Connection in the infrastructure market

Robert has been at the helm of INNOCY since September 1, 2023. "It is a club with an incredible amount of knowledge and specialism. Nevertheless, we decided to operate from three knowledge domains, namely asset management, project management and safety. A conscious choice to be able to make even more impact for our clients." And a choice that seems to be paying off, given the many projects to which INNOCY has made an important contribution in the past year and continues to do so.

Asset management

Asset management is a catch-all term, says van Meijgaarden. "We understand asset management to be a smart way of optimising a design so that an object is as easy and safe to maintain as possible and we guarantee maximum availability without adding a lot of costs. And our role does not stop at the design, we also contribute to the realisation and the management and maintenance issue, from strategic to operational level. For consortium VeenIX, for example, we assess the work carried out on the A9 and we have set up the failure organization. And for the ALSEEN consortium, we have set up the failure organisation on the A27 Everdingen-Hooipolder project, we are putting the area in order and we are responsible for the cost and RAMS analyses. It is a ten-year project that will be tackled in phases and followed by 15 years of management and maintenance. In doing so, we look not only at the design, but also at the current state of the area, where there is a backlog in maintenance."

Overdue maintenance

According to van Meijgaarden, the latter is characteristic of the market, because assets are lagging behind in maintenance. "All projects that come to the market have been delayed due to an insufficient budget, partly due to the corona period. This means that projects come to the market in even worse condition, because when an object is on the list for renewal, maintenance often stops. The pressure to allow projects to continue is therefore extremely high. It is then important to deal with it smartly. Precisely because we think along in the project from an asset management perspective, we as INNOCY are able to make choices like no other in outline instead of deep in the technology. That's where our added value lies. A design that seems to be incredibly lucrative can turn out to be incredibly expensive in the long run. And that does not always mean that the budget has to be increased. It is therefore important that we are involved right from the start, in order to be able to optimize the design."

Water domain

The second domain that INNOCY focuses on is project management. "That includes everything on the process side, risk management, cost expertise and technical management," explains van Meijgaarden. "We provide project management for tunnel renovations in the municipality of Amsterdam, but also for a number of infrastructural renovation projects in the Netherlands. In addition, there is still a world to be won for us in the 'water domain' dominated by water authorities and drinking water companies. We will also be investing heavily in this domain in the coming years. Just like in our third and final focus area: safety. This varies from occupational safety, integral safety, machine safety, tunnel safety, water safety and environmental safety to railway safety at ProRail. We are committed to having the theme of safety properly safeguarded at the front end. Because it is often in the design phase that you can make the most impact in the field of safety."

What you do, we can't do. "That's what we often hear from clients," says van Meijgaarden. "We review a design and see where optimizations are possible. We are good at that. Moreover, we make the connection. We see that our people play a strong connecting factor in project teams based on progression and specialism. We create an atmosphere in which a whole club of people in the project team strives for the same goal, instead of the best for everyone's own position. After all, together you are strong(er). Curious how we do that? Let's meet at our booth during InfraTech 2025."