Before there were “only” ships. Then new technologies arrived to radically transform one of the oldest industrial sectors in the world: the shipbuilding. AI, augmented reality, digital simulations, IoT, autonomous robots, Big Data, cloud connectivity and much more; they are all technologies that can be integrated to offer intelligent solutions to owners, crew and passengers. “Nothing is as it was before: today ships, both in the civil and military sectors, are ‘digital by-design’, entirely conceived, from the overall project down to the individual details, for a use and digital experience open to new functions. Simplifying with a metaphor, in the shipbuilding industry it is as if we had gone from the first mobile phones to the current smartphones”, he comments Cristiano Pasanisiad di Fincantieri NexTech, the “technological engine” of Fincantieri group which under its umbrella brings together the subsidiaries IDS Engineering dei Sistemi, Cetena, Issel Nord, e-Phors, Hms IT, Sls and Reicom.
“In other words, Fincantieri – which is already a leader in the construction of military, civil and offshore ships – wants to expand its skills to build ‘digital ships’, that is, creating a portfolio of high added value services, offered to the market with a business model different from the traditional one. We are talking about a radical transformation that requires a paradigm shift. As our CEO and general manager says, Pierroberto Folgierowe must move from Capex to Opex, that is, to combine the sale of ships – which generates one-off revenues – with sale of digital technological solutions, to generate recurring revenue. And as system integrators at ship level, we at Fincantieri are perfectly positioned to offer natively integrated solutions between hardware and software,” adds Pasanisi.
This is a mission that the group’s Board of Directors has entrusted to Fincantieri NexTech and its subsidiary companies. A total of 800 professionals in Italy and with offices in Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and South Korea which will grow in the coming years, in line with the ambitions of Fincantieri’s industrial plan (2023-2027). “Whatever the scope of application, the distinctive factor is today increasingly represented by electronics and digital. This implies the need for a high investment in research and innovation but above all in the acquisition of the right skills on the main ‘disruptive’ technologies such as robotica, blockchain, cyber security, artificial intelligence, advanced & mixed virtual reality e big datavery difficult to find on the market”, explains the CEO.
Cristiano Pasanisi, CEO of Fincantieri NexTech
Il mismatch between supply and demand it does not only concern Fincantieri or NexTech but transversally the entire national production system: “We have been working for years with many industrial and technological partners, including Leonardo and Elettronica. And these companies, like us, note the scarcity of suitable profiles, especially in the digital sector. This makes the job market very competitive – underlines the CEO – and for this reason, the challenge for Fincantieri NexTech and the entire group is twofold: first of all to work to find these new profiles to include in the workforce and at the same time communicate to potential candidates the ‘opportunity to be part of a company with a strong technological vocation, and not just naval engineering”.
To attract “digital profiles”, especially juniors, Pasanisi thinks of a different recruiting model, based on “challenge”: “We participate in many fairs or public meetings with schools, research centers and universities, and we would like to exploit these opportunities by offering young people with a strong vocation STEM to compete with two or three “challenges” on pilot technological cases on which Fincantieri NexTech is working. It is a different model from the traditional corporate HR recruitment, already used in the innovation field, which we are thinking about at group level”.
To give a good idea, Pasanisi cites the case of Fincantieri NexTech, a company that represents the “hard core” of the group’s “digital” skills, still little known outside. “In Nextech, there are professionals who have developed very advanced projects in different fields such as simulation, augmented and virtual reality (Cetena) or in the sectors of robotic systems, of the radar, dell’electromagnetism and of satellite communications (IDS – Systems Engineering). Visibility must be given to these skills which constitute the technological and digital environment needed to attract this type of profile”, observes the CEO.
There are two technological macro-trends that Fincantieri NexTech and the group are following and on which it is necessary to gather new resources: Big Data Analytics e AI. “For us, they are enablers in order to generate that added value that can make us truly distinctive towards our customers, both military and civilian – says Pasanisi – Fincantieri’s fortune is being a systems integrator: we are the only ones capable of integrating from a hardware point of view, all the solutions necessary to make a ship ‘work’. From a digital point of view we are the only ones who can do the same thing ‘natively’, i.e. from the very early design stages of the ship. This means ‘digital by-design’. The challenge is to collect as much data as possible from the ‘system of systems’, i.e. the ship, and use it to enable distinctive functionality to serve our customers. All this generates an impressive amount of data, hence the need for Data Analytics and AI skills for simulation.”
Pasanisi continues: “We will not become a software company and we will probably get help from some partners, but it is certain that within 3-5 years we will have to have a good number of data scientists and a sufficient number of people expert in AI applications to develop the solutions which we will launch on the market at the right time – warns the CEO. All this will enable a virtuous circle that will help the group to build more ships, better than today, and develop a digital business with greater added value and less capital intensity, which will help improve the group result.”
As regards the aspect related to cyber securityPasanisi adds, “Digital enables great advantages, but also exposes it to great risks, hence our great attention to Cyber, which we manage internally with a team of professionals that we have built over time and who lend their skills both to support internal services and for the development of solutions intended for the market”.
To bring Nextech’s strategy to life, Pasanisi does not rule out that the group could in the future make small acquisitions of companies with a strong digital vocation. “A scouting activity could arise in the short term to integrate new skills. In parallel, with the support of the parent company, we are already moving forward ‘open innovation’ and ‘corporate venturing’ initiatives to find startups in the ‘seeding’ phase with which to develop technological and digital products to integrate with existing ones. The model was started at group level, now it just needs to be implemented in a reality like Fincantieri NexTech”, concludes the CEO.