The upcoming large-scale renovation of Airport Schiphol’s C pier was the focus of the WCM Summer School 2024. Participants from asset owners and technical service providers and students, worked in teams to find the best answer to Royal Schiphol Group’s questions.
‘The level of the different solutions was quite high,’ says Christiaan Sijmons of Schiphol afterwards.
The study week at the base in Stroe concludes as usual with the final presentation of the participating teams. This year there are seven of them, with a total of 39 participants. These come from ADSE, Amstelland Engineers, Eneco, Fokker Services, Gasunie, Heineken, Heijmans, I-care Reliability, Marel Poultry, NLR, NS, Rijkswaterstaat, Shell, SPIE, Stork, Verebus and Worley. There are also participants from Defence, the Technische Hochschule Rosenheim and the universities of Twente and Lille. The teams will present their proposal to the jury and the public today, 2nd of
August.
Partnership
Jan Braaksma, director of the WCM Summer School, opened the meeting by explaining the WCM Summer School. The summer study week on smart maintenance is taking place for the 13th time. The week is aimed at young professionals with up to ten years of work experience, complemented by university (of applied sciences) students who are in the final part of their studies.
Participants attend theory classes and workshops provided by universities. Defence will provide a special leadership training during the week. The WCM Summer School is a partnership of seven Dutch universities, the Ministry of Defence and World Class Maintenance (WCM) and is open to members and non-members of WCM.
Maintenance in control
Colonel Kirsten Zuidam welcomed attendees on behalf of the host Ministry of Defence. With a background as a mechanical engineer, she says she is very interested in the teams’ results. WCM Director Henk Akkermans then briefly discussed the importance of maintenance for society and the role his organisation tries to play in this, including with open innovation projects in the various WCM Fieldlabs. Maintenance needs to be more in control, he says, thus referring to the theme of the WCM annual meeting in Maarssen on the 2nd of October.
Openness
At the start of each WCM Summer School, the case owner informs participants about its specific circumstances and explains the question. A special feature of this year’s case is that one of the contractors at Schiphol, Heijmans, also clarified the case explained Jeroen Endhoven of Heijmans prior to the closing session. Endhoven: ‘I helped prepare the case and informed the participants from the contractor’s perspective. We know the context well and I tried to help everyone as much as possible by making the connection between theory and practice.’ Braaksma: ‘That openness in mutual discussions is one of the great things about the Summer School.’
Complex task
Technical operations manager Asset Management Ron Wever of Schiphol explained the case to the audience, reiterating its complexity. Royal Schiphol Group is currently undergoing an organisational change in the asset management field. Three independent departments, namely Asset management, Portfolio management and Projects have been brought together under the umbrella of Schiphol Infrastructure. One of the questions Schiphol wants answered this week is: how do you make these different departments, ideally from a life cycle perspective, work together to monitor and facilitate Schiphol’s objectives? It is also important to upgrade the C pier to the latest industry standards in terms of sustainability and energy efficiency. In this regard, asset management at Schiphol is already a complex task from the ground up. It involves a huge amount of assets, and the airport has to deal with a variety of (inter)national regulations and a good number of stakeholders, each with their own interests.
When coming up with a solution, the teams also had to consider Schiphol’s vision: new initiatives must have a clear business case and meet the requirements in terms of the four pillars of Schiphol’s vision: Quality of Service, Work, Life and Network, with safety always coming first.
Team presentations
The jury, consisting of WCM director Akkermans and Schiphol asset managers Wever, Marco van der Ham and Christiaan Sijmons, took to the stage and the first team, team Holy Cow, was allowed to present its solution. Because ‘everything is interrelated’, the team proposes to develop a multi criteria decision making matrix. The proposed matrix addresses all aspects that play a role in asset management at Schiphol and then weighs them up. The proposed approach should help achieve a robust asset management approach. Team Aero Asset Pioneers is taking a different tack and wants to split short-term and long-term maintenance organisationally. Data-driven predictive maintenance is part of their proposal and, according to the team, helps to further improve Schiphol’s four Quality pillars.
Setting up object teams
Team three calls itself Asset Management with a Smile and thinks the solution lies in setting up so-called multidisciplinary Object teams. This changes Schiphol from a hierarchical to a matrix organisation, with goals aligned to the four pillars. Each team will have an object manager who reports directly to the system manager. This will keep it manageable in the large and complex organisation, the team thinks. Cut the Knot is the name of team four. The team members note that long-term strategic planning is a problem at Schiphol. It can be improved by setting clear goals and sub-goals, improving data-driven maintenance, and paying more attention to knowledge management and responsiveness management. Good communication is crucial here, and involving subcontractors is necessary.
Culture change
Team five, Phoenix, believes the focus at Schiphol is too much on operations. The team suggests a three-phase approach: short, mid and long term. Start with bringing about a culture change, because that process takes the most time. Role plays can play an important role in this.
In the medium term, the focus should be on quality rather than quantity and then a world-class airport in which all stakeholders work together in a matrix-shaped organisation will ‘naturally’ follow. Team six, Emergency Room notes that Schiphol is a commercially driven organisation. This must change into an asset-driven organisation, the team believes. Turn Around Schiphol, is the name of team seven. This team also wants Schiphol to transform itself into an asset management-driven organisation. Prioritising projects and work together instead of giving the last word to Operations.
Votes
The final presentation will be followed by a break during which the expert jury will deliberate. At the same time, the audience can vote online and decide who the public winner is. After the break, it appears that the audience designates team Asset Management with a Smile as the winner. The jury judged each team on a number of aspects, including the extent to which the four strategic pillars were included, the innovative content of the solution and the focus on sustainability, explains Ron Wever of Schiphol. His colleague Marco van der Ham adds that each team put forward aspects that Schiphol already uses to a greater or lesser extent. The teams Holy Cow and ER then finished third. Number two is Asset Management with a Smile and the winner is team Phoenix. Wever: ‘The proposal contains innovative ideas and the focus on cultural change is important. By the way, we are already working on that.’
High level
Over drinks afterwards, Christian Sijmons of Schiphol looked back on a fun and educational week. ‘It was nice to be involved and to get to know all those people and learn from them. I also attended some interesting lectures. Partly that was refreshing existing knowledge and partly that was new to me, such as the lecture by Tiedo Tinga of NLDA on failure mechanisms.’ On the level of the different solutions, Sijmons says: ‘It was quite high. I find it very clever that the teams were able to get to the core and come up with out-of-the-box ideas in such a short time. We will definitely take elements of it into our next consultation.’
Getting the essence out
‘Getting the essence out of the case was difficult,’ says Roeland Brouwer (SPIE) of winning team Phoenix. ‘After the first day with all the explanations, we went to bed with a full head. The pier has to remain operational, so you need Operations. How do you get them on board, that was central to coming up with our solution.’ Phoenix team member Mark van Mil (Marel Poultry): ‘This week was a great stepping stone for my new position as Maintenance Concept Engineer at Marel. I definitely learned new things, for example about failure analysis, and also how to apply it.’ Fellow team member Ian Smit (I-care); ‘It was very informative and is going to be very useful in my job.’
Participant Endhoven from Heijmans is satisfied with the week and the things he picked up. ‘Among other things, I gained more insight into the theoretical side of data analysis and how you then arrive at decision-making. And conversations with the other participants did show that we face the same kinds of challenges in all sectors, such as digitalisation and staff shortages.’ Participant Midas van Noort (Shell) had a ‘top week’: ‘It was high-level and we didn’t fall short of anything. In my job, I’m mainly executive and here I did learn what asset management really means.’
For more information, visit the WCM Summer School website.