September/October 2017
B ULK D ISTRIBUTOR
Depot Services
11
Kees in ‘t Veen,
pioneer of the ITT Europoort ‘one stop tank
container shop concept’
A quick word with…
Kees in ‘t Veen,
Firstly, could you tell us a little about
yourself and how you first came to
work on the ITT Europoort project?
I joined my father’s transport company as
a tanker driver in 1976. We were
chartered by Van Ruiten to drive all over
Europe including the former Yugoslavia,
plus other countries such as Turkey, Jordan
and Syria. In many of those countries there
were hardly any garages and no
mechanics at all who knew anything
about our modern trucks. Using a mobile
phone to call for help wasn’t an option of
course, so we had to take an entire toolkit
with us and fix things ourselves.
In 1978 my father and I started our tank
container operations from our family
home in Berkel en Rodenrijs, and soon
switched from just tanker trailers to a
mixture of tanker trailers and tank
containers as we worked for Bailee Freight
which was one of the first companies to
operate with tank containers. Tank
container activities were expanding and in
1989 I took on my first employee, John
Overdam, who is still working for us.
We grew to a six-man team by 1994.
Working with key clients such as Kemira
enabled us to expand significantly and
eventually led to us moving to the
Europoort site. It was here we established
a collaborative partnership with Aspenal,
Flaxfield, Best Trucks and DBS (Profile
Tyrecenter), which still continues today. In
2006, we opened our Tank Cleaning
Europoort (TCE) operations and with
continued growth, despite the economic
crisis, began phase 2 of our expansion in
2011.
Could you tell us a little about recent
developments at the Europoort?
We now refer to the initial TCE opening in
2006 as TCE1, and with the advent of
TCE2 in 2011, this gave us our capacity to
clean both chemical and foodstuff tanks
completely separately. Because the market
clearly demanded high quality food
cleaning, we made plans in 2014 for
Phase 3 of TCE, of which I’m proud and
thankful now, in June 2017; the total
concept of the ‘One Stop Shop’ has been
achieved in full. Having all the activities
together is what makes our concept
unique - everything is thought of, worked
out and implemented by our own
workforce in collaboration with our
regular contractors and subcontractors.
This has resulted in the Visible Quality
which is the theme of our organisation
along with commitment and service.
Are there plans for further
development in the immediate future?
Our new actual plans are in Moerdijk,
where we bought a plot of 10,000 sqm,
there we will build a repair facility for tank
containers and tank trailers as well as
storage for empty and loaded tank
containers - ADR and non-ADR, but on a
small scale storing 300 empty and 90
loaded containers.
There will also be an office for our tank
container planning and further partners,
the same as the co-siting offices we have
in Europoort. With this new site, we are
next to one of our clients, Stolt, so we can
give them all the service they want very
flexibly. This service is also available to all
the clients we have in Europoort; 70-80
percent of these clients are also doing
business in Moerdijk or are using rail or
water connections from Moerdijk.
What is the greatest challenge
currently facing the tank container
market, in your opinion?
The competition is very high, costs are
going up, yet prices must go down. Price
is often the only issue which seems to
count to customers - service and quality
are less important. Also, knowledge and
experience are disappearing, we don’t see
many young motivated people coming
new into our industry.
Kees is keen to keep a family business with his three children, above, working for the company. Jeffrey - director transport, Nicky -
cleaning depot, Charlotte - Lunchroom
and are earning some money! After our
latest investment, we have enough
capacity for the next five to 10 years for
our expanding business. There is one
element we will look to fulfil, drumming.
Next to our site we have ETT tank storage
(Vitol) and behind us we will get 100,000
sqm of warehousing - also ADR. All this
together presents a great opportunity.
Why don’t more ports have a full
service offering on site like yours and
could we see more in the future?
It’s a difficult job to run a business like
ours, but we are a family-owned company
and we have a lot of committed people
around us who are working very hard and
don’t look at their watch. You must be a
bit crazy! I don’t think other companies
will replicate this because we don’t have a
copy machine to copy our