This article was published in the February edition of the Dutch magazine Afval! 

Na de overname van het failliete Geesinknorba heeft 2024 voor Haller Benelux in het teken gestaan van het opstarten van de productie en de assemblage van vuilniswagens in Emmeloord. De aantallen lopen inmiddels gestaag op, zodat directeur Johan Dingemans zijn plannen voor 2025 kan ontvouwen. “Van een verhuizing naar Polen is nooit sprake geweest.”

It is January 1, 2024, 3:00 PM. The New Year's festivities are over and Johan Dingemans, director of Haller Benelux, is standing on the Betonweg in Emmeloord with the keys in his hand of the new production facility. This building housed RCV manufacturer Geesinknorba, which was declared bankrupt on November 22, 2023. Since then the office has been closed and there was a fence around it. Made it a month later Zoeller Group, parent company of Haller Benelux, announced that it will take over Geesinknorba from 2024 and that the latter company will continue under the flag of Haller Benelux. “When we started, there was only an empty office and an empty factory. Nothing else,” says Dingemans. “Gas, water, lighting, telephone and internet were turned off. We had to start from 'scratch'. Once we had access to those basic needs again, we focused on getting the factory halls clean. Our first goal was to start producing RCVs as quickly as possible.”

Increasing capacity
Geesinknorba's bankruptcy turned out to be unavoidable after a necessary restructuring was not properly implemented. In the last months of the RCV manufacturer's existence, employees were mainly concerned with completing orders as much as possible and paying off debts. Even for cleaning work, there was a lack of money and personnel at the time. After the bankruptcy, the welders were sent away, which meant that RCVs could no longer be completed. The employees of the assembly department were able to continue working, as long as the necessary parts were present.

Zoeller Group has been reaching the limits of its own production capacity at European level for some time and saw the bankruptcy of Geesinknorba as an excellent opportunity to expand its capacity, says Dingemans. “The factories of our sister companies in Germany, France, Italy and Poland are full. Long delivery times are not good for remaining active on the market. In addition, the niches in which Geesinknorba was active are very interesting for our parent company. For example, Geesinknorba RCVs have a specific compaction mechanism and they produced multi-fraction collection vehicles to empty mini containers with two and four compartments.”

Employees
Four days before Zoeller Group announced the acquisition of Geesinknorba, the curator contacted the German industry group to discuss the multi-million offer for the assets and the ERP file with RCV parts. “It was mainly about how many employees we wanted to take over from Geesinknorba,” says Dingemans. “Employment was important to the curator. Our goal for 2024 was to build 250 RCVs and for that we needed 125 employees. However, we started with 115 employees, because due to the holidays we were unable to reach all former Geesinknorba employees. They joined us in January 2024. We now have 150 employees.”

He rejects the rumor that Zoeller Group would like to move production from Emmeloord to its facility in Poland. “That was never the case. Zoeller Group paid 12.4 million euros for the acquisition. Add to this that we would have to buy out all our employees' contracts if we moved, which also costs a few million euros. If we wanted to move after four years, we would have to make at least 4 million euros in profit every year. That is not a realistic expectation.” For the new start-up, Dingemans has formed a core team with some of the employees to approach former Geesinknorba customers. “Those customers have shown a lot of understanding,” he says.

New contracts
“We had to conclude new contracts with them, because they had concluded the old agreements with the bankrupt Geesinknorba. This has largely been successful: 95 percent of the customers of the former Geesinknorba have now concluded an agreement with us.” According to him, this is because Zoeller Group is a big name in the 'RCV world'. “Companies active in this world know the name. Suppliers who do not come from the industry were a lot more suspicious of us. Just think of a landscaping company or a cleaning company. If such a company has an account of 500,000 euros open with Geesinknorba and has submitted a claim for this to the curator, it is not eager to start working for us.”

The start-up of production went well, he says. At the end of February the first RCV rolled off the proverbial production line and by the beginning of August Haller Benelux had built a hundred RCVs. At the end of 2024, the number was two hundred RCVs from production and fifty RCVs from the assembly department in which a truck chassis is fitted with a body and lifting device. This year the company aims to produce and assemble a total of 350 RCVs, which will require 25 additional employees. “We now provide eight to ten RCVs per week in Emmeloord. Of this, 70 percent is intended for export to Scandinavia, France, Spain and the United Kingdom,” says Dingemans.

