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Digital Leadership

Digital transformation is happening in an old factory hall in Bjerringbro

Grundfos has made courageous choices since the company began making pumps in 1945. Now they are teaming up with Microsoft to continue the transformation

In the Danish countryside the headquarter of Grundfos is situated – right here pumps and water solutions have been made for decades. But in the old factory halls of Bjerringbro lots of new things are pumping.

We met head of Digital Transformation at Grundfos, Fredrik Östbye, to learn about his insights from working on Grundfos’ transformation for two years.

With the use of Internet of Things (IoT) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) the company is bringing their products into a new era. And to Fredrik Östbye it makes perfect sense to place the Digital Transformation Office right in the heart of Grundfos’ headquarter in Bjerringbro.

“We are not putting up a fancy office in Berlin or San Francisco – not even in Copenhagen. We have decided to run our digital transformation as an upgrade of our entire core organization. We don’t want to have a cool digital department somewhere else. No, this is our new core. And it makes it easier for the entire organization to adapt new things, when they took part in developing them,” says Fredrik Östbye.

We basically run our projects as if they were startup companies

  • Fredrik Östbye

Startup mindset with approval from the top

In the Digital Transformation Office all the different parts of the organization meet to create the future together. Fredrik Östbye is convinced this is the way to get things done and break down barriers between different departments.

“We basically run our projects as if they were startup companies,” he says, and emphasizes one of the most important learnings he has gotten from his work with digital transformation:

“A transformation should always be a top-down thing.”

Fredrik Östbye thinks that the way to embrace and develop new technologies is to get approval from the top before you set of to explore new things.

“You cannot make this impactful if you try to grow it bottom-up. It is great with a lot of interest and initiatives going on, but at one point you need to take this to a top management decision to really make a transformation. If you don’t have that in place, you will never be able to have all the needed stakeholders involved.”

Get a partner

Another learning on digital transformation has been to choose a technology partner.

“I think one of the key challenges for big corporations is that they always try to make everything by themselves. We should have gotten expertise outside of Grundfos much faster. Because getting a technology partner onboard gives you faster access to new technologies and helps you start using them. Partnerships helps you get the fundamentals in place,” says Fredrik Östbye.

Fredrik Östbye is leading a team of data scientists and researchers who are transforming Grundfos’ products.

What is IoT in a pump?

You can describe IoT in a pump as attaching a small brain to the pump either on the side of the pump or inside the pump. In the future this brain will be a natural part of the pump.

How does Grundfos use it?

IoT is a fundamental technology for Grundfos. It connects their products to the internet and captures data from them. The data is used to optimize the operations of the pumps and to give feedback.