The reception was planned in the architecturally striking office building 'de Bolder'. The shape of this building symbolizes consistency. Positioning the building was a strong piece of craftsmanship of Mammoet. The building was built in 2001 in Zwijndrecht in a hall  "ready to go" and then transported on its own pontoon over water to its final destination in Schiedam and placed on the foundation.

Immediately after the reception the tour over the shipyard in Schiedam began. "Grandpa" Jan van Wees - already over 50 years an employee of Mammoet - shared passionately how the small family business has developed to a global market leader. In-company, Mammoet has developed many unique lift and transport mechanics that no other company was capable of.

Reshape IT
Once back in 'the Bolder' Gerrit Dekker explained the IT strategy. In a company where the focus is on heavy lifting and transport, it takes the necessary attention to get IT high on the agenda. Gerrit has made a clear link between the Business strategy and the IT strategy in the "Reshape IT" program. This link is important to actually embed IT and its innovation in the organization. Innovation in the field of engineering and IT is a strategic success factor to be and remain the global market leader. In order to achieve better efficiency and agility, Mammoet will deploy a new ERP system worldwide and a service-bus will be designed that allows the various processes and associated applications to be used. The ERP implementation has the commitment of the Board and a lead from the business.

Mammoet in a box
A big challenge was given 3 years ago for Mammoet IT colleague Marvin Wigmore. At that time, he was asked to build a new global infrastructure and a new team. The on premise systems under performed and the costs were high. Marvin presented the journey to the Cloud that he and his team have made. Where literally everything was redesigned from the drawing board. With the most important implementation "Mammoet in a box": a standardized virtual datacenter that can be deployed by region to support the business. After a lot of missionary work to get the business in line, this journey resulted in a high degree of usability, speed and cost reduction. The process 'application profiling' has also been developed. Within this process it is assessed whether an application is replaced by a SaaS, PaaS or IaaS solution.

Mammoth out of the box
Mammoet grew by continuously innovating on lifting techniques and crane construction such as the self-constructive crane on a small surface. Pascal Kartan has received the challenge to look for innovation outside the normal 'metal' paths. Also to be described by ‘Mammoet out of the box'. It looks at the possibilities of digital innovation in combination with the metal. 

Pascal has highlighted a number of innovation successes, including:

• VR to develop learning and testing scenarios. For example, a digital twin of a crane has been built for training purposes.
• Creating new business models. For example the "DIMA equipment rental", a portal for renting metal that doesn’t been used.  
• An own camera-car which is now deployed on three assignments in the quotation process for plotting a route for heavy transport.
• Augmented Reality. A digital twin of the shipyard that can calculate the impact on the workload.
• Quick application development for 'fit to purpose' solutions.

Important ingredients to realize innovation within Mammoet:

• People: create awareness for innovation through all layers of organization.
• Assign innovation coaches to teach colleagues to innovate.
• A balanced portfolio for the short and long term.
• To use an 'innovation funnel' with shared ownership to achieve broad engagement and visibility.
• Give confidence to experiment and the willingness to put money and time in growing trust.
• Collaborate with start and scale-ups.

Digital twin in daily practice
The last part of the plenary part was a joint discussion table was launched about the theme digital twin. Jan van de Wouw, CDO of Royal IHC and Mark Vermeer, CIO of the Municipality of Rotterdam, highlighted this theme from their own context. Within the group valuable learning, cases and challenges were shared. A very valuable closure to be further deepened in a future session.

 The varied programme was completed with a very tasty Indonesian buffet. This first Networking dinner has given a lot of inspiration. The next Networking dinner is scheduled for Thursday April 18th. Then we are a guest at Artie Debidien, CIO of the NIBC bank, of course a technological development will be addressed to be discussed.