Innius Testimonial
by Tronrud’s CEO

You can’t be the passenger

When out of the office, Olav Tronrud, CEO at innius customer, Tronrud Engineering, is passionate about flying. As a highly competent pilot himself, he is regularly behind the controls of Tronrud’s helicopter, a Eurocopter EC-120B Colibri. For Olav flying is a metaphor for managing Tronrud, “Flying a helicopter means that you need to be in control of the situation and that’s comparable with running a company as well. You need to be in control of the company, you can’t be the passenger. You constantly need to do changes.”

Embracing change

As a leading machine builder, embracing change, has been a huge factor in Tronrud’s success story. It was an early adopter of 3D printing, and was experimenting and learning what the implications of these new machines would be, before they could be put to commercial use. As Olav explains, “We bought the first plastic 3D printer fifteen years ago. The quality wasn’t good enough, so we couldn’t sell what the printer was doing, but it gave us knowledge about how we should think, how we should work, to design parts that could be produced in a 3D printer. So as the technology got better and the quality of the printing improved, we already had the knowledge about how to use them, so we could enter the market quicker than our competitors, with 3D printed parts.” It’s this forward thinking attitude which also led Tronrud to adopt the industrial IoT platform innius.

Partnerships

Olav is also realistic about the importance of strong partnerships with companies like innus to be able to deliver customer success: “I do see that in today’s business it is even more important to have good partners to collaborate with together to deliver projects. Because it’s important to have the best software, to have the best mechanical solutions, and even for a company as Tronrud it is hard to be best at all the aspects, that’s why it’s crucial to find good partners.”

Added value for the customer

Olav: “At Tronrud Engineering we have always been very focused on what kind of value we’re creating for the customer. We see that selling a machine is not only about delivering a machine to the customer, and then it’s over. It’s very important to do the follow-up and ensure that the customer has the maximum up-time from the machine, so that the machine can create the most value. And in that sense it’s very important for us to have feedback and get data from the machine, so we can, based on the numbers, do maintenance and also do changes in mechanical things, to be able to continue improving the machines. By adding innius solutions to our machines, we appear more attractive to our customers because they feel that they are getting more value out of the machine.”

Getting the numbers

By allowing Tronrud’s engineers to remotely monitor machine performance data, they can diagnose issues and make decisions based on facts. As Olav explains, the numbers are important, “We have learned a lot from working with different customers, different cultures, and some of them are pickier about the details and they want to have the numbers. And we have used that experience to be even more picky about the numbers, about the details of the machine, to ensure every part of the machine is working properly.”