priorities. However performance, in the customers’ eyes, is gauged by more than speed and reliability. Fuel economy is important too. Geesink Norba already claims to have the most fuel efficient machines on the market, but now it is developing vehicles based on hybrid chassis which, rather like the Toyota Prius, uses a combination of electricity and diesel. “This will be increasingly important, and not just because of fuel economy,” says Stuifmeel.

“Customers are beginning to order one or two of these machines to have in their fleet because they like the environmental cachet it gives them, but it has a practical spinoff as well. Refuse trucks operate in cities, and often in the small hours. Electric power is much quieter to operate the lifters and move the vehicle short distances – then it can shift to diesel for longer distances.”

Dion Stuifmeel’s objective is to continue with the policy of outsourcing that has already started with major parts like the hydraulic rams and cylinders already mentioned, and to make the best use of partners within the Oshkosh Group. Most parts will come from European sources, albeit many from Eastern countries like the Czech Republic and Romania; very few from the Far East.

However in common with many much larger companies Geesink Norba is finding that India is a good source of engineering support like the execution of routine drawings. “We will always keep the innovative stuff here, because we don’t want to just give away more than 100 years of accumulated know-how, but when it comes to standard design work we have found that we can get excellent quality work from our very intelligent and hardworking partners in India.”

The UK will remain a strong market for Geesink Norba, and the upturn in the underlying economy in the key Benelux, Scandinavian and western European countries should help the company to achieve good results in 2007, perhaps ten percent above last year’s. Further afield, the company has already sold more than 400 Kiggen brand compactors in China, and at the end of last year signed a licence agreement for their manufacture and distribution there.