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David Ariens (00:01)
Welcome, you’re listening to a very special episode of the IT/OT Insider Podcast. We are your host David…
Willem (00:08)
And I’m Willem.
David Ariens (00:10)
Subscribe to get the latest insights shaping the world of industry 4 .0 and smart manufacturing. Today we are joined by Bram Van Genabet Bram is a digital guru with a passion for technology, economics and sustainability. He has 14 years of experience in digital manufacturing and has led projects focused on process optimization, automation, advanced process control, something I also like, and sustainable hydrogen.
in the Petrochem, Energy and Food and Beverage industries. Welcome, Bram.
Bram (00:41)
Hello, good morning.
David Ariens (00:44)
And course also welcome back Willem!
Willem (00:46)
Hey! By the way, David, I don’t know if you realized but it’s actually a year that we’ve been doing the IT/OT Insider so happy birthday to us!
David Ariens (00:58)
Or I forgot to buy a birthday cake, but yes, absolutely. We’ll do that after the podcast. As I hinted at the start in today’s episode, we’ve got something big to share. But before we dive into the big news, Bram, why don’t you kick things off by, yeah, and tell our listeners a bit about yourself.
Willem (01:01)
I have my birthday coffee.
Bram (01:22)
Thank you for the introduction, David.
I’m Bram Van Genabet. I’m a chemical engineer by education. And I originally started my career in Antwerp in the petrochemical industry, working as a process engineer in the Antwerp refinery, really proper engineering, doing something with the chemical business. But I…
White quickly got an opportunity to start as an application engineer and that’s where I basically rolled into the world of digital automation. Initially optimizing the controls and the DCS of the factory worked
Honeywell Experion for those of you familiar with the topic. And it’s… Go ahead.
David Ariens (02:04)
I’ve done, yeah, I’ve seen it. I’ve done my FATs as well with Honeywell Experion Systems.
Bram (02:10)
There you go. that’s, that’s when it all started. Also started to learn about the importance working together with, with operators, with the IT teams running the systems. So really got a lot of hands on experience and it’s, it’s during that assignment I get to be introduced to my first APC project with Aspentech DMC. A lot of fun.
And I enjoyed it that much. decided to go and really work for a consultancy, a startup or scale up from the University of Leuven called IPCOS, who does these kinds of implementations all across the world. did a lot of international projects in various sectors, still oil and gas, but also chemical energy. And this was a very interesting period with a lot of travel, very intense as well.
And that’s when I started to look for an opportunity to join back on the site of a customer, which happened to be Barry Callebaut. They were looking for a project engineer to do international projects as well. My first project was the revamp of the automation of a factory in Spain, in Vic. So it was a very interesting experience also to get to know the processes and how Barry Callebaut works, learn a little bit more about chocolates.
cocoa production process. And that’s when I would say the longest chapter in my professional career so far has started because I’ve worked nine years for Barry Callebaut. Not so long after I started, they began with a major digital transformation project. And at this point we have done 170 production lines are converted into an MES application. There’s around 30 factories running the solution right now.
with more or less 2000 end users. And actually at this very day, it’s another crossroad, I would say in my career because last week was my last week at Buddy Callebaut I’ve actually got a very nice memory from my former team to remind us of the journey we’ve had with all the statistics of what we’ve done so far.
As of tomorrow, I’m officially starting a brand new chapter embarking as a digital strategy consultant with a new assignment starting with the La Lorraine Bakery Group in the role of digital strategy director. So really looking forward to exploring the road ahead.
Willem (04:39)
So you’re clearly staying within the chocolates and sweets and pastry area because I think a of them they make pastries, cakes.
Bram (04:48)
Yeah, they’re an industrial bakery company, so they make anything from fresh breads, the baguettes, pastries, donuts. I’ve already had the opportunity to taste some of their products and I’m already, I worry I will probably have to mind my weight even more than working at a chocolate company. So we’ll see in during the next months how my weight evolves.
Willem (05:14)
the fun thing, Bram, I also remember when I worked at Barry Callebaut when you come as a chemical engineer, you work in oil, you work in chemicals, people are not too enthusiastic. When you can tell them, like, I’m working with chocolates, I’m working with cakes, I mean, you
those sprinkles in everybody’s eyes asking, like, can you bring me some? It’s really fun about working in that area.
