A digitised world, thanks to smart infrastructure construction
Florin Dosa, business unit manager telecom at APK Group, explains: "From connected excavators to wearable tech for our workers, the future is built on connected devices, connected devices, all around us."
- Our mission is the Creating smart and sustainable cities. This is based on a need, a demand from customers, from end consumers, from our society. Indeed, the ultimate goal of such a smart city is to make the quality of life of the people living in them to increase.
- How do you build a Smart City? By making innovative use of information technology. Connected devices and the 'Internet of Things' (IoT) make this possible. Today's infrastructure investments are also aimed at building that Smart City and are therefore focused on enabling connected devices. APK Group has therefore been aligning its knowledge and services accordingly for a long time.
David Vandeputte, business unit manager digital meters, says: "Just think of digital water-energy and gas meters. They have an undeniably positive effect on the wallets of its users and for our planet. In this way, we all take a big step together towards a more economical, smarter use of our scarce raw materials and energy resources."
- Digitalisation means we are going to be able to measure more, and measuring is knowing. More data allows us to see into the future. Digital meters are a great example of this. They give everyone, including companies, the opportunity to saving on our energy bill and better deal with our precious (drinking) water.
- APK Group specialises in various energy sources such as water, electricity and gas. We install digital meters at the end consumers' homes, ensuring that our customers such as Fluvius and the Water Group have the consumption digital may go measuring out and be able to draw conclusions for the betterment of our society. An example: Currently, potable water is constantly being lost through our ageing water pipes. By measuring how much water arrives in each household, we can better identify where those leaks are.
- Digital meters also create a future-proof household. They enable families to meet 'load balancing' to do. That is seeing when is the best time to turn on the dishwasher, leave the blinds down, switch to solar power or charge the electric car. That way, their average energy consumption stays low and they avoid high consumption peaks. If everyone participates in this, eventually the costs drop for each consumer. APK Group can help facilitate these 'smart and sustainable homes' of the future.
Marc Teeuwen, business support at new energy, says: "Think also of green power and the associated 'energy management systems'. Everything can now be smartly integrated, solar panels or wind energy, charging infrastructure and all kinds of battery storage. We continue to innovate and that is necessary to respond to the looming grid congestion."
- Digitalisation is progress, and for me that's internally about the improving workflows. When done properly, digitisation ensures that people have to perform fewer actions, making life or your job easier. For our New Energy department, this is also the case: A faster turnaround per project thanks to an efficient, digitised workflow.
- Our system is already in place, from work preparation to delivery, but now we are still working hard on the optimising that system. Above all, we want our yard people need to input even fewer inputs so that they more can busy may be carrying out their expertises and get the job done faster on site. The advantage of our large APK Group is that we can share our digital work systems internally with other departments and learn from the various workflows to create an even more efficient process.
- What does New Energy mean for the digital society of the future? Charging poles, solar panels, batteries, and so on. We are increasingly working to make all our products integrate, all digitally and easily read out and then also cleverly combined. This way, we give more and more people the opportunity to energy in a smart way at use. This is good for their finances and also for our ecology.
Sven De Win, fibre city manager in Mol, recounts: "The evolving digital world should offer new opportunities and should not exclude anyone. All well-known telecom operators in Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany, our clients, are actively working on this. Among other things, plenty of fibre-optic cable is being installed for the flash-fast fibre network to every household in Flanders."
- For me, the digitalisation of society means: Everyone connected to a strong network. That all people can do pretty much anything they want digitally. Fiber (the physical medium, the cable underground) and 5G (the broadcaster) are now the future to enable this inclusive and high-tech internet connection.
- When everyone will have access to the high-speed fibre network, the anything faster go and there will be fewer dropouts of the network. With even fewer obstacles and more opportunities in making connections around the world, our society further can evolve. We are going to be able to share information with each other faster, companies can explore all kinds of new opportunities, governments can take the step of digitising things faster... In short, the availability of fibre is an important facilitator for our advanced and sustainable smart city future.
Bert Wouters, business unit manager water & energy, recounts: "We are also digitising our internal processes at APK Group for more efficient operation. 'Visual planning' is our customised planning tool. With it, we achieve a smooth workflow so that, among other things, we order our materials on time, apply for permits on time and, above all, respect the desired delivery date for the client. In this way, we not only ensure satisfied customers, but also calmness in our organisation."
- For me, the core of digitalisation is creating smooth data flows. Data from the field should flow more smoothly to the back-offices that process the data. In this way, we want to more efficient and paperless can work and score optimally in terms of communication to our customers.
- What is essential is that we bring the people who are going to work with those digital tools into the whole of this story, that they are also convinced of the benefits. We can make the digital changes not just like that impose from above. Our employees have to see and feel for themselves that it is nicer to work this way and they end up having more time to spend on their core business.
- The digital systems are already in place and we continue to optimise them further. Now we are still working on the intrinsic motivation among our employees to make use of it. In addition, a second obstacle is that there is often no stable internet connection available on construction sites today. So providing sufficient connection in the places where we work is a second working point to grow further as a digital company.
- If I may dream further about the digitised future, I see us surveying underground plans with a drone and training our people interactively using VR glasses.
Pieter van den Eynde, business unit manager road construction, recounts: "On site, we are also driving up our efficiency and the quality of our works thanks to digitalisation. A good example are the GPS systems in our newer excavators. In these, the plans are loaded and so our precision and speed goes up."
- Our clients expect everything to be increasingly smooth and accurate happens and that can also be done partly thanks to digitisation. So the pressure to digitise our operation was high, but we did not digitise for digitisation's sake and have only well-thought-out, tested systems implemented that also effectively make us faster and more efficient at the end of the day.
- Also in terms of our machinery we still see many digital potential. For example, concrete machines that follow digital plans instead of manually tensioned guided ropes are already occasionally used in the industry. But again, we are exploring accuracy and practicality before investing.
- The digitalisation of our yards has also brought a positive impact on our labour shortage with the right knowledge and experience. Our crane operators, for example, now always know where and how deep to dig, thanks to the new GPS systems in their machines. Thus, a part of their work shifts to a digital system and they can grow further in other aspects of their work.
- One digital optimisation that would mean very much for our industry is the improvement of the CLIP-KLIM plans. These are the digital plans in which all utilities in Belgium are read in. These plans need to be completed and made more accurate (especially in terms of depth). This is a process that needs to be tackled from higher up. It would also make our works safer and greatly reduce the risk of damage to and failure of utilities.
Are you triggered by one or more of our services? Do you want to prepare the infrastructure of your company, municipality or city according to the smart city vision?
Or is your company itself a facilitator of smart infrastructure and still looking for an experienced, multidisciplinary installation partner?
Our experts will be happy to get in touch with you: business.development@apkgroup.eu
Or do you want to be part of the team that makes tomorrow's infrastructure a reality? jobs.apkgroup.eu