Digitalisation essential for leadership position
Royal IHC is an international supplier of innovative and efficient equipment, vessels and services for the offshore, dredging and mining industries. More than 3,000 employees work on site and from offices worldwide to support customers on every continent. The company faces constant changes in customer requirements and global competitive pressures. To maintain its leading position and provide customers with innovative solutions, digitalization is an important part of IHC’s strategy. To define and implement the strategy, IHC is working with Ciphix.
Quickly scale with long-term partner
“Digitalization is of strategic importance for IHC,” says Jan van der Wouw, Director Digital Business at Royal IHC. “That’s why, among other things, we launched a specific digitization program aimed at digitizing existing processes and developing new solutions, called OneIHC. To realize our ambitions, we needed a long-term partner and a low-code platform that would allow us to scale the building of new applications in a faster and more efficient way.”
Aligning business stakeholders and IT
As the company saw growing demand for applications, dashboards and portals, the new low-code platform needed to improve collaboration between business stakeholders and IT to meet these requests. After evaluating several low-code platforms, IHC chose Mendix and business partner Ciphix. Key factors were the superior online and offline mobile capabilities, a shared vision on component-based architecture and the extensive knowledge and experience of Ciphix’s team.
Digital transformation should not be limited to one department, but should be done company-wide to have the greatest impact. IHC wanted to build digital solutions that improved product development but also supported customer service. To do this, it worked according to the credo: “Doing things right” and “Doing the right things.
Putting the platform to work
Many years ago, IHC began unifying processes and support systems resulting in a strong foundation. To accelerate application development, they began building digital solutions on the Mendix platform. This reduced the time to create, iterate and release applications from about six months to six weeks. In addition, reusable software components were created that further reduced the development time of other new solutions.
All ships and entities reside in IHC’s ERP system. These entities are linked via one API to the digital solutions in Mendix and then used in different apps, such as IRIS for operational intelligence, Searchlight for market intelligence and Optimus for asset condition management. This unification and standardization of the ERP system and API allows a development time for apps of only a few weeks.
Defining customer needs
Improving cooperation with customers was one of the main objectives. Implementing customer validation in the development process has proved very successful. For this, IHC works in projects with two-week development sprints, after which a working solution can be shown. These are reviewed with internal and external stakeholders. The feedback obtained is picked up in the next development sprint, while the benefits of the released software provide immediate results.
While customer insights are important, the company also conducts research on the behavior of targeted user groups. This data should help answer key questions, such as: to what extent is the solution desired by the customer? Is there a positive business case (is the solution viable)? And can we realize the solution given the constraints (is it feasible)? With this information, they can build better solutions, or-if that is the best solution-not build a solution.
For example, one solution is a mobile application that allows customers to access their list of ships, related parts and documents. During the initial review, customers appreciated the result, but requested additional functionality, such as a simpler search option. While the product was already released and in use, development of this search feature began immediately. More importantly, incorporating customer feedback built support for the solution, making it much easier to adopt.