Bram (05:33)
absolutely
It’s a lot more fun if you can bring some products home for the family and say, hey, this is what we’ve made. That doesn’t work as well in, or it’s at least not as sexy in an oil and gas company to bring.
Willem (05:49)
Or like the pleasure of eating white chocolate fresh from the production line. That’s the best. Yeah, Bram, how did you actually get started with those? How did you get involved in that digitalization journey at Barry Callebaut? Because you started as a process engineer, I understood.
Bram (06:06)
Yeah, so my first role was actually in automation, helping to revamp a production line in a Spain factory. It was a very good project to get familiar with the process and the way of working at Barry Callebaut But it was around the time that I joined that there was kind of like a new project starting to embark on a very ambitious digital transformation program, you know, with the goal to go fully paperless.
to optimize the production process quite ambitious. And the project was situated in two pilot sites. One would be in Paris and the other one in Philadelphia, two very different factories to really cover the full span of different processes. And at one point, I was quite limitedly involved. I joined some of the vendor selection sessions. I’ve also been…
helping to write some basic parts of the functional requirements, example, on the energy capability, given my background. But it was kind of a separate project where I saw things happening. Until a certain day, my manager informed us that, the project manager in the US has found another opportunity. And there was a vacancy that became available. And I said, hey, actually, I’ve always wanted to do a project in the US.
And I volunteered to say, hey, if you’re still looking for someone, I’m volunteering. I would love to take over the project. At that time, the project was already starting to show the signs of a typical digital transformation project. Things started to take a little bit longer than expected. The initial testing results weren’t as good. And I said, hey, let’s just start, give it a go. I was very excited.
And that’s where it really began. After a while, we then managed to get the application to the point that we were able to get close to go life. And things were really getting very difficult because budget starts to run out. As we started to learn more about the process, we encountered functionalities that hadn’t been included in the original design. So budget became even more tight.
And then we came to a point where we had like one weekend left to get the application up and running. Otherwise we would lose another month with another window where we could go live because we needed to do that after a monthly stop where they do a stock count. So that was kind of a weekend where we worked through, you know, 16 hour shifts, liters of coffee and way too much fatty American food. And the go life was, I would say.
Willem (08:46)
Hmm?
Bram (08:58)
quite eventful. We’ve came through across a huge number of challenges, but we were able to push through to kind of, you know, I would almost compare it to the project at some point was in a comatose situation, but you know, at the point where we were one decision away from somebody pulling the plug on it all together. And I’m really happy that we managed to push through and it’s because there was this climate of entrepreneurship. mean, what I call about this is
a family -owned business. We had this long -term perspective. There was a great passion, a lot of team spirit that really helped us to kind of rediscover ourselves. And the rest is kind of working through a new strategy, building a fantastic team that I’ve had the honor of working with over the last years to get to the point where now, know, Bari Kalabot has been completely transformed in terms of digital manufacturing.
Willem (09:57)
Okay, that sounds like a very interesting time. How much time did it take to go from that one first critical project to where you were? I imagine you grew a lot in that time span. But what are we talking about? A year, five years?
Bram (10:12)
Yeah, it’s been a multi -year journey. think that’s probably one of the key learnings I had for myself doing such a big digital transformation project, being an engineer and really coming from this technical background. We tended to think about implementing a new technology and I think the first timelines that were estimated
together with my fellow engineers, I think was in nine months, we’ll have the full application apparently, then we’ll start a rollout and we’ll do that at, know, pretty much, yeah, very ambitious, but not so realistic, especially not in hindsight. I think overall the entire journey took eight years and it’s still ongoing because it’s the journey that I think is never done. There’s so much new technological development. by the time that you have fully implemented
one side, there’s already a new version out there. There’s new capabilities. Just think about the whole like AI hype and wave that brings in questions from senior management, like, are we doing something with that? there’s a lot of, yeah, steps to undertake. So yeah, a long journey.
