Ships, Questionnaires, Digital Twins, Construction, CIO-leadership and a 17 hour work-day.
Ships, Questionnaires, Digital Twins, Construction, CIO-leadership and a 17 hour work-day.
Questionnaire about interoperability, benefits management, cruise-line discussion about next gen connectivity and digital t(wins), construction 4.0, Robotics process automation, stream processing...
A pretty interesting day that started at 6 am and finished at midnight. I think it was on Friday that I got an inquiry into a Cruise ship digitalization something. Apparently this company wanted to go all-in now that their entire fleet was stuck in ports more or less. It reminded me of this article about airplanes being stuck in airports and elsewhere due to COVID and Corona.
What better time to do some maintenance, get them ready to be deployed, bigger, and better than before? And also utilize the 3D models that went into building the ship for added data-driven decision making during the whole lifecycle?
The scope, as it was from the beginning, was about;
Mesh sensoring x 10 000 sensors, mostly around occupancy, but also IAQ- related, doors, windows, and whatever else. In order to create a nervous system of connectivity for the entire ship.
Digital Twin technology, to be able to ingest these sensors, and any other data that they wanted to make sense of in a scalable way. No matter the origin, but ingested in a Digital Twin database of the ship.
A way to transport data in real-time or near real-time both onboard the ship, as well as from the ship back to the shore. To also make decisions based on location, and other metrics influencing the ship’s journey. A suggested way to do this is of course stream processing from i.e. Kafka and Confluent to create a streaming platform of data both on the edge, as well as to the cloud and back. It’s in a way similar to this use case from Royal Caribbean and Knoldus that I got from the Confluent guru himself Kai Waehner, who’s the all-knowing person when it comes to anything real-time.
And the ask was perhaps even more similar to another Shipping use case I was indirectly involved with a year ago. That was a shipping company with contracts to over hundred of companies that owned a total of 1000+ ships. They had about 50 sensors on each ship that collected data every 30 minutes. So I guess about a couple of million messages passed their streaming platform architecture on a daily basis. I believe that infrastructure was based on Azure, utilizing Azure VM. At the time, and I still do, believe it’s the way to go when shuffling data in a smart building/smart portfolio and a smart city setting.
And the fourth item of the tech-bucket list was Blockchain, DLT (Distributed Ledger Technology to create a secure and tamper-proof messaging system. This also goes hand in hand with modern digital twin creation platforms.
Read more about shipping
You can read more about the shipping case here at Optimizing shipping operations if you are interested. It was only a part of the day, but definitely an interesting part nonetheless.
Benefits Realization Questionnaire & MSI vetting
The original ask was to help a company providing peace of mind to property owners to come up with questions relevant to the building operations staff. Partly to assess their own as-is situation and also separate questionnaires for asking the right questions to future partners and systems integrators. They had seen from the past that pure technical plays didn’t work out and that there’s more to succeeding with building operations than just technology.
The first thing that came to mind was the Amazing book by Ward & Daniel, Benefits Realization.
Starting from the end is the key that a lot of companies miss. What are the actual outcomes that companies are looking for? Do they know the challenges of today? Do they have an idea what needs to be done, who’s going to do it, and how much time and money is involved in realizing intended benefits?
Most companies don’t.
That is why we created about 100+ questions that can be used to assess the As-is situation as well as questions to assess MSI- competence, and skill-level. If interested, click here until further notice and you will get the latest status.
Innovation in Construction
After that, it was about time for the Smart World Partner consultancy that Winniio offers in their Smart World Partner program. One of the largest construction companies in the US is currently taking huge strides in becoming the new Apple in the Construction space. Topics of discussion were:
How to scope down and solve interoperability and communication issues out on-site between people
How to get most of the benefits out working with engineering consultants
Division 25 specifications and knowing where offerings start and stop
Insurance claims, what they could look like and how to avoid them through connectivity strategies and phone home solutions
Contractual de-risking and how owners representatives can improve planning and move further into operations
What is actually needed from a construction company’s standpoint to deliver value and have more control and clout during the whole construction lifecycle?
Pros and cons with Primavera, Microsoft Project, and other “tools of the trade”
The importance of Mission and Vision to drive change through the organization
Pinpointing external drivers, internal change agents and automation centers for continuous growth without throwing more people on the problem.