Ronny van Baal does not accept the status quo. He is generally respected as a passionate innovator. With his companies Sky Access and SkyDeck Europe, he has made the industry a safer place to work. His products have also yielded his customers huge cost savings and faster lead times. It’s high time to talk to him about his latest introduction: QuikDeck.
We agreed to meet at Ronny’s training center Delta Safety in Rotterdam. This is where professionals learn how to work with his products in simulated situations. He takes me on a tour of the facility and tells me about QuikDeck: a revolutionary scaffolding system that he is exclusively licensed to distribute in the Benelux and German-speaking Europe.
What makes QuikDeck so different?
“It is stable and lightweight and yet has a much higher load-bearing capacity than regular scaffolding. When you consider bridge maintenance, for instance, this has huge advantages. It may even change the entire way these things are done.”
He offers an example. “Traditional scaffolding slows down work, simply because it has a low load-bearing capacity to continue working for any length of time. Old paint is removed from bridges using steel grit. The grit’s weight means that workers have to stop working every hour to remove the residue. A huge loss of time. QuikDeck is strong enough to let blast cleaning continue, so the residue can be cleaned up afterwards. The steel grit can simply be left where it falls.”
Reducing bridge work lead times helps reduce the costs and will often mean less extensive interference with traffic, too.
Rijkswaterstaat, the Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure and the Environment, manages over 1000 bridges in the Netherlands alone. There are 7300 bridges in Germany that trucks are not allowed to cross because they need to be renovated. There is a lot of catching-up to be done. The profit – in time and costs – when using QuikDeck for this work will be huge.
QuikDeck is not just a great solution for bridge repairs, however. The product has already proven its worth in other fields, such as offshore and large-scale complex building projects.
Because QuikDeck enables a different, more efficient operating method, Ronny also offers his customers training as a service. “We want our customers to get the most from QuikDeck. So it’s important to showcase all of its possibilities, so that the commercial interests of our customers are served optimally and worker safety is guaranteed.”
Using QuikDeck will become a real aspect in project planning. “It is not just ‘another’ component – it is now decisive in the process,” explains Ronny. It changes everything: the cost, the operating method, the lead time. We have teamed up with the Vogels agency for drawings and calculations, we offer training. We want to provide the full package.”
The term ‘innovation’ tends to be used for every purpose these days, but it seems that Ronny has introduced another real game changer with QuikDeck.
Read more stories on: https://wordpress.com/stats/insights/ronnyvanbaal.wordpress.com
People with a vision 