Willem (11:32)
I think I really recognize the parts where you mentioned how long it takes compared to the initial expectations, especially from an engineering production environment. It’s like the plan is clear, install it next and then how hard can it be to install those things? While in reality you’re doing just so much change management, you’re learning all the time. I always notice that people…
get a bit afraid or like startled when I tell them, yeah, it’s going to take a year easily, maybe two. People cannot fathom how it’s possible that it will take so long, except after two years.
David Ariens (12:10)
But here is my Gantt chart and I’ve made a very nice drawing and it says that we can do it in three months, Willem. Why would it be a problem?
Willem (12:20)
Yeah, especially if you start going down to what’s really bringing value. But I think you definitely also probably experienced it’s not so much about installing the application. I mean, anybody can install an application.
Bram (12:31)
And you can’t go about starting a digital project with saying, this is going to take five years because you’re just not going to get started. You need to have a plan and a vision on how you’re going to get to value quickly. And I think all of those plans are certainly always made with the right intentions. And it’s more during the implementation that you encounter new issues and you have to adapt and learn how to turn it around.
Willem (12:40)
No.
Bram (12:58)
But if at some point you don’t come up with tangible savings, tangible improvements, the project is going to get cut short. It’s as simple as that. so value is at the core and center of every digital transformation strategy.
Willem (13:15)
I think the saying, think big, start small, really fits here. A natural reflex that I see very often is, think big, start big. Like, we’ve got everything figured out, we just need to do it and we’ll get the savings even faster. Often because people don’t always realize how much they still have to learn while they will be implementing things. But you cannot wait for…
two years to find out everything.
Bram (13:45)
Exactly. And in all honesty, Willem, if I think back on it, the right approach is of course, you know, think big and that you need to know where you want to go. Like define your North Star, what does the future state look like and to have a really good picture, ideally holistically, like what are the main problems you want to solve to be able to work towards an end goal.
Because along the journey, you’re going to have to make a lot of decisions and there’s a lot of that. There’s no right way to doing these types of projects. There’s just way too many options. So it’s really important to know where you want to go. The approach that we took initially was big. I think there was certainly a very good holistic view on the total project scope. But we also started big, like we really were going to go basically in one shot to fully paperless operations.
which I would say probably made sense at the time to say, okay, you we want to get rid of all of this mountain of papers and sort of like, you know, it’s a way to also get enthusiasm from the main sponsors of the project to go ahead with it. But then looking back, I mean, when I walked into the Wiesen factory, it’s the place where I was based, the largest chocolate factory in the world.
Naive as I was, started to ask around to my colleagues about, know, where can I find your historian? Because I would like to get some access to some data, some process data to understand more on how does this chocolate making process behave? Because that’s what I had been doing, right? With the vehicles, with Exxon, all these APCs, required a lot of data. But most of the colleagues looked at me like a data historian.
think we have that. mean, I want trend data. Of course you have like we got a small Nokia phone with a 0 .3 megapixel camera. Why don’t you go to the production line and take like a snapshot and then you can analyze that or you can print it out directly from the WinCC. So that was kind of the starting point and looking at the beginning having
David Ariens (15:57)
Yeah.
Bram (16:03)
A lot of the process recordings, all the order management was very much paper -based, having basically almost no substantial data recording to going fully digital, fully paperless. It’s a really big, big step just from a technology point of view. And at that point, think everybody knew we also had to think about change management and like training and so on. was part of the plan.
But I think the complexity and the impact and the time it requires to do that right. I think at that time we must have severely underestimated that. But I think it was also almost like a necessary evil to really learn a lot by doing and then, you know, from all those experiences to find a way how to fix and solve it.
Willem (16:57)
Maybe it’s the only way to get started because from an executive level if you say no problem we can start this digital transformation it’s just gonna take six, seven years. Maybe it’s already dead on arrival. So maybe you need somebody who shows you the too pretty picture and then at least you can get started.
Bram (17:16)
Well, there needs to be an interest, right? I think on convincing senior executives and sponsors, you need to have an audacious plan. needs to be, I mean, there’s like this one, I would say, rule of thumb that I, in a book I was recently reading, it’s an interesting read, by the way, Rewired from McKinsey.
