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COVERSTORY
DG-specialist Vertex A powerful player in a turbulent market To set up a new company in the turbulent year 2020 in an industry that had suffered quite some blows, takes both courage and determination. Vertex Dangerous Goods Services & Consultancy has shown time and again since start-up that they possess these qualities. Cargo Magazine spoke with Faouzi El Ghani about the team’s passion to optimally serve their customers when it comes to dangerous goods.
“A vertex can generally be interpreted as being the highest point. The top, the highest point where everything comes together. A point not lying between two other points of an object.”
and he set up Vertex Dangerous Goods Services & Consultancy. Assisted by good coaching and a team of some 15 colleagues, Vertex is working towards its objective.
Source: Wikipedia
Text Esther Kort-Boreas Photo de Beeldredacteur
F
aouzi intentionally talks about ‘the team’. “There is no ‘I’ but ‘we’, a close-knit group of people with solid knowledge of dangerous goods (DG) working together with a single goal: making our customer’s life easy.” After successfully completing his studies at the Netherlands Aviation College and working for 17 years for Special Cargo Services, Faouzi felt he could no longer deny what was in his blood
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The philosophy is clear: the focus lies with the customer, the staff comes first. The team comprises professionals who are 100% aware and have a strong sense of responsibility. The company has an office at Schiphol and two offices in Rotterdam (for DG ocean freight shipments). Expansion to the Eindhoven region will be looked at in 2022.
Service Vertex presents itself to its customers as an ‘experienced partner in terms of everything involved with the storage, documentation, packing and transport of dangerous goods in compliance with current (inter) national legislation and regulations’. That is quite a mouthful but quite simply means that Vertex can take everything relating to dangerous
goods off the hands of their customers. At Schiphol forwarders form 80% of their customer base. In Rotterdam, however, it is more the shippers that Vertex counts as its customers. Sea freight is quite different to air freight. With sea freight the shipper is directly responsible for DG consignments. DG: part of the logistical process? Every month at Schiphol as many as 12,000 airfreight shipments of dangerous goods are transported, via the warehouses of the four handling agents, to all corners of the world. Thus, you could say that DG is an integral part of the logistical process. Yet this link in the logistical chain does not have its own sector council within industry association Air Cargo Netherlands (ACN). And, in the digitalisation processes throughout the logistics chain, the DG link is not included. And still today everything relating to DG shipments is undertaken using paper documents. Vertex, however, is moving ahead with digitalisation: everything that can be done digitally is embraced by the company.
Vertex Learning Institute On 1 November 2021 the company started the Vertex Learning Institute. Under the direction of Ivo Jongh Visscher (Director) and with their own
