The Vision of Erik de Neef

A modern fleet of 60 mooring boats, 300 fully qualified boatmen, 32 winch trucks, manual work, mainly outdoors, seven days a week, 24 hours a day.

Royal Boatmen ́s Association Eendracht (in Dutch: Koninklijke Roeiers Veereniging Eendracht, KRVE) is a very unique organisation within the port of Rotterdam, helmed by chairman Erik de Neef.

In May 2015, the KRVE celebrated its 120th anniversary. The association started with five rowing-boats, when the municipality and port authority of Rotterdam requested to unite to transport goods and offer mooring and unmooring services.

De Neef: “The most efficient way to practise this profession is to have just one party. Together with the pilots and tugboats, we form the basis of technical nautical services in the port, our service is of general economical importance.”

Co-ownership

The KRVE counts 300 boatmen and 60 paid employees, the boatmen are all co-owners of the association. De Neef has been a boatman since he was 16, but also had an interest in the financial sector. Therefore, he studied business economics in the evenings. In January 2015 he became chairman of the association. “As we are all entrepreneurs within the association, we are all responsible. As a chairman, I have been chosen. I don’t need to take responsibility towards shareholders, I have to take responsibility towards 300 co-owners, who are all very critical, possibly even harder.
I have to not only look at the rational side of business, but also at the emotional side. The commitment is huge, stimulated by the co-ownership, which is another motive than in conventional companies. Managing this association is difficult, but challenging, this profession just grabs you. You have to be passionate and driven. I was already a fighter when I was young. I wanted to improve every time, it is my mentality.”

He continues: “As an association, we have three pillars: safety, quality and availability. By offering these pillars to ship owners coming to Rotterdam, we can keep Rotterdam open. We should not become arrogant as a single player, the customer is king. As we are an association consisting of independent entrepreneurs, everyone is conscious about safety, our equipment, education, everything needs to be of 100 per cent quality. The money we earn is evenly split amongst our members and the profit is part-ly given back to the company for education, investments and innovations.’’

In 2006, the KRVE acquired the shipyard Merwelands Jachtbouw Rotterdam, withw hich they already had a close cooperation. Currently, about 40 people work here in paid employment.

De Neef: “Our fleet is maintained at the yard, but 90 per cent of its work is for external parties: maintenance, refits, but also newbuildings for other boatmen associations in the Netherlands and abroad. Currently we have a fast aluminium tender under construction for the Belgian port of Gent. In order to meet the huge demand a second shipyard is under construction, just along the road, due to be delivered mid 2016, which we will use for ShoreTension, repair and newbuilding.”

Innovations

As quality is so important to the boatmen, they only use the best equipment, says De Neef: “We are a developer, manufacturer and end-user combined, the boatmen are involved in all innovations.”

Talking about innovations, the KRVE accounts for several successful ones. First and foremost ShoreTension, a flexible stand-alone mooring system based on a permanent tension of shore mooring lines without the need of external energy. It reduces the movements of a moored vessel caused by strong wind, currents or passing vessels.

“We respect the natural forces, nature cannot be suppressed. Therefore we try to use these forces”, De Neef explains the background of the system. The ShortTension system is in demand in Europe as well as outside of Europe, where optimising mooring and unmooring is needed.

“The system is active in Australia and New Zealand, but also in Oman, Antwerp and Portugal. Dutch expertise travels the world. ShoreTension is a joint venture be-tween KRVE and ECT, but makes use of KRVE people. An innovation within ShoreTension is the snatch block, ensuring friction-free operations. It has been certified for heavy lifting applications by Lloyd’s Register.”

Another challenge is the Multiship, a vessel that KRVE developed for several sorts of services which is currently under construction at the Merwelands shipyard.

De Neef: ”This vessel can for example be used in the offshore industry, as the demand for heavier equipment rises, but also for the transport of the ShoreTension. Another possibility is to rent it out including a skipper to companies that are incidentally in need of more capacity, for example the Ministry of Infrastructure & Environment, during repairs. Moreover, we developed a unique all-weather boat, which is able to moor anywhere, regardless of the wind, swell or other ships, equipped with excellent navigation systems, and a new sort of heavy-duty fender system, which is very strong. We use this fender ourselves, but also sell it to third parties. These fenders are sold by Poly Marine Services, founded in 2007, in which KRVE participates.”

