Empowerment. That is one of the key characteristics of working at NNE in the US, according to Andres Martinez. As head of the NNE US digital innovation strategy track, he is leading the development of NNE’s digital competences and finding creative solutions to help our customers achieve operational excellence – and growing his own skills on top. Find out what he loves about his role and his job at NNE.
What inspires you abour your role?
The most inspiring aspect of my role as a Digitalization Team Lead is that I’m tackling an industry-wide challenge. The entire manufacturing sector is trying to be a part of what has been dubbed “Industry 4.0” or the “Fourth Industrial Revolution”. Technology these days is evolving at an exponential rate, and for us to stay competitive in this market along with our clients, we need to find creative ways to implement digital technologies that add value. At the end of the day, our goal is to use digital technologies to find ways to integrate industrial and business data, make it within reach, and collaborate with our customers to find insights from data we could never see before.
How did you get to where you are today?
Throughout my career as a process engineer, I’ve always tried to find the most efficient way to perform a task. I’m pretty lazy so I always took any chance I could to automate my way out of doing tedious work if I could maintain and sometimes even improve my work’s quality. Like many engineers and project managers, Excel became my tool of choice, but I quickly became fascinated by using more powerful tools for data accessibility and analysis.
My journey into digitalization began with the question: “What if we could make engineering master data accessible and easy to manipulate for our customers’ long-term operations?”. My project lead at the time and I took this question to our experts in Denmark, and we found they use a home-grown engineering tool to integrate all their master data in one location and streamline the engineering process for capital projects. We then developed a solution for our client by applying this concept to the production environment as a change control tool that houses engineering information for their long-term operations. This tool now acts as a precursor to our client’s CMMS (Computerized Maintenance Management System) where engineers on the floor have critical data at their fingertips to ease problem solving and streamline any engineering changes.
This is only one small example of digitalization, however, that kickstarted my passion for “Industry 4.0”. I now constantly ask myself: “Where can we find relationships between data from engineering, supply chain, maintenance, and production to help our clients provide the best quality product to the patient faster than ever before?”. This first project was just a steppingstone to help answer this question with more exciting ventures such as extended reality, IIoT, data analytics, and more.
What is different about working at NNE?
NNE-US is one of the most empowering organizations I have ever seen. In other larger companies it’s difficult to not feel like you’re an employee in a cruiseship that’s taking you towards a destination you have no control over. Being at our US office feels more like you’re in a fleet of speedboats. Every speedboat has a say on where our destination will be, and we all work together to get there. It’s an extremely collaborative environment where silos almost don’t exist. Our digital innovation strategy team consists of people from all three disciplines (Editor's note: project execution, process and mechanical engineering, and automation) in our US office.
An added cherry on top is that our colleagues in Denmark and India have expertise in cutting edge technologies. While the US office empowers us to set direction for the company, our DK and India offices support us with the appropriate expertise to execute. The overall experience is extremely rewarding and I can’t imagine growing as much as I have these past few years anywhere else.
Bio
Educational background
Certified Maintenance and Reliability Professionals (CMRP)
SMRP, Sep. 2020
B. Sc. Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering
Georgia Institute of Technology, 2017
NNE history
Digitalization Team Lead
Jan. 2022 - present
Process & Mechanical Team Lead
Mar. 2021 – Jan. 2022
Process Consultant
Aug. 2019 – Mar. 2021
Meet NNE US’s digitalization team
Under Andres’ leadership, a team of 13 employees in NNE US is pioneering a digital innovation strategy track to support our customers’ progression toward Industry 4.0. The team focuses on increasing digital competencies (i.e. BIM, VR/AR, plant simulation, IT/OT integration, business intelligence, data analytics, etc.) within NNE US, understanding our customers’ production needs, and proposing the appropriate solutions based on our capabilities.
