Make our business your business

It’s not for nothing that the Star Trek starship was named the Enterprise. Most plainly, the word means a “project” or “undertaking,” but it also conjures up adventure-seeking and the intrepid curiosity that guides us to and through unknown territories. And it’s not for nothing that we’ve long referred to many of our commercial customers as “enterprises.” Looking back on the past couple years, we find that label, with all its cosmic Trekkie connotations, especially fitting: our manufacturing customers have been tasked to boldly go where no one has gone before.

In 2021, manufacturers the world over were still dealing with COVID’s effects on supply chain disruptions, on-location working, and hospitality and retail closures that dented consumer and B2B demands. Globally, we all slogged through a second pandemic year, dealt with a host of cyberattacks or threats thereof, and had to process tremendous geopolitical turmoil, all of which exacerbated public health, social violence, and the climate crisis. Locally, the Netherlands lived through a collapsed government, flooding, and persisting housing shortages. Indeed, these have been unprecedented times, with unprecedented effects on business.

But again and again, our customers have shown remarkable resilience. In the face of crises, the manufacturers we partner with have harnessed their actual entrepreneurialism as well as their entrepreneurial spirit. While we’ve seen how some organizations focus on simply keeping up and running or, by contrast, to just keep on innovating in hopes of getting ahead of competition, our customers are in fact simultaneously committed to doing both. Upkeep and innovation are not diametrically opposed. In fact, the IT solutions that we co-create enable the passionate pursuit of both.

Optimizing production, prioritizing operators

While the shutdowns of 2020 spurred austerity cuts and shrunk budgets for production and development, by 2021, many of our customers could return to steady production thanks in part to our mission-critical IT. This was clear as day for one manufacturer using a data solution that we created together and implemented pre-pandemic. Incorporated in their factory line, our self-service dashboard was already yielding analytics for predicting and, ultimately, preventing stoppages. What’s more, this solution could be scaled up and executed at other factories around the world within a couple of hours and without an engineer ever having to board a plane or get on a train. By the end of 2021, 27 sites were using this solution to successfully increase operational efficiency – thanks to an loT kit that we could send to the various locations and close, even if remote, cooperation within our teams.

Last year, moreover, this same technology helped the company cope with the pandemic’s effects on business. The same data solution provided insights into the effects of shutting down entire factories – a scenario never rehearsed in an emergency preparedness drill. This was particularly relevant for a company with markets in different regions of the world, each with its own pandemic timeline and consequences for shutdowns. So, while our customers have long known that having the best, fit-for-purpose IT generates value, 2021 proved that a sound solution during business-as-usual can also serve to blunt the blows from business-as-never-before.

Throughout it all, our customers teams have emphasized that in manufacturing, true transformation works from the bottom up. Or in less hierarchical terms, change proves effective when the shop floor’s priorities are taken as the starting point for a solution. If the actual operators of the technology show enthusiasm, the chance for success is high. In-person visits to the shop floor are thus extremely informative. Walking along actual production lines and watching their processes lets us understand links between the mission-critical activities at work, the data being gathered, the insights processed therefrom, and how those insights can be fed back into real-world processes to make life easier for operators.

Data is power

Large-scale data analyses also proved helpful as pandemic-related restrictions and geopolitical rockiness have complicated travel to shop floors, notably across international borders. In this context, customers all the more relied on the lighthouse model. This model entails implementing an innovative, potentially disruptive solution at a single site and then assessing its results. If successful, implementation can follow at another location, then another, and so on. When – rather than if – the next crisis hits and impacts production, lighthouse data factory can be pulled up and compared with non-lighthouse data for sound decision-making.

Indeed, in all our optimization cases, we witnessed the power of data. Each case exploits the agility, scalability, and interconnectability of industry 4.0 in one way or another, but all feed on data. Such solutions permit decisions to be made according to facts and figures, rather than best guesses, speculations, or aspirations – many of which float around during times of social unrest and economic instability. Data generates practical, productive discussions about performance because, as one of our customers recently put it, the data itself serves as a performance report.

