CUSTOMER STORY // VAN OORD
Van Oord Turns Data into Insight to Protect Coastal Ecosystems and Communities Worldwide
Marine engineering specialist builds apps for business intelligence and global environmental projects.
500
Regular Qlik users
From HR to engineering, Qlik Sense has a large and growing user base within Van Oord.
3
COP conferences attended
The Climate Risk Overview has been acclaimed by governments and public sector bodies at three COP conferences.
c60
Vessels operated
Van Oord’s large maritime fleet acquires and generates huge volumes of complex marine and engineering data.
CHALLENGE
A global responsibility
For Van Oord, a company with over 155 years’ experience as an international marine contractor, keeping the world’s seas and oceans healthy isn’t just a business priority: it’s a crucial component of its purpose to create a better world for future generations.
To achieve this, Van Oord needs to make intelligent choices to protect at-risk ecosystems, while also optimizing its own operations.
Acquiring data involves specialist equipment and expertise. It’s also a highly expensive process but Van Oord saw gaps in its systems that stopped it from maximizing value from an important and hard-won resource.
APPROACH
Coupling science with visualization
Qlik Sense offered the power and breadth of functionality that Van Oord needed to not only handle internal business functions but would also enable it to build apps with a more specialist focus.
Around 500 Van Oord staff now use Qlik each day. However, the internal use cases are just the start of its journey. Van Oord developed the Climate Risk Overview to highlight the dangers facing communities and ecosystems worldwide caused by rising sea levels and extreme weather events, accessing gigabytes of data to build out valuable digital models.
RESULTS
A focus on global support
During a recent visit to the Netherlands by Mia Mottley, Prime Minister of Barbados, she specifically asked Van Oord to look at the challenges Barbados is facing.
“The Climate Risk Overview helped us look at how we could work with local ecosystems, such as coral or mangroves, to provide nature-based solutions,” says Rachel Terry, Head of Sustainability at Van Oord.
And as well as contributing to the UN Ocean Decade initiative, the Climate Risk Overview app has also engaged stakeholders at three COP conferences, from financiers to governments, the public sector to private business.
The next step for Climate Risk Overview is to combine external data with Van Oord’s internal resources to expand its functionality and increase public awareness further still.
WHAT THIS MEANS FOR YOU
The real power of data
Van Oord’s decision to make the Climate Risk Overview available to everyone reflects its commitment to change and its belief in the power of data.
Qlik Sense has enabled Van Oord to identify new hotspots where it can combine flood-protection solutions and build with nature, including smaller regional hotspots with vulnerable coastal communities and ecosystems.
It’s a fantastic example of how analytics can make a critical difference to global projects – how the right tools in the right hands have the potential to benefit generations to come.
To make a business case for flood protection, for example, we need to combine data from socioeconomic, geophysical and environmental data sources.
