Are you a young professional (within 10 years after graduation) or technical Master/PhD student or, with a special interest in Maintenance Management & Engineering, then apply to the 13th edition (before June 7th) of our WCM Summer School 2024 (July 29th – August 2nd, 2024) and challenge yourself in our exciting program. 

“Challenge yourself in our multi-disciplinary Summer School on Maintenance Management & Engineering. Satisfy intellectual curiosity, gain new professional skills in the area of Maintenance and extend your professional network by joining the WCM Summer School″ (prof. dr. H. Akkermans, and director World Class Maintenance)

Please click here for a short movie about the WCM Summer School (Dutch)

You will learn about the exciting world of maintenance with all its aspects through our workshops on state of the art maintenance tools and approaches. Knowledge gained will be applied immediately as your analytical skills and creativity will be tested to its limits when you are solving the problems presented in our real life case study.

Royal Schiphol Group case

Royal Schiphol Group will provide a real business case on asset management at a major airport. Royal Schiphol Group has a significant project portfolio that includes expansion projects as well as major renovation projects. The main question and challenge for you during the summer school is to think about how Royal Schiphol Group can optimise its asset management processes for its renovation projects. These improvements should help to speed up maintenance and the modernisation of Schiphol Airport while it continues to operate. The results of your work will help Royal Schiphol Group to create maximum value for its stakeholders.

How can the availability of the Cougar helicopter go up and how can deployment be more flexible from a maintenance perspective? And what lessons do we take to the successor of the Cougar? These questions were central to the practical case of the Royal Air Force during the twelfth WCM Summer School.

This year’s study week at the barracks in Stroe concluded on 4 August with the election of the best solution. The five student teams with a total of 27 participants of different nationalities are diverse in composition. Asset owners like Shell and NS and knowledge institutions like Avans Hogeschool, University of Twente and University of Hasselt are represented, as well as service providers like Spie and Ilias. Staff from the Ministry of Defence are also taking part. Today, the teams will present their proposal to defence representatives and the public.

Partnership
Before that, Jan Braaksma, director of the WCM Summer School, opened the closing ceremony by explaining the WCM Summer School. The summer study week on smart maintenance is a partnership of seven Dutch universities, the Ministry of Defence and World Class Maintenance (WCM). The target group consists of young professionals with up to 10 years of work experience, supplemented by college and university students who are in the final part of their studies. WCM Summer School is open to members and non-members of WCM.

This year, Gasunie provided the case for the eleventh edition of the WCM Summer School. A case consisting of several layers and questions, explains Scholte Strikwerda. “It is a challenging mega-case, in which the overriding question is how we can properly manage the imbalance in energy demand in time and place within the Netherlands as a whole.”

As part of the energy transition, Gasunie’s entire transport network must be converted and/or renewed. This is an investment running into billions, which is subject to time pressure, involves many uncertainties and has to deal with changing frameworks. “The situation in Ukraine is of course a shining example. Developments are exceptionally fast these days, also in technology. It is all less predictable than before. You want to look far ahead, but within that you have to be as flexible as possible”, Strikwerda explains.

This year’s WCM Summer School is dedicated to ‘Doorstroming als een Service’ (DaeS). Former Summer School participant Bianca Coolen from Heijmans Infra talks about the case and her experiences with the Summer School. “We are looking for technical-substantive advice and tips on working together between organisations with different interests,” she says.

“DaeS is new, new, new; it is new in the way of cooperation, in the form of contract, in the contract period of twenty years, and also the techniques we want to apply are new. We are trying to apply techniques that will not get in the way of future developments. For example, we are laying a glass fibre network with more fibres than are currently required. Because who knows how much data we will be sending in twenty years’ time,” says Coolen.

18 August 2020

Performance Based Contracting Royal Netherlands Army and Scania

Link naar Nederlandse versie van artikel

The ninth edition of the WCM Summer School also took place this year at the military base in Stroe. Because of COVID-19, it remained exciting for a long time whether and how the Summer School would take place. Summer School-director Jan Braaksma: “Foreign students could not travel to us this year and the turnout of the earlier large numbers of students would not go with all the corona measures. The choice fell on a hybrid study week, partly live and partly online.

Henk Akkermans, WCM Director and Professor Tilburg University: “The world around us is in transition. The continuation of the Summer School is a great opportunity to meet all societal challenges and to continue to work on maintenance innovation”.