Casting off the digital mooring lines
Port of Rotterdam

“For our suppliers, the days of ‘you ask, we deliver’ are truly behind us.” 

With nearly 1,400 employees, the Port of Rotterdam focuses on managing and developing the port area and ensuring safe shipping. The organisation aims to achieve sustainable growth in collaboration with its partners, including within its Digital & IT division. 

“We’re no longer just a coordinating body,” says Gijs Huizinga. “Internally, we want our work processes to be top-notch. That’s what we’re working on under the umbrella of our company-wide ‘DOE programme’, which stands for Digital Operational Excellence. It marks a strategic shift. We want to work with partners who can guide us forward and help us achieve great things together, because we certainly can’t and don’t want to do everything ourselves.” 

For years, the Port Authority relied on SAP R/3 as its enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. “But by 2023, it was really due for replacement,” Gijs explains. “Over time, it had become cluttered with custom solutions. We wanted to return to standardised solutions and enable a clear process vision. After all, our business operations – procurement, HR, finance – aren’t fundamentally different from those of other organisations. Standardisation makes our IT more flexible and easier to manage. And that makes us more agile in the face of change, such as the energy and raw materials transition.” 

To migrate to SAP S/4HANA, the new SAP ERP system, Gijs and his colleagues went looking for a partner. “A migration like this is a bit like a safari, full of unexpected creatures along the way,” Gijs says. “What made it even more complex was that we also wanted to move to a Cloud environment at the same time. So, we had an organisational ambition, and also wanted to streamline and rationalise. All while ensuring continuity, because our operations never stop. And we wanted to collaborate in differently. We captured all of this in a tender, and in the end, Conclusion delivered the project for us.” 

The migration took a total of 18 months. “It was a major, high-impact project. Because our operations depend on it, it had to be thoroughly tested,” Gijs explains. “We migrated around 80 system integrations and ran some 1,200 test scenarios four times, involving about 200 testers. Each time, we asked ourselves and the users: ‘Is it working? Can we keep doing our work the way we always have?’” 

“We’re now in a phase where we’re increasingly reaping the benefits of the new platform: things like process automation, real-time reporting and far greater agility. So far, the focus has been on finance, procurement, and HR. Ccustomer processes and asset management are next. The latter involves port-specific matters, especially maintenance planning for docks, quay walls, roads, bridges, locks, radar stations, and the required depth of shipping channels. Dredging is sometimes needed to keep the port navigable.” 

Gijs stresses that a technical go-live is only the beginning. “You have to keep improving. You can’t just implement something and then sit back. So, we continue to innovate and look for ways to do things better – for example, with AI applications in the financial chain. And we’re seeking synergy with another initiative focused on managing, developing and optimising the Port Authority’s websites and web applications – including the customer portals used daily by thousands of skippers and businesses. This too is a collaboration with Conclusion.” 

One of the Port Authority’s key challenges is becoming more data-driven – for steering, analysis, and innovation. While this only partly falls within Gijs’ remit, he’s no less enthusiastic. “If you know, for instance, how fast a container ship travels under different conditions, you can pinpoint exactly when it’s ready to dock. Think of tides, wind force, CO₂ emissions and the current salinity of the water. Seawater mixes with freshwater, and when salinity is higher, a ship sits higher in the water and behaves differently. By combining this data, our customers can make more intensive use of quay walls and increase their capacity.” 

“We select market players who understand that, for us, it’s not about technology – it’s about impact. Players who understand our challenges. That doesn’t mean Conclusion is now our default supplier, even though we work together in three areas: SAP, platforms and applications, and data and AI. For each project or service, we select the best partner. But of course, working with three Conclusion companies across three quite different domains is, well… different.”