David Ariens (17:16)
But I’m actually one…
Bram (17:40)
And there the rule of thumb is if you’re making a digital transformation program, should target about 20 % of the, the EBIT kind of having a significant saving. And I think that makes sense because why would you do a massive investment, a massive transformation program if it’s not gonna ultimately affect one of the main KPIs from, from many corporations, it needs to be big enough to get the interest and the attention. And then you can start to zoom into.
more the details of the strategy to kind of do that step by step. But it needs to be, you you need to sell the idea. And as an engineer, we’re not salespeople, but it’s certainly valuable to learn a little bit on that skill as well.
David Ariens (18:23)
going to play the devil’s advocate here. you suppose that you say, here is our big plan. It’s just going paperless. I would say having a sheet of paper and making that digital is that the big plan that there has to be something else that has to be value. I would say when you when you take those steps, somehow you have to unlock value for the company. So what does that?
mean or meant for Barry Callebaut when you’re producing chocolate to really go from from paper to something else.
Bram (19:01)
Actually, when you look at what are the value drivers, it’s going to be… Let me first go back. Initially, think the focus was purely, I would say, on the productivity. So the paperless was kind of deliverable in a way to become paperless. And what it would bring is productivity gains. And productivity, it’s typically defined as what do you produce as an output divided by your inputs.
One part is increasing the output, running the lines faster. It’s your typical OEE drivers, reducing the downtime so that you produce more in the same time span. And on the other side, it’s reducing the inputs. And a lot of it is centered around waste. For a company like Barry Callebaut if you look at the typical value drivers, it’s a material conversion company. So the biggest percentage of costs is around material usage. If you can…
improve the efficiency and that goes about reduction of waste, reduction of rework. That’s a really big one to target. The second one is, and that changes of course, but a big one is there is still quite some manual tasks, manual administration, so the labor component is significant. That’s where paperless, for example, can be a driver for improvement because you can reduce on
non -value added tasks and use that spare time for more valuable activities. And then the third one is energy. So I think that were the big three drivers in the initial program, material improvements to improve the efficiency and to reduce on the energy costs. Now looking back at
Where we are now, I think the starting point of defining the strategy begins from a slightly different perspective, but very importantly, I think it’s more this customer centricity. That’s where it all starts from. And customer centricity is geared towards quality. Quality is also linked to material variation because obviously if your quality is very stable, then you will have less waste. Product quality is a very important one. Then the other one is OTIF.
delivering your product in full and in time. So this is for a customer, obviously very important. It touches on the topic of reliability. And then there is, I would say the whole domain of cost leadership, which is again the same driver, but it’s one of the big three. this putting customer centricity first, when I would like restart a new, like developing a digital strategy, I think that’s probably a good point to start working out.
Why do you wanna do
David Ariens (21:55)
super interesting learning and I remember the why statement which is really important here. I see too much technology push when it comes to smart manufacturing or industry 4 .0 or whatever you want to call it. you, yeah during your years at Barry Callebaut, have you also encountered these technology push initiatives where somebody, I don’t know, like
someone sat on a plane with a guy who said like have you read that article this is cool let’s implement this
Bram (22:29)
Yeah, I would have to think of some concrete examples, but surely a technology push is, it’s often a driver. mean, even if you, one example that comes to mind is that at one point our, our COO at the time had gone to a conference and had spoken with a company that was selling a data science platform. Basically the promise was you put in all your operational data into our platform.
