Boskalis_Annual_Report_2016

ANNUAL REPORT 2016 – BOSKALIS 47

landfill to substitute sand as a building material in, for example, road and dike construction. The plant came on stream in the second half of 2016. Please refer to our CSR report for more information. ICT In the past year we made great strides in rolling out the new Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system, which has led to better integration of our processes in the areas of finance, logistics and project management. In view of the different requirements for the Dredging & Inland Infra division on the one hand and Offshore Energy division on the other, ERP programs Infor LN and SAP are being used respectively. The new ERP system optimizes our planning and procurement methods and gives us an immediate overview of the administrative and financial processing of all our internal resources. Furthermore, major steps were taken with the development of the Seacrew program, aimed at the planning of operational staff and crews. Within Dredging the program is also used to plan the work of the international operational pool including project managers. An online system offering digital courses and enabling online reporting of training results was developed for the Learning & Development department. In 2016 work also started on developing a new time registration system, which will be completed in 2017 within the framework of our ERP system. The efficiency of our ICT infrastructure improved considerably in 2016 thanks to the organization-wide switch to cloud services. Switching to ‘the cloud’ brings considerable benefits to many aspects of our business operations. As well as providing greater flexibility in our ICT services it also guarantees better protection of our company data against cybercrime. Moreover it enhances the accessibility of our network and ICT applications worldwide.

The Union Bear marks the successful installation of The Ocean Cleanup’s prototype on the North Sea with water fountains. Boskalis is one of the main sponsors of this test.