Data is also the lynchpin to a new method that gained a lot of momentum in 2021 at Schuberg Philis. The 16-week approach, as we call it, responds to our customers’ urgent desire to verify the value of their digital transformation strategies. In applying this approach, we enable our customers to test an innovative digital solution without having to disturb or dismantle their entire IT landscape. This allows the company to continue on its merry way maintaining the status quo, while simultaneously working with our team to create a proof of value for a new potentially disruptive – and profitable – solution. Starting with a small experiment instead of committing to a long-term program is as pragmatic as it is elegant. Four months allows plenty of time for issues to surface, failures to occur, and stakeholders to assess. If deemed successful and worthwhile, we scale up. If not, we apply what we’ve learned during this veritable crash course on value to improve ongoing work and innovations down the line.

Going against the grain

Proving the 100% functionality of a new solution requires effort. However, leading a digital transformation, whether big or small, often comes with an even greater challenge: going against the grain of otherwise deeply engrained habits and attitudes in corporate cultures. For many employees, newbies and veterans alike, we’ve observed how uncomfortable a process this can be, particularly when it involves considerable convincing within the company. For innovation-eager individuals – the (early) believers, as we sometimes call them – this type of project caretaking and campaigning is personally energizing. But still, spearheading innovation can be met with some resistance, budget constraints, and/or skepticism from more tradition-abiding colleagues.

We empathize a lot with these individuals and, at the same time, well know the cultural context in which they may feel they’re swimming against the current. But as we’ve found, the Schuberg Philis way of working – specifically on multidisciplinary teams that integrate experts from our company and experts from our customer’s – tends to have a halo effect. It shines light on our customer’s own internal organization and often illuminates a way forward. This path is one on which keeping things up and running and innovation go hand in hand. It’s one that honors the time-tested values, practices, and traditions of an organization while still ensuring it is operating not just in the 21st century, but also in an era of non-stop change and motion in general.

All our customers belong to the world’s most crucial industries, thus requiring mission-critical IT. But with the responsibility to service the world’s most vital processes, there is also, rightly so, cautiousness. Even organizations open to experimentation and with a high tolerance for risk need time and trust to transform. That tension has long existed, though has felt thicker in these crisis-ridden years. But as one young, strikingly bright digitization manager recently said: “This is why companies should accept vulnerability. Its acceptance provides a way to navigate the endless possibilities of all that IT can achieve while recognizing that everyone’s needs cannot always be met.” The times we’re living in have deep valleys and high peaks, but by tracking those ups and downs and thus being better prepared for them, business is likely to keep getting better. The wisdom resounded of far more decades of experience than she has yet lived, but we couldn’t agree more. And we’re excited to continue enabling our manufacturing customers to keep boldly going and empowering the next generation in all their enterprises.

And while PostNL has been ensuring that everyone in the Netherlands can get mail and parcels for more than two centuries, the company is evolving. Year after year, its mail division has seen letter volume fall steadily because people now can connect digitally. By contrast, e-commerce is booming, which means that volumes handled by its parcel division will keep growing. In 2021, PostNL delivered a record number of 384 million parcels.

And this is why PostNL asked Schuberg Philis to help its logistics event data (LED) team build a warehouse in the cloud.

A warehouse to record it all

At all times, PostNL wants to know exactly where in the logistics process a letter or a parcel is. That's why the company constantly maps out what happens to a shipment.

"The vast majority of the packages we process are sent by companies," explains Dennis van Steijn, PostNL’s LED Warehouse Platform Owner. "Our first awareness of a shipment is when a customer creates a label for their package. At that point, we get information about the sender, the recipient, and the corresponding barcode. We also know whether, for example, a signature is required upon delivery. Once in transit, the parcel gets scanned multiple times over the course of sorting, distribution, or if put on a truck. Each time the parcel is scanned is seen as a logistics event. We collect all that information and attach it to the shipment. On average, 15 logistics events are generated and processed per package. We record it all."

Agile and DevOps

Not only did Schuberg Philis enable PostNL to overhaul its applications, but we helped the company change work methods for the better. PostNL completely transitioned from its traditional linear way of working to Agile. This meant that the LED team started working in short cycles, thus abandoning habits ingrained after nearly a decade. And it worked. Gradually, the LED team could work more and more smoothly, adhering to Agile principles.