going to run our algorithm and it’s going to give you automatically how to optimize your process. So there was in a way a technology push. And I think that’s what you see a lot with this whole AI hype as well. It’s like, Hey, there’s this like, what ChatGPT is able to do. is phenomenal. Board rooms get, get interested and say, Hey, we should also be able to do that in our manufacturing process. And then they go to the, like,
more technical teams in the organization to say, make this happen. that is technology push in a way. But I think it’s, it’s, has been also a good trigger. Once you get that technology push is then to start to look, okay, what can, can we do with that? Like that example I gave on the, the platform, what we ultimately did is we were already looking and that was after the first iterations with the, the MES implementation, we had, we had some challenges and we defined
At that point, we had about two years of data on one of the production lines. We defined a tender with a very clear API that we wanted to solve and then look at including that specific company, but scanned across the entire markets to find other suppliers that the one we ultimately selected had a very different approach to like this data and analytics, much more explainable AI, machine learning to have a model where you can then
better understand what is happening. But I think if we hadn’t had the push from a technology perspective, it also would have been maybe a little bit more difficult to get the idea solved to the more executive leaders. So it can play a beneficial role in a journey, but it should certainly not be the only thing. And again, what we then changed is we had a very clear
David Ariens (24:45)
you
Bram (24:51)
KPI and a deliverable to fix because at one point we do have to submit a business case and the technology push is going to be never a reason that will be accepted to do the investment.
David Ariens (25:07)
the technology push or how technology gets, I would say, inside an organization and especially also how it gets, yeah, how it not only gets implemented or how it gets rolled out, but also how it gets really embedded into an organization is of course tightly linked to the way we cooperate, the way we have IT teams, data teams, OT teams, business come together.
One of the topics we always love to talk about, not only on our blog, but especially in the podcast, are our cooperation models. this is where I would say, especially Willem did an amazing job in detailing out several ways on how organizations cooperate. Right, Willem?
Willem (25:57)
Yeah, think that’s like basically you can already predict the at least the short term success because companies will evolve. can already predict how well or how advanced your digitalization will be based on what your current cooperation level is. If it’s us versus them, it’s production versus IT and nobody understands each other and they’re all blaming each other because they just don’t understand it.
you can already feel it’s not gonna be like the best way to start and really fundamentally change production. While if you already have an environment where the barriers are blurred and everybody feels like those guys from IT, the guys from production, it’s like one group and they all understand each other, you’re gonna go much faster with much better solutions. Definitely.
David Ariens (26:52)
So I’m wondering, yeah, I’m wondering, you read our cooperation models. We talked about that more than this podcast, but in the conversations we had leading up to this podcast, how do you see the Barry Callebaut organization? How are the silos or are there silos, is there cooperation, are there temporary teams? How do they operate?
Bram (27:16)
I must say when I was reading the IT/OT Insider article on the cooperation models, it was very interesting, very recognizable in a way, mapping to the journey we’ve come across. I think we have probably evolved through several of the steps of these different cooperation models. In the very beginning, the starting point was really sort of to
isolated worlds physically as well, right? You have the IT business network and the OT operational network with two teams that were very passionate about making sure that their side of the business remained stable and operated well. But you could sense at the very beginning of the MES project, because MES is a catalyst to bring both of those worlds together. You’re connecting, you know, virtual machines in our case on the local
data center to the operational network. We had to introduce new principles related to cybersecurity. And in the very beginning, there were a lot of meetings where the conversations became very heated. And often it was because people just spoke a different language. It was about different types of topics that maybe were not fully understood.
There were differences in way of work and methodologies and like expectations where OT is looking at IT and not understanding why they have to get a ticket if something breaks down in manufacturing and then have to wait to get a solution. While there is no like distinction made between somebody who needs a laptop to fill in an Excel and a device that runs in manufacturing, these type of discussions. While I think on the IT side, the
like the procedures, the word governance is like this very important word in an IT language where, you know, having a standardized backup solution and some practices around cybersecurity that are very different. So we really began from a very separated world, but we had to work together. And I think there is this one model or pattern where you have IT and OT and then there is sort of like a project team.
or an IT OT team in the middle in one of the variations. And ultimately the MES project team filled in that role and really trying to, because we had to make the project, in order to make the project a success, we had to form a good relationship with our IT colleagues to understand what is important for them, how can we work effectively together. But we also had to work very closely together with the OT teams. And so,
Figuring out along the way what works and what doesn’t, how do we translate things has been, I would say, a very, very critical part of success. And it’s like you say, Willem, if you don’t have a good cooperation model where ultimately, I we all, I believe at the end of the day, everybody in an organization wants to make the organization better, but maybe different teams have different ideas on what that actually means in practice.
