News
TrendMiner Selects Nortal as Partner of the Year 2022
Tech company awarded for keen eye on the market, clear understanding of OT/IT challenges, drive to support customers, and use of TrendMiner
To recognize our outstanding partnerships, we present an award each year to a partner that demonstrates remarkable commitment to their customers in the industry and to the growth of TrendMiner.
It was a difficult task to select a single partner this year, but our partner team chose Nortal to win Partner of the Year 2022. Nortal distinguished itself because of its proactive team approach, drive to meet the challenges of the industry, expertise in the IT/OT convergence, and successful deliveries to the customer pipeline. We handed the award during our annual partner kick off.
Watch Ergin Tuganay of Nortal discuss Experiences in Digital Transformation during the 2023 Partner Kickoff.
Even before our customers became data-driven decisionmakers, they were turning to partners such as Nortal for guidance on their digital transformation needs.
“During the past several years, we have all witnessed a huge number of pilot programs and proof of concepts,” said Ergin Tuganay, Head of Industry 4.0 at Nortal, during this year’s Partner Kickoff event. “Often, we see that these projects don’t fly because of like lack of business support. With IT/OT challenges, we tell our clients that need to start by building a solid business case, identifying their business drivers for the change, and understanding the key success criteria. Then, we tell them to ask themselves why they are making the change and are investing their time and money in new services.”
As Tuganay explained, his organization began searching five years ago for an advanced industrial analytics software partner that would fit within its architecture. Finally, last year, Nortal and TrendMiner signed their first deal together.
“We have been working with Ergin and Nortal since May 2022, and I have to say that the collaboration has been not only successful, but also pleasant,” said Hanne Neyens, Director of Partners and Strategic Projects at TrendMiner. “It’s great to work with industry specialists with focus and drive to bring top solutions to their customers. We have many opportunities in the pipeline for partnership with Nortal, and I can only be confident that we will be successful together in 2023.”
Nortal’s Industry 4.0 Model
For more than 35 years, Nortal has been offering IT services to a variety of industries throughout the world. Today, the company employs more than 2,000 experts in 21 offices to help clients navigate the challenges of cloud infrastructure, digital commerce, modern software delivery, and Industry 4.0.
Tuganay, who has more than 15 years of experience in a wide range of areas in industrial automation and data driven technology, said that many of Nortal’s customers come from the forest and metal industries. But the company also serves customers in healthcare, food and beverage, and many others.
In the forest and metal industries, for example, clients often have huge data streams that are typically seen as a byproduct to the core line of production. Most of these companies have been collecting the data in a historian for years, but they lacked the digital maturity to begin understanding how they could leverage that information to optimize process performance.
“In the past six or seven years, we’ve been introducing modern cloud-native solutions with integrated OT tools that can access the data,” he said. “And this is the link to TrendMiner. We also emphasize that data is a first-class citizen, not a byproduct. It requires a cultural mindset shift that the domains—manufacturing, production, and so forth—need their data as a product, and that it’s not just some side product that was generated next to the core process.
“Once the data is identified as a key asset, we can begin to help them democratize the data and enable the self-service capabilities of TrendMiner,” said Tuganay.
Advancing on a Digitalization Journey
Among the most important steps an industrial organization can take when starting a transformation is aligning its digitalization goals with the company’s overall strategic goals.
“So many times, most of the focus of these data teams has been financial reporting and KPI needs,” Tuganay said. “Often, process engineers, production engineers, and maintenance engineers who run the daily operations in the manufacturing shop floor or production shop floor are left outside of this journey. We heavily promote bringing those people in and promoting data democratization.
“I would say think big, start small, and move fast,” he said. “Set your North Star—your focal point—early and make your big, hairy audacious goals clear. However, don’t immediately rush and aim for perfection. If we immediately aim for perfection, we often fall into what we could call an ‘analysis paralysis,’ basically getting stuck in the analysis phase for too long and losing the momentum. Instead of that, move fast, stay agile, do a continuous improvement cycle. Plan, do, check, act, and start a new iteration.”