“We owe these numbers to our staff, the former employees of Geesinknorba. They are real professionals. I have been very pleased with their attitude, as the past seven years – with the acquisitions of Firion Investments in 2017 and Globitas in 2022 – have been an extremely turbulent period for them with a lot of job insecurity.” The difference between the companies played a role in the positive attitude of the staff, he thinks. “Firion and Globitas are investment companies, while Haller Benelux and Zoeller Group have never done anything other than build RCVs. We know what it takes to build a RCV with a positive result.”

Less diversity
The latter was urgently needed, because the 150-year-old Geesinknorba had been in the red for 15 years in a row. Dingemans points to the low sales price per RCV as the reason for this, as stated in the bankruptcy report. “Geesinknorba sold every RCV 20,000 euros too cheaply. With 500 RCVs built, this results in a negative result of 10 million euros.” According to him, the sales price that is too low is due to Geesinknorba's enormous options arsenal. “Adding extra options to an RCV, such as a gutter or a bracket, is done after the regular serial work has been completed and results in many extra production hours: 600 to 700 hours instead of 300 to 400 hours. It is not possible to include those hours in the sales price, because then a company would price itself out of the market. The question is whether customers are willing to pay 20,000 euros more for such an option. However, the cost price is rising, and that creates loss-making products.”

That is why Dingemans has reduced the diversity of options and then compiled a new sales price. “We looked in Geesinknorba's ERP file to see which parts an RCV consists of, from nuts and bolts to the paintwork. We then looked at what all those parts cost together.” However, the information from the ERP list of the SAP business process software system turned out to be quite disappointing. “The list had become too complex to get a good cost price calculation from it. That's why we went back to basics with simple Excel documents. We have now switched to the 4Bizz ERP system, which provides a simpler overview.”

Improvements
In Emmeloord, Haller Benelux has chosen to focus on the production, assembly and improvement of three RCV series, namely the Medium MF2, the Medium MF4 and the Magnum GPM. “The MF2 and MF4 are RCVs with a 'slide and sweep' pressing mechanism, which we mainly produce for the collection of household waste in Scandinavia and Spain. The GPM is the former Geesinknorba RCV with a 'big bite' compaction mechanism that we mainly sell in the Netherlands for the collection of commercial and industrial waste,” he explains. “We are going to improve the Magnum GPM by raising the so-called pivot point yoke at the rear of the RCV. Waste can get stuck under that yoke. If it is not cleaned, it will break after a maximum of four years. By placing the yoke a little higher, we expect that no more dirt will remain underneath.”

Software improvements are required for the two MF series. “In the first month after the takeover, we were told that software improvements had been at a standstill for two years,” says Dingemans. “We immediately hired people from our sister companies to ensure these improvements, including in the areas of cybersecurity and ease of use.” Haller Benelux has now implemented the improvements for MF2 and MF4 multi fraction vehicles. He also indicates that artificial intelligence (AI) will play a greater role for collection vehicles this year, including for service and maintenance work. “With AI we want to ensure that collection vehicles have as little unplanned downtime as possible and as much planned downtime as possible. A hundred vehicles have been running in Europe for about a year and a half on a trial basis. Thanks to AI, we can see how quickly certain parts wear out and when a vehicle needs maintenance or repairs.” At the end of the first quarter of 2025, the first collection vehicles with AI will also be driving in the Netherlands. The region is not yet known.

He also expects to equip collection vehicles this year with AI systems to recognize contamination in waste materials. “It concerns sensors with AI that signal loaders to stop emptying a container, for example, as soon as too much contamination is detected. Last year we presented our AI systems SmartScan and DeepScan at the IFAT trade fair in Munich and there was a lot of interest in these systems.”

Expansion on the way
In addition to starting up the production and assembly of RCVs, Haller Benelux has used the past year to investigate the possibilities in Emmeloord. “Due to grid congestion, new construction quickly fell through, because Emmeloord only has room for new buildings on the electricity grid in 2031. That is why we have chosen to take over the office and factory through the curator as of January 6, 2025,” says Dingemans. The takeover gives Haller Benelux the opportunity to thoroughly renovate the building this year. “It's mainly about the office area and the outside. We want to make the outdated access more presentable. We will carry out the renovation work step by step, because the regular work in the factory must continue.” In addition to renovating, he has ideas to expand the location in Emmeloord. This expansion is necessary because Haller Benelux wants production and assembly to grow to a total of five hundred collection vehicles per year by 2026 and according to Dingemans the assembly line is reaching its maximum capacity. “We may do something with the parking lot in front of the office.” Later this year, Haller Benelux will announce how it plans to change the location on Betonweg. ■

Tim van Dorsten, journalist for magazine Afval!