Carsten Nielsen, Installation and Service Manager
[Article from ScrapBook No 5 2014]
Seven days a week, challenging conditions and thousands of kilometres from home. Working as installation technician demands strong character and high competence. Our nine men strong personnel travel all over the world installing recycling equipment to our customers.
Hundreds of new machines and complete lines each year
Considering that Eldan Recycling installs closely to one hundred new recycling machines and complete plants every year, our installation team has a heavy work schedule. Carsten Nielsen that has been in this team as Installation and Service Manager for many years knows the importance of recruiting right staff. This kind of work definitely does not suit everyone due to very challenging conditions.
“The guys often travel alone on these installation assignments and they are responsible of the work coordination on site including time planning and leading the local workforce. Cultural discrepancies can be a challenge as well as different languages. In addition to strong technical and leadership skills, you need to be self-driven, courageous and equipped with a large portion of social competence,” explains Nielsen. “Examples of such projects are our customers in Papua New Guinea and in Pakistan.”
In Papua New Guinea, the recycling plant was installed in the Western Province, which is an isolated and lightly populated area. The customer is located on Mount Fublian, which is set in a high rainfall area characterised by vertical cliffs and dense tropical rainforest. Rain falls on average 339 days of the year, totalling around 10,000mm per year, making the area one of the wettest on earth. Logistics was a challenge, transporting the equipment by boat at sea and river and by truck on dirt roads. The Danish personnel flew 27 hours (excluding transfer time) via Dubai, Singapore, Brisbane and Cairns in order to get there.
In Pakistan it is well known that it is a developing country with large countryside areas and a tense political climate. This situation makes the planning of the recycling plant installation even more important. “For this exceptional project we had two installation technicians on site. They worked and lived far from the nearest city, Karachi, and they stayed in Pakistan several weeks, often working more than ten hours each day, seven days a week. They need to be two to keep up spirit,” says Nielsen.
Normally an installation project starts directly after a customer’s purchase of a single machine or a complete plant. Our project leaders Michael Hansen and Thomas Thomsen are responsible for larger plants. Nielsen takes care of single machines. He is also responsible for the online support, guaranties and service. Speaking both English and German is beneficial, as well as having a mobile near at hand.
“We know that every minute counts when it comes to reducing downtime, therefore we do our best to help,” says Nielsen.
Always installing our own equipment
Eldan usually sends a container equipped with tools to the production facility as a quality assurance. If sky lifts, cranes or other equipment is required at site, the customer is informed by Nielsen. The installation technician from Eldan acts as Supervisor on site leading the work with local installers.
Carsten Jensen emphasizes the value of installing our own equipment: “As well as the Eldan recycling machines are manufactured in our own production facility in Denmark, they are installed under our supervision. It is a question about quality.”
Of the same reason, all of our installation technicians have undergone internal training on our recycling machines. It takes about four years to be fully trained. Thereafter, they keep themselves updated on technical improvements. This training is very important due to technical advanced equipment and the fact that the recycling plants arrive in modules. A technical layout is provided, but sometimes it does not exactly correspond to for example the building. In this situation, a profound technical and logistic understanding is needed. Next phase is the production start-up where the customer’s personnel get all necessary training to run the production successfully.
“Our installation technicians make a fantastic job ensuring that our customers feel secure about managing the recycling machines on their own. They are definitely part of the explanation to our many returning customers. Nothing is stronger than its weakest link. We aim to be strong along the whole production chain,” ends Nielsen.
Meet installation technician Steen Jensen (link).