Ultimately, this IT/OT convergence and finding ways to make that work in our case was through the MES project. And I would say to a large extent also cybersecurity, was another, like ultimately became another theme throughout that journey that was also focusing on this IT/OT corporations. We kind of have those two bridges between the two. That I think has been a very important catalyst to get to the point where we ultimately.
David Ariens (31:07)
It’s super interesting and actually leads me perfectly into our, I would say, big announcement we were also going to make today. So yeah, Willem and I, we started writing the IT/OT Insider exactly a year ago and we did so because we felt there was, I would say, a need to share information.
Willem’s, would say, forte is more about, as he said, the cooperation models, the way teams collaborate, the way management behaves. And this is also something we first focused on. So the first articles we wrote were really about these organizational silos. And then later on, and that’s bit more my thing, we started talking about data.
What does data look like in OT? What is sensor data? How can data platforms help us scale digital initiatives? But yeah, we touched that during this podcast as well. missed, we still missed out on something really, really important. And that is the thing which makes or breaks any digital transformation project. And that’s the journey itself. How do you work with people? How do you come up with that?
that’s a big audacious plan. Which processes do you need to support such a journey? So today we are, yeah, the three of us, I would say we are really, really happy to announce that Bram will be joining the IT/OT insider crew. So from now it’s not two, but the three of us to share the work.
Bram (32:50)
Yes. Thank you very much.
Willem (32:51)
Welcome, Bram. I mean, I’m really glad you’re joining us. I still remember seeing you speaking at conferences and really resonating with the stories you were telling. And also like, of course, afterwards. well, think David and I are really happy that you joined us, but maybe the questions I have like what motivated you to get more work than your day job?
Were you bored?
Bram (33:22)
think it’s not for a lack of work, that’s for sure. But like first of all, David and Willem, thank you very much for the confidence and having me, like giving me the honor of joining the IT/OT Insider team. You know, over the last months and during the last year, I’ve been reading on the IT/OT Insider and like you mentioned at conferences, we’ve had the opportunity to talk and I’ve always noticed there is like a
very strong resonance between the day -to -day experience that you share from your companies and what you have experienced and what I’m noticing in what I noticed throughout my journey so far. And I think that’s what motivates me the most to have this like, know, it’s
We’re talking about topics, don’t think we know each other that long yet, and yet we have the feeling that we have so many common points to talk about, and that’s really fascinating. yeah, what motivates me, think I’ve over this last 10 to 12 years, I’ve experienced a lot of the challenges around effective IT OT cooperation, bringing the different teams together, but also
Like in that journey, we come across and I talked about it in San Francisco as well. If I look at where do things start to become difficult, it’s always the usual suspects. There’s people, there’s process, there’s technology. And I would add to that nowadays, you also want to report data as a separate domain.
And all of those four domains, need to work harmoniously together to get into the sweet spots where we’re at the center, you want to unlock value for the organization. When I talk with you, with other practitioners in different companies, what I notice is that we’re all struggling with very similar challenges. I’ve been kind of wondering, is there a magical formula? Is there a success formula, a methodology that we can apply?
to be more successful in these transformations. Now, I’m very realistic there. There probably is not like the silver bullet, but I do believe that it is possible to, through sharing experiences and then being open to learn from others, that we can get closer to a better way of doing things to kind of leverage the knowledge in the room, so to speak.
that we can, when we make a mistake and talk about it openly with each other, that we can find ways to do that better. And equally, if something does turn out better, if we celebrate a success by sharing that openly, it can actually make us as better in this, let’s call it a relatively small community of digital manufacturing. And so I believe the IT/OT Insider is a fantastic platform to share.
experiences and to learn from each other. And that’s what I intend to do as a fresh co -author on the blog.
David Ariens (36:33)
Amazing. Bram, thank you so much for joining the IT/OT Insider crew. Thank you so much also for joining this podcast today. To our listeners, to our subscribers, in the weeks to come, we will be publishing several very, I would say, super interesting new articles around digital transformation journeys, around manufacturing execution systems, and so on. So yeah.
This is the time to subscribe if you haven’t yet. Bram, Willem, thank you very much. Until the next time.
Willem (37:12)
Talk to you soon.