Howden is an engineering company with a long history of innovation, providing high-quality air and gas handling products and services to a wide range of customers and industries.

Among other things, Howden builds compressors to power gas pipelines and fans to ventilate tunnels. Howden employs more than 5.000 people worldwide with customers all over the globe.

Howden operates within a fast-changing environment where innovation and growth through acquisition is the norm. In the last three years alone, the group acquired three companies per year – a rapid pace in any industry. While this represents an opportunity for Howden, this also creates many challenges.

Howden recognised the need to become a digital enterprise.

Howden’s journey began almost three years ago and is likely to take another three years to complete. Transformational change like this is not undertaken in isolation. A portfolio of initiatives is being implemented across the organisation. In Q3 2016, the business has realigned the IT support environment so that it best serves and supports the gross divisional operating units. The initiative implemented world-class service provision and operational management, whilst also enabling the implementation of standardised technologies and processes. At the core of the journey was the need to control and manage digital assets (e.g., intellectual property in the form of drawings), while improving the efficiency and throughput of the business processes. In order to underpin and support the Howden business globally, IT had to evolve. A new support organisation and revised structure were designed to put new overarching work processes and technology platforms in place.

While digitalised processes are not completely new for Howden, the company is now facing the challenge of multiple digital tools invading the work environment; this is provoking changes in how the company wants and needs to operate. 

Therefore, the company has started to embrace a Kaizen-based approach to process improvement to re-evaluate strategies, and make changes where needed to ensure that the drive to become a digital company is having a positive effect on the entire business.

The business drivers are manifold, but most importantly Howden must maintain the ability to acquire and integrate new companies all over the world while growing and protecting the aftermarket business. For Howden, a significant proportion of future growth will come from expansion into new markets in Asia and from growing the aftermarket part of the business. It is important to note that it is these markets where Howden has experienced new challenges relating to the protection of its intellectual property. These threats are especially prominent in the aftermarket (e.g., services, maintenance and spare parts). Addressing these challenges in a non-digital enterprise is very difficult, if not impossible.

With digital documents, users can take various steps to secure their files, be it through password protection and certificate security, or simply using a smart documents platform to track when a document has been viewed, downloaded, modified or signed. The biggest obstacle to providing document security in a large, distributed organisation like Howden is to ensure ease of use – engineers and other knowledge workers are unlikely to use solutions that are difficult to understand, arduous to switch to or unpleasant to use. Historically, Howden had not defined a global standard for document software or document management, primarily as it was not deemed business-critical. Howden is focused on finding the right solutions for its needs – combining security with to ease of use.

The organisational structure of Howden is ‘loosely coupled’ – this means the subsidiaries operate independently from each other. While this has many advantages, it also creates challenges with respect to process integration.

It is expected that, for historic, cultural and practical reasons, an important part of the required process integration between the Howden businesses will always be based on the exchange of documents (mainly PDF documents).

This is also the case for the process integration that needs to happen along the supply chain into and out of Howden with customers and suppliers (i.e., the legal and commercial processes).

This leads to the conclusion that a strong correlation exists between becoming a digital enterprise and becoming a paperless company. 

Or, stated differently, becoming a paperless company can be a strong driver to becoming a digital enterprise.

In the UK alone, Howden needs to manage content equivalent to 15 to 20 terabytes. Because a large part of the business is document-based, the belief that becoming paperless is critical for the success of the transformation has become one of the cornerstones of Howden’s transformation implementation strategy. As a consequence, there has been a strong focus on digitisation (e.g., scanning documents and finding ways to avoid printing documents) and standardisation (e.g., consolidating 27 document productivity tools into one). When it comes to document workflows and the document management life cycle, Howden is working in accordance with a clear strategy and process: