Digitization is the 'enabler' of improvement and innovation

She is no stranger to readers of this magazine. Celeste Martens, Manager Technology & Development at Croonwolter&dros, has been dealing with the topic of digitalization within the organization for some time. "At Croonwolter&dros, computerization, automation and digitalization are now fields of their own, in addition to electrical and mechanical engineering," Celeste opens the conversation. 

Celeste sees digitization as an "enabler" of improvement and innovation: "Who is the customer of digitization? We all are, but each in our own way. For Croonwolter&dros, the trick is not only to know what the customer's need is, based on what the customer's need is we create, implement, facilitate or explore technological possibilities. Through our pioneering role within digitalization, we are able to identify, advise and, if the client wishes, improve processes."

Three levels of digitization

Celeste continues her story, "We distinguish three levels within digitalization, namely an 'operational backbone,' a 'modular digital platform' and 'business intelligence.' The latter includes the creation of the desired information, to be able to look back, interpret now and look forward, up to and including forecasting." What does Croonwolter&dros understand by a 'digital platform'? "It is more or less a digital shell, consisting of a data warehouse where data from our business processes is stored and a common data environment where data is stored about our assets. We bring everything together and link it with the client's software or any other stakeholder's software through an Object Type Library (OTL). The strength is that we can link with any packages."

Agility and flexibility are important

"Business Intelligence means being able to look across the whole, rather than just at one part," Celeste continued. "We can extract even more intelligence from data. On the one hand, that requires resources; on the other hand, you need the people for it. There is sufficient support and backing from management. Taking digitization seriously -this applies to everyone- can bring about quite a cultural change within the organization. The idea is that digitization makes you more agile and flexible, which is very important. We are still mainly document-oriented, which is logical. Eventually we will make the transition to 'data driven' work and we will transfer data to the parties who work with us. Data is alive, you learn from it and data can be further enriched. This means that you will soon be able to work in a data-driven way from a tendering process to the maintenance phase. Every update you make is valuable in that respect. Having your data in order becomes more important than ever. Inextricably linked to that is that you have to set up your processes properly. The digital platform offers a 'single source of truth', data that is always up-to-date and accessible to everyone who needs to use it. This ensures you are using the right data and avoids duplication."

No ivory tower

Croonwolter&dros leads the way when it comes to digitization, computerization and automation. However, this does not mean that the experts who work there speak unintelligible language from an ivory tower. Celeste explains, "As always, our customers are our driving force. We therefore market our expertise 100% in the service of the customer, we think along from the customer's situation. That is where we identify a problem, validate it, come up with a solution, which we also validate, and in consultation implement the solution. We have the people and the resources for that, the knowledge and expertise. Our customer is taken step by step through the whole process and keeps an eye on what is happening."

Celeste and her colleagues are concerned with the world of tomorrow. "Innovation requires looking over the horizon. We bring about the structure and coherence of innovations and make everything applicable to projects. We have many projects underway with long durations that allow us to apply innovations," Celeste said. "The advantage for everyone participating in the digitization process is that learning from 'old' data is possible, we can optimize today's practices far and wide, and we can be predictive when it comes to tomorrow's world. The benefits: reduced failure costs, increased efficiency, saving money, saving energy, reducing CO₂-emissions and overall operate more sustainably. That's what we're doing it for, right, together?"