KRVE also developed a buoy, taxable up to 240 tons of safe working load, against 60 tons of traditional buoys. The eyes of the buoy are made of massive steel and allow the boatmen to immediately secure the mooring lines on the bollard. This idea originates from the association’s colleagues in Amsterdam, but was optimised by the KRVE. The first four were already sold to Zeeland Seaports and De Neef hopes that also other ports will show interest.

NEN-certification

Something De Neef is visibly proud of, is the NEN-certification: “A NEN-certification for mooring boats was successfully implemented and we are in the process of getting our profession as a whole in the Netherlands NEN-certified. When this is a success, we hope to implement this in Europe and the rest of the world. We already achieved the standardisation of the education, boatmen in seaports all need to undergo the same education, provided by training institute STC in Rotterdam. A certification guarantees multinationals in the future that the quality regarding the equipment and the execution they expect is the quality they actually get.”

When asked about what distinguishes Rotterdam in comparison to other ports, De Neef answers: “The combination of mooring, piloting and towing ensures that during a manoeuvre a seagoing vessel is already moored. There is no technology that gets a vessel moored as fast as we can. We bring the ropes from the ship ashore, where our colleagues take the ropes from our launches and put them on the shore bollards. This is partly done by hand and by our winch trucks. Next to mooring and unmooring, KRVE also transports pilots by tender and car.”

Will technology take over the boatmen’s work in the future? De Neef smiles: “Technology can go very far, but cannot take over everything. The forces on a seagoing vessel are so enormous that no crane in the world is able to lift a vessel. However, I don’t claim that technology will never take over, that is why we research if we can upgrade the conventional business ourselves.”

Offering expertise

Additionally the KRVE provides marine consultancy services. The marine consultancy captures the period from the conceptual design to the end of life time of a project or vessel. The specialty and focus in this process is mooring. “We started in 2006 with our offshore activities, offering our expertise for mooring FPSO and oil rigs”, explains De Neef. “These objects are often not equipped to moor in a port and therefore detailed preparations are necessary. Our boatmen are in demand, they are entrepreneurial and well educated with the right knowhow and good communication skills. We offer hands-on mooring as well as full project engineering to projects worldwide, which was a request from the market.”

Sustainability has his attention, says De Neef:

“When innovating, we always take sustainability into account. Our office building for example has been made almost zero-emission following the design of one of our boatmen, and we have created wells to cool and heat the building. These are sustainability investments you simply need to do as a company. Next to that we were the first to sign the convenant with the Rotterdam Port Authorities for low sulphur fuel. Often the answer lies in simple things: smartly making use of things that are already existing. The equipment we build is already quite sustainable as it has a long life cycle. To go hybrid is difficult in regard to our boats, as they are quite small and need a lot of power, but for example ShoreTension does not need external energy, but gets its energy from the natural forces. We look into the possibility to give the sustainable energy the ShoreTension system produces and does not need, back to the terminal. We consciously chose to use just one John Deere engine for our boats, in combination with a Rolls Royce jet and we have as little failures as with vessels with two engines as we have an intensive maintenance programme.”

Cooperation for success abroad

Asked about (future) trends in the industry, De Neef mentions cooperation: “I think it is important that Dutch companies -multinationals, SMEs and government – cooperate more and support each other more to find opportunities abroad together, thereby creating employment in the Netherlands and strengthening each other. This will help to be more successful, for example being able to offer more complete tenders. We have good experiences with cooperation, we once started our own yard being a competitor of Shipyard De Haas in Maassluis; nowadays, we work together and we even set up a joint venture to exploit the submarine lift at the RDM premises.”

He continues: “Another trend I see is that the shipping industry changes: vessels become bigger, heavier and we need to adjust our equipment. Also, ports used to be situated next to cities; nowadays, they are located next to the sea, where different sorts of forces are active. You encounter more swell and more wind, but also the climate is changing. We need to be aware of and adapt to that. When seagoing vessels are designed, the mooring is under-exposed, focussing more on the vessel and not enough on the shore-side. This provides a challenge to us to create awareness that paying attention to mooring is important.”

De Neef also sees opportunities education-wise: “The Netherlands is the only country in the world that has a four-year boatman education, regulated by the government. This should become a trend worldwide. That would increase the quality and the safety in every port in the world.”

Gail van den Hanenberg