Dear TeMa alumni,
My name is Doede Bouma and live in Groningen. Last year I finished the TOM master after I started studying Electrical Engineering at NHL university of applied sciences 6 years ago. I majored in Industrial Automation. Within that study I did the minor Industrial Engineering and Management and because of this minor, I wanted to continue in that field and therefore moved to Groningen to do the Pre-master Technology and Operations Management. After the premaster I went on with the master TOM. At that time I also joined the Social Committee while we were still in the corona crisis, this made it difficult to organize events but with a little creativity, we managed to host some online events like a pubquiz and the famous “kopstoot avond” presented by Hooghoudt.
Since September I started working as a Maintenance Engineer at Van Wijnen in Heerenveen. Van Wijnen is a building and construction company and is currently building a factory to produce prefab houses. In the traditional way of building, all construction workers go to a location to build a house and after finishing, they go to another location. All these projects are custom and are all different from each other, this results in a lot of failure and excessive costs. Also, with the current housing crisis going. It is difficult to find builders and technical people, while the demand for housing is huge. Our way of building is brand new within the building industry because we use a configure-to-order production strategy and mass customization. The customer can choose all kinds of configurations of a house in a webshop, for example, the color of tiles, the location of wall sockets and the layout of the rooms. This webshop consists of a few million configurations. After the customer presses the order button, the design of the house is translated into a CAD file and is automatically sent to our factory where robots produce each wall and floor. For me, this was also the reason to work here because the high degree of automation and the new technologies that are applied here. And of course the bold action of changing an entire industry.
The factory is part of a private company within Van Wijnen. What I like, is that within this private company we are with a small group of people. Right now we are with 12 people to control the whole factory. This feels like I am working in a start-up company while having the resources of a national company. As I mentioned, I’m hired as the Maintenance Engineer, however, when I was hired the factory is was still under construction. The machines needed to be built and I was assigned to do the commissioning of the machines, which means that I needed to check if the machines perform according to the agreed contracts. At the moment of writing this blog, we are testing all the machines and in the meantime, we are setting up our maintenance department which also means that we need to determine our maintenance strategy and hire the appropriate mechanics. This involves a lot of theories of the course of Asset Management from Jasper Veldman and Bram de Jonge. We are busy with setting up our predictive maintenance strategy to perform maintenance at the right moment through smart sensors which tell us the deterioration of a machine part. For me, each day is different, for example, one day I’m replacing a sensor, and a different day I’m building our company Sharepoint. Or, in the morning I’m discussing with mechanics and programmers and in the afternoon I have a meeting with a couple of managers and directors. The following links show pictures and movies about the new building concept and our new factory:
https://www.vanwijnen.nl/projecten/woningfabriek/
https://www.vanwijnen.nl/woningnood-vraagt-om-transitie-in-de-bouw/
If you would like to lean more about Van Wijnen, feel free to contact me at d.bouma@vanwijnen.nl or add me to Linkedin.
