HARLYN SOLUTIONS: Difficult, Challenging, and Complex? ‘We Speak Engineering’
‘You make incredible, we move incredible’ is the promise from Harlyn Solutions, the UK-based transportation engineering firm. The company has grown aggressively in the past four years but Head of Business Development and Commercial, Nathanael Allison remains confident about Harlyn’s ability to deliver against the most difficult brief.
Not often do you hear of the relatively new business that doesn’t want to do anything easy or take on clients doing the industry standard. Typically, startup companies want to showcase their ability by doing the simple things well. They look for quick wins, and straightforward contracts to deliver proven, obvious solutions. And this makes sense, for most.
But Harlyn Solutions is different. Starting out in 2020, and growing quickly, Harlyn has always steered away from easy, avoided basic, and aimed for what others call impossible.
The company is an engineering-led transportation organisation with clients across various industries but a concentration on the energy space. Excited by the prospect of transporting highly complex, often extraordinarily heavy, and always unique cargoes from point of origin to point of use, Harlyn has developed a reputation as a problem solver.
Importantly, the company does not simply throw money at projects, leaving clients with a product in the right place but a large invoice; instead Harlyn employs experience, talent, partnership, and industry proficiency to do what others cannot so that clients are delighted.
“The more unusual, the more challenging, the more value we can add,” says Head of Business Development and Commercial, Nathanael Allison of the company’s desire to innovate. “If it’s simple and has been moved hundreds of times, we are not going to be competitive. We want unique opportunities – things that have not been done. We thrive with environmental challenges or difficult locations.”
Headquartered in Blyth, in the UK’s northeast industrial cluster, energy infrastructure quickly became an obvious growth market for Harlyn with the ongoing importance of oil and gas in the North Sea, and the rollout of offshore wind, providing significant opportunities for pioneering thinking. In a relatively short period, Harlyn has elevated itself to the top of its space with many positive projects.
“We have moved cable laying machines, barges, cable turntables, 2000 tonne accommodation modules and substations; we even transported hydroelectric screws on an island in a canal system,” highlights Allison.
Recent deliveries further demonstrate the company’s unique ability to combine engineering and transportation with invention. MacGregor, a world-leading heavy engineering firm, tasked Harlyn with moving a 150 ton, 60m linkspan from Poland to Liverpool for eventual use on the ferry terminal that connects the city with the Isle of Man. The linkspan joins ship to shore, and is a critical piece of infrastructure. Harlyn was quick to offer an engineering-led solution that took into account the nature of departure point and destination, in a time when Covid-19 was disruptive.
STRATEGIC GROWTH
Expansion is on the cards with a new office in Rotterdam giving Harlyn a European base for international operation. But from the Port of Blyth, where a cluster of big-name businesses work from, opportunities continue to present.
“Over the past few years, we have become more strategic in our growth approach,” Allison explains. “We know we have great skills moving energy infrastructure including subsea umbilicals and subsea power cables, and there is a big market for that in offshore wind. But we can also move big things like substations, monopiles and transition pieces. And there is a big market in oil and gas for jackets and subsea structures. All those things need moving from a fabricator to a site.”
Ability to achieve, even with strict guidelines, was proven recently when Harlyn successfully transported infrastructure for use in the Moray West Offshore Wind Farm off the east coast of Scotland. The 882 MW project sees 60 turbines positioned 65km offshore, supplying sustainable energy to 1.3 million households.
“We are closing out the Moray West Project – that has been a fantastic project for us where we were contracted to move the offshore substation platforms from the Smulders yard in the northeast, out to the Port of Nigg. We were contracted on one package but we did such a good job that it grew into other packages,” says Allison.
In challenging conditions, with a quickly changing project landscape, and with significant value in transit, the company’s work was heralded by all involved.
“Harlyn’s commitment to safety and efficiency has been exemplary, ensuring a seamless and successful execution of the scope. Their dedication and expertise have not only met but exceeded our expectations, making them an invaluable asset to the project’s progress,” said Moray West Project Director, Pete Geddes.
Hamish Adamson, Harlyn Founder and MD added: “I am immensely proud of the Harlyn team for successfully completing the scope of work for the Moray West Windfarm project, contributing significantly to its progress. I am thrilled by our team’s dedication and support in realizing this milestone. Harlyn remains committed to excellence in renewable energy, and we look forward to continued engineering led solutions we provide to our clients.”
DELIBERATELY LIGHT
The reason behind Harlyn’s success is its ability to act in a completely agile fashion – not offering a one size fits all approach but being truly distinctive across different projects. The business has been intentionally designed to allow for fresh thinking on each project. This, says Allison, drives quality.
“We always start with the engineering,” he says. “80% of the people in our business are highly skilled, experienced engineers of various types – mechanical, marine, naval, lift etc.
“We are deliberately asset light,” he adds. “Our strategy is not to have lots of assets because we don’t want to have to shoehorn our solutions into the assets we have. We want to come up with creative, holistic solutions, and then find the right vessels or cranes or fabricators so that we can give the best value to customers.”
He highlights a recent project in South Korea where the company sourced assets in-country to allow for flexibility. Without geographic constraint and completely open to any potential solution, Harlyn’s offering was British engineering that surpassed the expectations of the client.
