Ronald van Lent

Ronald van Lent has been working at Wivé Techniek for almost 25 years. Early next year he will celebrate his anniversary. He started in the office, but was soon able to enter the field service. Now, as a bridge between the market and the company, he is responsible for serving our customers perfectly. What does he like best about working at WivéTechniek?

“The variety! You get everywhere. Asphalt, concrete, recycling, storage and transfer, bulk handling animal feed, glass, power plants, steel mills…. You get an inside look at everything. You stand in drying drums, walk through installations, think about solutions together with the customer, come up with ideas. And then when you see that things work and customers are satisfied it provides a lot of satisfaction.”

“There are two of us in field service, Robert (Dreamers, ed.) and I. I do the northern half of the Netherlands, he everything below the A15. I live in Nunspeet, but I don’t get to the office very often. There you are mainly busy catching up with everyone you haven’t seen for a while. And of course I have to process all the notes from the notebook into our systems. That’s why I prefer to work at home on Mondays, where I can be more productive. Then I work out my visits and notes from the week before, communicate with the office staff and make appointments with clients for the following week. Other than that, I figure out some little things, answer customer questions, follow up on quotes. And the rest of the week, Tuesday through Friday, I’m out and about.”

“I not only advise on the choice of hard-wearing material and for which application, but also collect all the data – photos, sketches, dimensions – needed to make a good offer. What materials are needed, how do we fly the assembly, can we get to it properly? Only when the customer orders, Jan-Karst goes there to take exact measurements. Manually or with the 3D scanner. Until assembly, it can take up to six months or nine months. This is not a quick trade.”

Perfection does not exist, but if you try hard enough, you can get very close.

“I love flying remote-controlled helicopters. I build those myself and I also fly competitions with them. Artificial flight and precision. Class F3C. That means flying figures, low and high in the air. Loopings, rolls, judged by a jury. Since 2014, I have been a Dutch champion. Last August I participated in the European Championships in Denmark. There I got to the best 14 in the finals and ended up finishing ^11th. Flying a competition is a bit like our job. Perfection doesn’t exist, but if you try hard enough, you can get very close.”

“By now I can fly, but to reproduce exactly the figures every time within a certain window you have to practice a lot. The height, the speed, the turns have to be exactly the same each time. I am training every Saturday and Sunday morning, weather permitting. And even then you have to deal with variables that make it difficult. Here I train with an empty sky as the background. If you fly in Switzerland, suddenly you are looking at a mountain. A totally different experience. It’s just like in my job: the variety keeps it exciting.”