Back at home in Amsterdam, where the company runs 100 cranes mainly on taxi duty, van Keulen reorganised the business to bring together special transport and crane rental in early 2008. The change makes it easier to offer customers a complete lifting and transport package, van Keulen said. It brings staff together from three different divisions. And it helps the company manage the fleet – because the company employs 10% more crane drivers than cranes, a free driver can work as a rigger on a special transport job.
Saan, now in its fourth generation as a family company under Joop Saan, also runs a moving and storage business.
van Keulen joined the company two years ago, after three years at Dutch bus company Connection, where he developed a series of key performance indicators to measure staff. He has set the company’s crane planners have a total of five KPIs, including the number of hours a day a crane works (the target is eight hours) and the ratio of crane drivers’ hours to hours that are billable to the client (the target: 90%). He added that he works to his own KPIs, including the crane division’s profitability and utilisation.
He said that although he still has recent new crane orders – two 65t Fauns, and two 100t Liebherr ATs in 2009 – he is now waiting for a year to order new cranes for the market to cool down. “Now there are high prices and long delivery times,” he said.
