Getting To Know The New Lanner Management Team – Geoff Turner

In last week's blog introducing Lanner's new Management Team, we met Lanner's Commercial Officer Sander Zweers, and in this week's blog, we introduce Geoff Turner, Lanner's new Operations Director. We sat down with Geoff to discuss his new role with Lanner and our exciting future with Royal HaskoningDHV Digital.

Q. Welcome to the Lanner Team! How are you finding your new position as Operations Director of Lanner?

A. Thank you. It is very refreshing to join such an experienced, enthusiastic, and friendly team here at Lanner. There is so much knowledge that we bring to a customer project based on delivery into a variety of industry sectors. Our ability to move seamlessly between a wide range of business problems, where the common thread is predictability of business outcomes, is quite remarkable.

My role will be the continued support and development of our Reseller network, our L-SIM licensees and the wellbeing of the Lanner team, supporting Sander and Luuk. I have been the local contact during the last 6 month’s transition and am thankful for the support I have had from David, Andrew and Chris.

Q. You are also the Royal HaskoningDHV Digital Software Unit’s Director for Business Alliances and Partnerships, what does this entail?

A. Our industry is driven by the partners we choose, in terms of their geographical presence and technology, market and customer influence. My role is to develop a consistent way of working with our partners across the Business Unit Software. We are looking for partners for certain applications and markets, so I am working on how we attract them and train and certify them to work with them to develop the local ecosystem around our applications.

Q. Tell us more about yourself! What experience are you bringing to Lanner?

A. I have some 30 years’ experience in the technical software market having worked with a number of software vendors, resellers and systems integrators. I am well placed to understand the market from both sides of the fence as we develop our channel offerings. Having said that, the market is always fast-moving, so the team around you is hugely important and it is great to be working with some very talented people. We need to be agile and always ready for change to meet these demands

Q. As Lanner is becoming further integrated with RHDHV Digital, it is an exciting time for all involved, but what does this mean for our customers?

A. Any acquisition can be viewed equally with anticipation, as well as suspicion. We will continue to provide the high levels of quality that our customers have come to expect in terms of product, delivery, and support. We will also continue to invest in the  WITNESS software platform and integrate it with other data analytic, modelling and simulation applications. Couple this with the domain experience of RHDHV and we have some different and exciting propositions for our customers.

For example, if a customer wanted to build a new production facility, Lanner would work with them to build a simulation of the proposed layout to experiment, optimise and visualise the optimum output. However, the recent pandemic and climate change has clearly shown the need to build resilience into our business decisions. With our RHDHV Digital's Resilient Suite, we can model the climatic risk of the facility over its lifecycle and integrate that with production. So, the client can see how production could be affected by climate change over that period and make the appropriate design choices to protect today's investment.

Q. What other areas of RHDHV Digital is Lanner working closely with, and what opportunities is this creating for Lanner?

A. As an integrated team we are collaborating on a number of initiatives driven by RHDHV’s Business Lines; Water and Marine, Industry and Buildings and Transport and Aviation and through the development of common reusable software components. For example, one area is the capture and ingestion of real-time data from IIOT, Scada and PLC devices. This will enable all of our applications to gain access to that data for comparison of simulation vs actual data, and analytics for the performance and optimisation of processes, with alerts for potential, or actual failures, in the process. All areas that contribute to predictable business performance with minimal disruption.

Q. How do you see digital trends moving in the future? Will predictive simulation and digital twins continue to play a key strategic role for businesses?

A. There has been much talk of IIoT and Digital Transformation over the past 5 years or so that has now become both achievable and scalable. That said companies are still looking for business cases and projects that will deliver the best value. As a company, RHDHV are also delivering projects with a high BIM content. The opportunity we have is to help companies imagine and then deliver the future. How will my new facility operate? How do I optimise the design and project execution? How can I operate the facility and optimise its use? All of these decisions can be modelled using a predictive Digital Twin of the Enterprise, of the Asset, and even of the climatic conditions; all delivered as a decision as service.