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Ten years ago, J Hvidtved Larsen was a small machine shop like so many others. They produced sewer cleaning technology, cranes and chassis frames for buses, they fixed the fountain in the town square, and they even handled the maintenance of Hjejlen – the world’s oldest functioning paddle steamer, which is in operation on the Silkeborg Lakes.

“We did all sorts of things,” says R&D Manager Jesper Hejselbæk. “At the time, we felt that the diversity made us less vulnerable: If demand for sewer cleaning technology were to drop temporarily, we could simply switch to something else. But the catch was that we never became very good at any of it. In particular, it’s difficult to properly price assignments that are outside one’s main area. So, sometimes we were really off the mark, and that affected our earning capacity.”

When Søren Hvidtved Larsen took over as the third generation of the Hvidtved Larsen family, he raised the bar. Continuing the down same old path was no longer satisfactory – it was time to expand the company. The R&D manager describes the early stages of this endeavour: “We analysed our production and found that the most prominent product – and a product where we had gradually become market leaders in Denmark – was sewer cleaning vehicles. In Denmark, the total demand for these vehicles does not exceed 20 or 30 a year, so if we wanted to expand within this industry, we could only do it through exports.”

The managing director therefore began to join business delegations on international tours, and the very first stop, St Petersburg, proved to have a big demand for sewer cleaning technology. So big, in fact, that there are now 80 sewer cleaning vehicles carrying the JHL logo in operation in St Petersburg alone.

Until then, however, JHL had only produced some 20 sewer cleaning vehicles a year, so they now had to work out how to turn out enough vehicles to cover the demand. In other words, they needed to take a long, hard look at their production design.

This assignment went to Nils Toft from the design firm CBD, and as he would soon discover, he had his work cut out for him: “It was immediately apparent that JHL’s production processes were anything but rational,” says Nils Toft. “In the company’s own perception, they custom-built every sewer cleaning vehicle for the individual buyer, so they would start from scratch every time – assembling parts, testing them, taking them apart again, painting them, and finally putting it all back together. But that was not actually necessary, since the vehicles really weren’t that unique. Once we analysed the production process, we found that 90% of the components are the same. It made sense, then, to combine those into prefab, pre-painted standard modules.”

This idea was well received by JHL, and the new production design, which is based on standard modules – but still with room for special requests from individual buyers – was marketed under the brand name FlexLine in 2000.

Satisfied customers
“Now we’re telling the customer what he wants, unlike before, when the customer defined the assignment,” says Jesper Hejselbæk, who points out some of the many advantages of this new approach:

“Of course, the main thing is that this makes our production far more efficient – faster, cheaper and better. We used to make 20 vehicles a year, and this year we’ve
made 110”

One might expect the customers to be unhappy with the standardisation, but that is not the case –Jesper Hejselbæk explains: “One of CBD’s designs was a standard operation panel, which means that the buttons controlling the various functions are in the same location across different vehicles. That is a huge benefit for the operators; it increases their flexibility that all their drivers can operate all the different vehicles. It is also an advantage when the vehicles come in for service that the wiring is arranged in the same way, as opposed to the past when we had handmade drawings for the individual vehicle.”

Thus, the new production design has many advantages, which now seem obvious to anyone. But according to Nils Toft from CBD, it is not unusual that it takes a design firm to sort things out: “We work with a wide range of companies, and inefficient production processes, like the ones we found at Hvidtved Larsen, are very common. First of all, with our experience, we notice these things immediately. And secondly, it often takes an outsider to adopt a sort of helicopter view and disregard the way things have been done traditionally.”

New customers
The success of the FlexLine series in 2000 gave the staff at JHL a taste for more, and since then they have continued to involve external design assistance. In 2006, the CityFlex model was launched.

The managing director had the idea for this product on another business delegation trip, this time in connection with the Danish Queen’s visit to Tokyo: “In Tokyo’s crooked one-way streets, it was impossible to operate a normal sewer cleaning vehicle,” says Søren Hvidtved Larsen, who witnessed first-hand how the Japanese approached the task: “Eight men showed up in four cars – one for suction, one for jetting, one carrying equipment, and one carrying personnel. I figured there had to be a better way to do this – with one guy in one car. Earlier that day, we had visited the container terminal, and seen how easy it was to have goods shipped out in 20-foot containers. So on the way home on the plane, I dreamt of a small, compact sewer cleaning vehicle especially made for the narrow passageways of big cities, which would fit into a 20-foot container.”

Once that idea landed on the R&D manager’s desk, he knew it was time to call in the designers once more.

“One thing I really like about designers is that they’re not afraid to ask stupid questions – ‘How come you do it that way?’ – Often, the answer is, ‘Because we’ve always done it that way.’ And that’s never a good reason to do anything.”

With CityFlex, the design task revolved mainly around new materials. A small sewer cleaning device has to go on a small lorry with a maximum load of 7.5 tons. Since the vehicle itself weighs in at 2.5 tons, and it must be able to carry some 3 tons of sludge, that leaves only 2 tons for the equipment that weighs 8-10 tons in a normal sewer cleaning device.

The solution was found in collaboration with the Århus-based design firm Made by Makers. The technical details are patented and will not be revealed here, but there is also an aesthetic side to the new sewer cleaning vehicle: “Many people associate sewer cleaning with something ‘yucky’. But in fact, it’s quite the opposite. Before the sewer cleaning vehicle arrives, the sewer may be yucky, but afterwards, it is clean. That is why Made by Makers went for a ‘clean’ look in their design of the CityFlex,” says Jesper Hejselbæk, who believes that his customers alsocare about aesthetics.

The success of CityFlex surprised even the sewer cleaning experts at JHL: “We thought we knew all the potential buyers of sewer cleaning vehicles in Denmark,” says Jesper Hejselbæk, “but the CityFlex model has opened up a whole new customer group. It is so affordable that large contractors can now have their own sewer cleaning vehicle. This year alone, we’ve sold 25 CityFlex vehicles, and next year we expect to ship 45-50.”

This means that only one year after the market launch of the designer mini-model, about every third sewer cleaning vehicle that leaves Hvidtved Larsen’s factory is one of these small, compact models. And they are going to be in operation throughout the world, as JHL now has exports to 28 countries.

Impressive bottomline
The bottom line reflects this impressive development: Ten years ago, the company had rather narrow margins, and in Jesper Hejselbæk’s words, it was “not a particularly convincing asset.” Now, it is a thriving business with profits that recently reached 17 million on a continuing upwards trend.

“Of course, you can’t put everything down to design. But working with designers has clearly helped drive our company forward,” says Jesper Hejselbæk, who encourages other companies to take on design. In his understated way, he says, “No harm in having a meeting.”

The managing director is also convinced that designers have much to offer Danish industry:

“If you walk through a residential neighbourhood, you can tell that this house was designed by a bricklayer, this one by a carpenter, and that one by an architect. Similarly, when you look at industrial products, you can tell if they’ve been constructed by engineers alone, or whether designers have been involved. You simply get a better result when you mix the professions,” says Søren Hvidtved Larsen. He is in fact trained as an engineer, but that does not keep him from concluding:

“If you get three engineers together, they’ll all say the same. But if you get an engineer, a designer, and maybe a PR guy together, you’ll get a variety of ideas, and that’s when things begin to happen.”