The knowledge and engineering experience of the team, and the ability to seamlessly harmonise different elements of a supply chain, is what separates Harlyn from others. A turnkey provision, sometimes beginning before the client is asking relevant questions, is often unmatched in the heavy transportation industry.
“We get into these projects because customers have a challenge and they don’t know what question to ask to overcome the challenge. We offer the questions, and that builds momentum. From there, we can engineer a solution, and the difference between us and an engineering house is that we have the capability to deliver this operationally. Many of our staff are fully Basic Offshore Safety Induction and Emergency Training (BOSIET) qualified and/or Global Wind Organisation (GWO) accredited, and they are able to work offshore. We offer an end-to-end service, from the engineering of a solution, overcoming challenges, and delivering the result,” says Allison.
With the growth of renewable energy as part of the global energy mix, it is not only nice to come up with new strategies and modern ways of doing things, it is essential. Much of the work being done across the industry is pioneering and original, and while guidance from history is useful, it is important for companies to innovate. Harlyn Solutions is innovative at the core, with Hamish Adamson – a naval architect and transportation engineer – encouraging out-of-the-box thinking in every decision.
“He has always wanted to use engineering to solve problems around movement of things that are too big or too unusual or too complex to be done by regular means – that is part of the company’s genesis,” details Allison.
“If you go back a few decades, pre-offshore wind, there was a traditional energy supply chain for the oil and gas market. People had challenges, but they mostly did the same things over and over again. There was truly excellent work there, but now, with climate change and the importance placed on progress in that sphere, people are being highly innovative when driving energy solutions. In fixed offshore wind, finding new locations, and finding ports to service that – everything is new, everything is different. Across that industry, turbines are getting bigger, different subsea power cables have their own design, and that industry is reflective of how energy demands, and climate change has made people think more innovatively. Often, solutions come from doing things that have not been done before.”
NEW SOLUTIONS
As new industries are spawn from the burgeoning offshore market, Harlyn is enthusiastic about how its boundless imagination can assist in difficult, challenging, complex projects. Floating offshore wind is a growing sector, decommissioning remains highly appealing, offshore exploration continues at pace, and each market brings new challenges, in new conditions, that need modern ideas, removed from historical methodology.
Allison, who came into Harlyn after years across various energy markets, is keen to drive further growth in renewables as these markets remain in their infancy despite major successes.
“We will continue to service markets that continue to grow,” he says. “We also want more involvement with companies that fabricate unusual things. Often, a supplier will make something very rare and their expertise is in the design and manufacturing. They don’t know how to get it from Ireland to Cape Town, for example. We also have a product line called Bridging Incoterms which we are really keen to encourage going forward.”
Bridging Incoterms is useful for “filling in gaps” for customers, he says. Manufacturers can perform certain transportation tasks – perhaps from facility to port – but they need a reliable partner to complete the journey to destination. “They know they need a crane, and they know they need a vessel, but we coordinate the package and bring everything together.” Because of the deep relationships the company has built with customers, often becoming an extension of the client business, the trust is robust and clients rely on Harlyn to fit in where required.
“We work hard to get our customers to understand the value of the engineering knowledge,” Allison furthers. “If they feel we are a safe set of hands, we will always provide where we can and stay with them. We find that, as we do more and more projects, people do come back to us because we overcome leftfield challenges.”
And leftfield challenges are coming more frequently, with new industry sectors developing best practice and constant macroeconomic and geopolitical issues to hurdle. However, engineering a solution with Harlyn does not mean only hardware and operational delivery. The company is experienced in balancing across unstable conditions and the team has worked through various recessions and trials. The key is aligning a path with client goals.
“Geopolitics are challenges for our customers and they are always looking for engineering solutions to deliver cost saving or de-risking,” Allison explains. “Ironically for us, when there are challenges, that is our bread and butter. Things like Brexit and other similar challenges are tough, but we step up and we have employed people who understand the landscape and can facilitate. We see it as adding engineering value. As the geopolitical environment is unstable, we can find engineering solutions to overcome, and that means we add value.
“We have a strap line: We speak engineering,” he smiles. “We are very proud of that. Although we have offices in Europe and we do lots of work around the world, it is British engineering based from our Blyth, Headquarters. We put a lot of effort into recruiting graduates from UK universities and training them in engineering and what makes Harlyn different.”
While the projects that the company seeks are unconventional, extraordinary, and diverse, the culture developed within Harlyn is what you would expect from a successfully growing business – dynamic, energetic, imaginative, and forward-thinking.
“The people we hire are ‘roll sleeves up and get the job done’ people. As we expand, we want to find young engineers and positive thinkers who want to get in the thick of things. It’s all exciting stuff and we deliberately populate the company with people who add to that positive attitude.”
In the medium-term, Harlyn is underway with multiple projects and is busy looking at many prospects around the world. Particularly exciting for Allison is work for major energy company in Trinidad and Tobago where new subsea infrastructure will tie to the successful Juniper platform.
“We are busy with the next phase of the flowline project which is a very exciting project. We also have a significant set of projects with subsea power cable manufacturers and several other project finance offshore wind developers. We have a few projects in the Mediterranean and a few projects in South Korea and Taiwan. They are all about overcoming logistical challenges using engineering solutions,” he says.
Longer-term, Harlyn will continue to shape the brand that has been lifted high in the past four years, further building a reputation for engineering excellence across challenges that are, sometimes, yet to be identified. It will continue being altogether different in its outlook.