The LED team also started adopting DevOps. This brought together developers and administrators, experts who traditionally seldom sat at the same table, much less worked together. Applying DevOps, PostNL empowered a single team for platform development and management. The LED platform was successfully released in production.

Van Steijn looks back on the past period with great satisfaction. "Within the team, PostNL and Schuberg Philis share responsibility. This means that you constantly have to seek out dialogue and include everyone in the developments. For example, after we decided not only to take on the migration, but also to meet business goals, you have to discuss and debate that with each other. What that means for the project? A good project not only benefits from good internal communication, but also from keeping all the stakeholders on board and informed. You also have to be in constant dialogue with them," he says.

Fewer disruptions, lower costs

The rebuild to public cloud-native applications has benefited PostNL greatly. Management costs have dropped significantly. Because the new environment is much more robust, disruptions are fewer and there is less need for repairs. Furthermore, the new platform is fast, scalable, and has more features. In addition, speed of development is much higher. This is a result of the use of some AWS native services, like e.g. DynamoDB. While new functionality development and rollout once took at least a month, now that be done in half the time, in part because many steps – testing, for example – have become largely automated. Software improvements can also go live immediately.

"We created a data warehouse and a platform that functions well. Now that the solution is live, everyone is reaping the benefits,” says Van Steijn.

Mission-critical software

Schuberg Philis is responsible for keeping all of PostNL's mission-critical IT systems up and running. In addition to its LED team, Schuberg Philis has others currently working on innovative software projects at the heart of PostNL operations. Examples include Last Mile, a user-friendly digital support solution for mail carrier, and an IoT solution providing insight and control throughout the digital chain.

“We guarantee 100% uptime of the logistics process," says Gert de Jong, Customer Director at Schuberg Philis. "We only have one KPI, and that is customer satisfaction,” he emphasizes. “At an average IT company, you call the help desk if you have a problem. But only when things get really tense do you maybe get a specialist on the line. We only work with specialists who keep in contact directly with the customer. In our partnership with PostNL, we know that satisfying this company means helping them satisfy millions of letter writers and package senders across the Netherlands and all their recipients around the world.”

Want to know more about how we build mission-critical software? Check out our expertise on Software.

Jumbo, the Dutch supermarket chain, is committed to offering its customers a seamless shopping experience. Years ago the food retailer had already designed and built an online platform with the ambition to process several thousands of orders per week. But demand has since grown to a similar number of orders per day, with a giant peak during the Christmas season. “Year after year, we saw more and more people using our app, and at some point the infrastructure we had in place simply couldn’t facilitate that anymore,” says Tim Hehenkamp, Jumbo’s Executive Director Technology & Data.

Scalability and cost-efficiency

As a result, Jumbo’s platform needed to be optimized to enable peak-demand order processing. They sat down to discuss their options with their IT partner, Schuberg Philis, and ended up selecting the public cloud at AWS. Hehenkamp explains, “The cloud offered us infrastructural possibilities like massive scalability and cost-efficiency, as we no longer needed to run our own hardware in Schuberg Philis’s datacenter. But it also offered us the opportunity to make better analytic use of the data available to us.”

Technology, processes, and people

We advised Jumbo to move the platform and the entire environment for application and services from the on-premises data center to the public cloud, which gave the supermarket chain a secure, resilient environment that met the company’s requirements for scalability and reliability. Schuberg Philis led the entire cloud migration process, and Jumbo was responsible for the necessary application upgrades. “We didn’t only migrate the technology into the cloud,” says Anuschka Diderich, Customer Director at Schuberg Philis. “We also included Jumbo’s processes and people. You can fully capitalize on the added value of the public cloud if you make sure that people can use all of its capacities.” For a number of years now, Jumbo has been making considerable investments in using data to better understand its customers’ needs. “In everything we do, our focus is on the customer,” says Hehenkamp. One example of this is that Jumbo assesses the value of every product for both customers and the company itself. “We then use this customer-product metric to improve the selection of items we offer.”

