Plan de evaluación de las 5’S

Rijkswaterstaat is the executive department of the ministry of Infrastructure and Environment in the Netherlands. With around 8700 employees they operate via 7 different national

divisions and 7 regional divisions with a management board on top, see appendix G. From the 7 national divisions GPO (Large Projects and Maintenance) and PPO (Program, Projects and Maintenance) are the departments responsible for the construction and maintenance of the national highways. This report focuses on GPO which has 4 main departments namely:

• Procurement- and tender management • Production- and project management • Engineering and technical management • Business management and process control

From the 1970s RWS changed their business from being an engineering and construction company towards a more project-based management organization. Infrastructural projects are necessary for the mobility and economic growth in the Netherlands which has to deal with the topics such as the urbanization, digitalization and sustainability. The ministry of Infrastructure and Environment has written an overview of current and future projects and programs in the so called MIRT (in Dutch: Meerjarenprogramma Infrastructuur, Ruimte en Transport). The MIRT has intensive collaboration between provinces, municipalities, water authorities and transportation regions. The MIRT facilitates a management meeting every year with each of the 5 MIRT-areas (North, East, South, South-West, and North-West).

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Nevertheless the MIRT only describes a broad policy such as sustainability, safety, mobility and so on, which is written in the Structure Vision Infrastructure and Environment (in Dutch: Structuurvisie Infrastructuur en Ruimte, SVIR). The MIRT has some more specific goals described whereas sustainability is now even an integrated part of the plan. The ambition to be energy- and climate neutral in 2030 is one of the most important aspects. The first energy-neutral road that will be realized is the project A6-Almere which is part of a larger program Schiphol-Amsterdam-Almere (SAA). Some national programs and some programs related to a specific region were set up and described in the MIRT related to the road construction industry:

- “More Safety”, to reduce injuries and deaths as a result of accidents on the main road

network.

- “Multi-year noise remediation program”. For national highways the target was set to 60 decibel. Silent roads and noise barriers are some examples where RWS is focusing on which are being developed with the market.

- National Collaboration Program Air Quality.

- “Beter Benutten” where in the first phase the goal is to achieve 20% reduction of congestion during rush hours on specific corridors of the busiest areas in the country. - Program Replacement and Renovation main roads.

- Program SmartwayZ.NL, to improve the business climate of Brainport South-East Netherlands and Greenport Venlo. Its goal is to increase the mobility system with smart techniques and innovations such as Intelligent Transportation Systems and Smart Mobility.

One of the projects from SmartwayZ.NL is the InnovA58. With 160 kilometre of road at the A58 between Breda and Tilburg an additional task of the project was to investigate how innovations could contribute to solutions and how to pace it up. - “Acceptation and chances for spatial integration of new energy systems”. Focusing to

pace up the energy transition towards a more sustainable one.

Looking at these programs they could be helpful to investigate and invest in possible solutions and to stimulate product innovations where possible. Nevertheless most of the

programs don’t have specific (smart) goals related to the potential added value of product innovations or a CoPS as a whole. It makes it difficult to know when and where certain types of product innovations could be applied in future projects. The requested improvements and outcomes on a product level are not clearly defined.

Employees of RWS also mentioned that some innovations are not applied anymore after they were successfully applied once. This could be the case for innovations that will be applied at InnovA58. Another testing location where innovations are applied is the so called

“Road of the Future” in Oss, the N329. But a clear roadmap after the first successful implementation of a product innovation is missing.

When developing and implementing innovations it should be discussed within RWS to see if it can be applied in more projects which could then be communicated to the market. Gerling (2014) did a research on inter-project learning within projects of RWS. He described the characteristics, originally formulated by Gann and Salter (2000, p.959), of project-based firms in the construction industry:

- Projects create the core around which design- and production processes are organized.

- Mostly one-off productions or at least highly customised products and services. - They operate in varying of companies along the supplier-customer chain.

Looking at the different projects, each project is managed by a team of RWS, the so called IPM-team (Integral Project Management). RWS appoints a Project Manager, Manager Project Control, Environmental Manager, Technical Manager and a Contract Manager to guide and control the realisation and exploitation phase of the project. On the basis of the contract the roles and responsibilities are communicated between RWS and the executive

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party. Between projects Gerling (2014) also looked at inter-project learning and innovations within RWS projects. His conclusion was that inter-project learning on innovations had too little attention at projects of RWS. Furthermore he saw no control mechanism towards this process of learning between projects whereas learning was often done on a voluntary basis and via informal networks. The positive side of his research was that employees of RWS acknowledged the fact that innovation is important and that the learning process can and has to be improved in the future. The next paragraph will give some more insight information about how projects are originated and how the tendering process at RWS works.