Wirtschaftsforum: Mr. Schuller, with your software and service offerings, you are involved in both industrial plant construction and structural engineering. What solutions do you specifically rely on?

Helmut Schuller: For industrial plant construction, we use Aveva products, which we then adapt, implement, and fine-tune. Before founding SCHULLER & Company, I had been responsible for Aveva's Global Sales activities for many years, so I am very familiar with all the possibilities of the relevant product suites. In construction, we rely on our own solution, bocad, which is probably the best product on the market for execution planning, as it can also directly represent the actual manufacturing process. The application fields of our solutions are as broad and global as they are complex: In recent years, there has hardly been a power mast constructed in India that was not planned with the help of bocad; the same is likely true for the anchorages of wind turbines at sea.

Wirtschaftsforum: What is the central added value for your customers in combining these two approaches?

Helmut Schuller: In everyday life, both areas are actually inseparably linked, even though they represent fundamentally different disciplines. Through the appropriate Collaboration Suite, we can solve the problem that the individual disciplines often only consider the digital twin in terms of their own specific challenges. However, to obtain the operating license for a facility and to be able to control all processes as efficiently as possible, not only the process engineering aspects must be considered, but also the planning of escape routes, the accessibility to fire extinguishers, restrictions regarding possible sparks in certain zones, and many other issues within the scope of BIM. With our solutions, we bring both together – thus enabling users to have a straightforward overview of all relevant aspects.
 

Wirtschaftsforum: How exactly do you understand the digital twin in this context?

Helmut Schuller: I like to compare the digital twin to Google Maps. If you input the location of our company at Mergenthalerallee in Eschborn there, you will be directly led to our building. If you zoom out a bit further, the surrounding area comes into view: for instance, you'll see that Ernst & Young operates a branch next to us, or that there is an Italian restaurant around the corner. If you click on it, you will find its opening times and dish of the day, and receive many more details. Ultimately, you do not know from which sources these individual pieces of information come from – but from a user perspective, that may not matter to you. What is important is that as a consumer, you have access to all the information you need. This is ideally how the digital twin functions—it's just that it deals with essential information for process control and safety-related aspects that need to be considered with dependable foresight. Because once a major incident occurs in an industrial context, often resulting in the worst-case scenario even with personal injury, the drive to prevent the next issue is generally high – only by then, it's usually too late.
 

Wirtschaftsforum: What do you see as the core strengths of your company?

Helmut Schuller: I believe that in our everyday life, it is evident that we are owner-managed and can thus operate independently of short-term investor interests. If we have a good idea and are convinced that it will help our customers, then we want to implement it swiftly and straightforwardly – here we take a page from Nike's slogan: Just Do It! That's also why I decided to found SCHULLER & Company six years ago simply because I was convinced that outside of corporate structures, we could be more flexible and influential in the market with significantly lower coordination costs. We now employ 80 staff members and would like to reach the symbolically important milestone of 100 this year. In doing so, we rely not only on people with backgrounds in relevant IT and engineering professions but also on interested career changers from essentially unrelated fields who have acquired skills important to us during their careers, such as in communication or marketing. Moreover, we have the great advantage of being able to access the entire talent pool without geographical restrictions – long before the coronavirus crisis we had consistently focused on sustainable remote work concepts. The restrictions of the pandemic have therefore hardly affected us – we were able to continue working as normal.