“To be able to build a plant in the most remote and desolate lands of the world you must necessarily be prepared like an engineer, passionate like a technologist and motivated like an entrepreneur”. The vision of Michele Mariella, head of information and communication technology of Maire Tecnimont, is the perfect synthesis of the cultural engine that has been accompanying the digital transformation of the engineering, technology and energy group. Not surprisingly, a real mix of technologies and paradigms is now hiding in the company’s digital soul, ranging from cloud computing to smart working, via remote maintenance, collaboration and cybersecurity.
The innovation melting pot of Mayor Tecnimont (9,000 workers, 4 research centers and 1,700 patents) was born from afar and precisely in 2016, with the exploration of the cloud and digital communication and collaboration solutions. Since then, the digital transformation process has been irreversible and even a potentially slippery terrain such as that of the pandemic has proved to be stable ground, especially in terms of smart working. The path started in 2018 with the arrival of employees on Microsoft’s Teams platform, which was designed on the basis of the needs and preferences expressed by the workers, proved to be decisive and today Maire Tecnimont has something like 3,500 meetings, 178 thousand chats and 18 thousand call every week.
The Italian group has not only created a hybrid context of efficient work, but has also decided to constantly monitor it through special digital tools, which allow management to verify the effective use of the systems by leveraging on aggregate data relating to corporate work models, to promote people’s well-being and productivity. “We found that during the pandemic we produced more engineering documents than in the previous period and that our people willingly dedicated the time saved traveling to high value-added activities,” explains Mariella. If the implementation of the collaboration had started well before the pandemic, the lockdown period instead saw the birth and immediate acceleration of a larger data center transformation project.
Maire Tecnimont has started the migration of almost all the services previously provided by the on-premise data center to the cloud of Microsoft Azure: today more than 90% of the servers of the Italian and Indian headquarters are in the cloud. “The advantages obtained are considerable, measurable in terms of lower CO2 emissions, machine uptime, resilience and even agility – highlights Mariella – Until a few years ago, opening a plant in Siberia or in the Sahara desert meant in fact set up an on-site data center. Today everything is done in the cloud, with enormous time and money savings “. All this is accompanied by efforts on the subject of IT security, another hot front for those involved in engineering, innovation and energy.
Maire Tecnimont’s ambition as a digital champion is pushing the group towards other and new shores. Corporate IT aims to become a real profit center, exploiting the skills and services gained internally to the outside. Among the hot fronts, the development of remote maintenance and training services on plants, using augmented reality and the HoloLens 2 holographic computer.
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