For you, with you, by you

Schuberg Philis’s approach is a good match for Jumbo, says Diderich: “For you, with you, by you.” Gosse Reinsma is manager of the Jumbo Tech Campus (JTC). “This unit handles all of the company’s digital developments,” he explains. “The JTC bring together around 400 people, working in about 50 teams. Digitization is so important to Jumbo that we want to take on more of this work ourselves and attract the right talented people to do it.” In practice, this meant that Schuberg Philis passed on more and more of the development side of the platform to Jumbo. And by now, operational management is also increasingly being shifted to so-called DevOps teams at Jumbo. “That’s what I like about our collaboration with Jumbo,” says Hehenkamp. “They show us what the technology can do, but they also give us room to operate independently. It’s good to have a partner that enables you to actively pursue this transition.”

DevOps offers energy and creativity

The DevOps approach works well for the teams within the JTC. Diderich explains: “At Schuberg Philis, we have a dedicated team of people for each client. The team that builds the solution is also responsible for its execution. Not only for managing it, but also for our 24/7 support services.” In this way, developers can quickly build small components, so-called microservices, which lets them experiment with new technologies or services, says Reinsma. “It enables us to stay on top of developments in the market.” That speed is one of the benefits of DevOps, but as the work is performed in mixed teams, the quality of the delivered solutions is higher. Also, this way of working makes Jumbo a more attractive employer for scarce IT talent, according to both Reinsma and Diderich. “Working together generates both energy and creativity,” says the latter. What’s more, it offers Jumbo the opportunity to quickly use the data collected to implement new services or solutions for its customers – wherever they may be. “We follow the customer,” says Hehenkamp. One such new service is the fully automated and personalized “Did you forget something?” product list that customers see just before completing an order. “This automated, personalized feature has tripled our conversion.”

A baptism of fire during the lockdown

Jumbo’s new cloud platform was shown to meet its requirements for security, availability, and scalability during peak periods. But the real test came in the spring of 2020, when the world suddenly went into lockdown and unheard-of numbers of people in the Netherlands started ordering their groceries online. “Our normal peak period is around Christmas and we spend months preparing for it,” says Hehenkamp. “But the lockdown presented us, with zero preparation, with a peak that was many times larger than the seasonal Christmas rush. It was a baptism of fire for our new technical capabilities, which proved more than capable of handling the dramatic increase in traffic. In retrospect, we had deployed the changes to our landscape just in time.”

Innovating fast

The AWS cloud offers many benefits. The new platform makes it possible to implement new applications faster than ever. In the past, for example, it took a lot of time to ramp up server capacity – something that can now be achieved within a day. And the 100% uptime, fast website, and mobile app all help to guarantee a streamlined customer experience. What’s more, based on analysis of the available data, Jumbo can further personalize offers to individual customers, reward them for their patronage, and offer smart payment solutions – all of which placed customers at the heart of Jumbo’s service proposition. Which is exactly what the company hoped to achieve. Reinsma adds: “The speed of innovation also matters to us. From a market perspective, of course, but also to attract and retain talented employees.”

Going for a good night’s sleep

Schuberg Philis guarantees 100% uptime for its systems. Chief Marketing Officer Ivo Roefs explains: “With this way of working, we can promise our customers a good night’s sleep, every night. And that matters, because we work on systems that are so business-critical to our customers that if anything were to go wrong, they would want to get a call – even in the middle of the night. But broken nights drain your energy, which affects your creativity and therefore your power to innovate. That’s why that uptime is so important to us. We want our customers to sleep well while we take care of the availability of their systems.” Hehenkamp and Reinsma smile: that’s a promise that really makes a difference.

“Because of the speed and depth with which we develop our landscape, incidents are bound to happen every now and then. But because we have an agile way of working and make more frequent, smaller adjustments instead of a few large ones, the number of issues has decreased considerably and we are better able to handle the hiccups that do occur,” says Reinsma. “But it’s a good motto, as it exemplifies Schuberg Philis’s commitment to delivering quality.”

Source: FD