delaware held its first co-innovation program DEL20 in Asia

Innovation is not a magical incantation. There are several barriers to innovation, such as extreme conservatism and opposition to change. In SMEs, the most significant obstacles are the lack of skills or resources or simply a lack of time. The lack of internal alignment is cited as obstacle number one in bigger organizations.

Innovation has always been critical to delaware. We help our customers solve their unique business challenges with our skillsets and experience every day. We want to extend this spirit beyond our specialization into uncharted technologies, allowing our consultants and customers to uncover new ways to add value to business processes. This is why, six years ago, we first launched, together with some of our key customers, DEL20 – our ecosystem of innovation in Belgium.

A co-creation space to explore new boundaries

The principles of this ‘innovation club’ are very straightforward. To offer our customers a space where they can try out innovative ideas and share knowledge with each other. There are no competitors in the club. This is a space where CIOs, together with their business alter-egos, are encouraged to experiment, try out new technologies and explore new boundaries instead of using proven technologies like they usually do to mitigate risk.

We regard DEL20 as a win-win: delaware brings its technical skills and time (25 man-days of free consultancy) to the selected innovative projects. And our customers bring us real-life cases so that delaware can deepen its business expertise.  Co-creation is not a buzzword here, and we are at the crossroads of business and technology.

The first in Asia

Our first iteration of DEL20 in Singapore welcomed six organizations. Together, there were seven potential experiments of which participants voted for the top two.

These are the companies (and technologies) with whom we were happy to turn ideas into actionable innovations:

Dnata (Thermotracker) Dnata is a leading airport service provider, clinching numerous awards and accreditations across their countries of operations. As the COVID-19 pandemic developed, workplace health and monitoring became the top priority. At Dnata Singapore, all staff must submit their body temperatures daily to fulfill government regulatory requirements. With different measuring equipment and reporting methods across teams, it is challenging to maintain the accuracy and consistency of the data. There is also the possibility that an employee chooses not to disclose minor symptoms.

Together with the delaware team, a prototype to detect employee faces while recording their temperature was drawn up. It would feed the information into a central database that is stored consistently and organized. The system was also designed to notify the supervisor should a temperature abnormity be recorded, allowing for a quick response and minimal disruption to the business operations.

Katoen Natie (IoT & Analytics) As an international logistics service provider and port operator, Katoen Natie is present in 26 countries on five continents and employs about 16,000 people worldwide. Katoen Natie heavily depends on material handling equipment, most commonly forklifts, for day-to-day operations. Most of the forklifts are externally leased. Katoen Natie’s interest is to ensure that their usage is optimized. Due to the large area where the employees operate, it is difficult to monitor and track the usage rate of these forklifts. The core deliverable recommended a tracking beacon solution to enable active monitoring and tracking of their forklifts usage. The data can be presented in an intelligent dashboard to give Katoen Natie deeper insights into overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) more efficiently utilized across different teams/shifts.

More to come in 2022

As DEL20 Singapore 2021 successfully draws close, another selection of great companies is preparing to boost their innovation potential during DEL20 2022. We look forward to seeing and working on the brand-new experiments next year.

Who said innovation could not lead to beneficial outcomes?