Shifting our service mix

Our clients increasingly expect us to integrally support them along their journey to be or become future ready. We do this by taking a multi-disciplinary approach to their complex challenges. This involves considering the entire asset life cycle and combines digital and physical worlds.

Ensuring we have the skills and competencies to meet the needs of the market is at the heart of our ambition to shift our service mix. In 2023, we continued to grow consultancy services alongside engineering and design which are at the heart of our company. Past acquisitions of ITP, Novius and Districon are proving increasingly valuable in this respect. Looking forward, we expect the growth in consultancy services to continue. We also want to grow and further digitise our design and engineering services. And we are expanding our services to cover both the project and exploitation phases of assets (capital expenditure and operations).

It is our ambition to fully integrate digital in all our services and grow our digital services (commercial software, data services and consultancy) to 10-15% of our total revenue. New developments such as generative Artificial Intelligence fuel possibilities for the way in which we do our business and deliver our services. They offer opportunities for new types of services and automated models for our clients. Our digital consultancy (which includes Novius) is especially active in advising our clients on digital transformations and delivering bespoke digital solutions such as data science and geographic information systems. We have seen increased demand in the field of digital twins where our domain and digital knowledge come together. In 2023, we revised and restructured our software services to bring them further in line with our Global Leading Markets.

To harness these opportunities, the digital maturity of our people is continually developed. Digital Leads were appointed within each Global Leading Market in 2023 to apply digital capabilities and data driven ways of working in our projects responding to clients’ demands. They identify tools and software to automate parts of our work. Similar work takes place in our corporate groups - including marketing and strategy. We set up a Software Intake Team to professionalise and support software development and an Enterprise Architecture Board to ensure consistent futureproof development of our data systems and processes. We have active knowledge groups on digital topics like generative AI, automation of consultancy, automation of design & engineering, information management and computational design.