By now I had experienced Covestro as a rather formal organisation. There were structures, responsibilities, standards and rules, and sometimes I found these constraining.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But that was not the whole story.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I gradually discovered that, if you stayed somewhat under the radar and found the right companions, quite a lot could still be done<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Covestro Analytics Platform was a good example.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When I first became involved, the platform was still something of a pioneering activity. A first version of a serverless data lake framework (SDLF) had been set up, and not everything had yet been cast in stone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I liked that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There was a willingness to try something, learn from it and then build a better version, rather than pretending that the first design had to be the final one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I built some of my applications on that first version. Later, when the second version of the platform, the broader Datazone, emerged, I was invited to migrate these applications to it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I was not involved in designing the second version itself, but I received good support from the platform team during the migration. In the process, we also developed functionality for ingesting data from Layer-3 MES systems into the platform.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I could therefore contribute some of the experience I had gained from working with the first version. The Layer-3 ingestion functionality could become a reusable building block rather than something that had to be solved separately for every MES application.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This was exactly the kind of collaboration I enjoyed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The platform team brought the cloud and data expertise. I brought the MES and plant perspective. And there was another IT colleague who was particularly valuable because he could bridge the gap between OT and the AWS environment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n None of us had to know the complete answer beforehand.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We could work it out together.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That was quite different from some of the more formal processes I had encountered elsewhere in Covestro. There was room to experiment, learn and adjust.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The MES implementation at Santa Margarida was a completely different story.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It originated from an idea that had already existed at DSM and followed from the earlier migration work. Turning that idea into reality was a fairly tedious project. Halfway through, we had to redo the architecture in AWS, which made an already complicated project considerably more cumbersome.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But eventually we got there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Santa Margarida went live in 2023.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n At the time, I did not think particularly much about whether this achievement was visible to the wider organisation. We had a project to do, we found people who could help us, solved the problems that arose and got it running.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Then, in 2025, I encountered an amusing consequence of having worked rather under the radar.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the context of a Covestro award, the gMES programme was presented as the first cloud implementation of an MES<\/strong> in Covestro.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That was not quite how I remembered it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Santa Margarida had already been running in the cloud for two years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I did not make much of it. In a way, it was almost the logical consequence of how I had worked. If you operate quietly with a small group of people, solve problems together and do not need the wider organisation to validate what you are doing, there is a small downside as well:<\/p>\n\n\n\n sometimes nobody outside that circle knows what has actually been achieved.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n But perhaps that was a price I was quite willing to pay.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Because there was also an upside.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I had discovered that the formal organisation did not tell the whole story. Within it were people who were curious, technically capable and willing to cross boundaries. With the right companions, there was room to experiment and to build things that had not yet been prescribed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And that became one of the more positive things I took from my time at Covestro.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Amazing things can happen when you find the right companions.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Even if, occasionally, the organisation finds out about them only later.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I also realise how much of what I was able to do at Covestro had been shaped by my years at DSM.<\/p>\n\n\n\n DSM had given me the opportunity to develop not only as a professional, but also as a person. Working with colleagues, managing people at times, dealing with different personalities and trying to understand what motivates or frustrates people had made me increasingly aware of the psychology of organisations and of the people within them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Professionally, DSM had given me an unusually broad playground. I had been able to move between technology, operations, projects, IT, data and organisational questions. I had not followed one narrow professional path; I had gradually accumulated different ways of looking at a problem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Covestro continued that development, but in different directions. The migration and the work that followed gave me the opportunity to develop further in areas that had been much less familiar to me before \u2014 particularly cloud computing and, later, AI<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So although I sometimes found the Covestro organisation difficult to navigate, I cannot separate that experience from the things I learned there. I added new professional capabilities to a foundation that had largely been built at DSM.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Perhaps that is also why finding the right companions mattered so much. By then I had learned enough to recognise when someone had a different piece of the puzzle \u2014 and enough confidence to work with them without needing to know everything myself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There was also a repeated message from management, including from people who had themselves come from DSM: \u201cWe are Covestro now.\u201d<\/strong> The intention was understandable. The integration had to become a success, and at some point people had to stop thinking in terms of \u201cus\u201d and \u201cthem\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I nevertheless found it difficult when this seemed to imply that we should simply forget DSM.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I could not do that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n DSM was not just the company I happened to work for before the integration. It had been my formation period, professionally and personally. It had given me opportunities to develop in many different directions, to work with people, to manage people, to learn about organisations and their psychology, and to develop as a professional. Much of the way I looked at problems had been formed there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You cannot simply switch that off because the name on the building changes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Over time I came to see this less as a question of choosing between DSM and Covestro and more as a question of having more than one identity<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I sometimes think of people of Italian descent who have lived in the Netherlands for several generations. They may be completely Dutch, while still speaking Italian at home, knowing where their family came from or even putting an Italian tricolore on their car.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There is nothing contradictory about that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You do not have to abandon one identity in order to acquire another.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Perhaps the same applies to organisations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I could become part of Covestro without pretending that DSM had never existed. I could carry the things DSM had taught me into Covestro, learn new things there and gradually add them to what I already knew.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In fact, that is exactly what happened.<\/p>\n\n\n\n DSM had given me a broad professional foundation. Covestro added new experiences, particularly in areas such as cloud computing and AI.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So perhaps \u201cWe are One\u201d<\/strong> does not have to mean that everybody has the same history.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It can also mean that people with different histories become part of the same organisation \u2014 without having to erase where they came from.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" By now I had experienced Covestro as a rather formal organisation. There were structures, responsibilities, standards and rules, and sometimes I found these constraining. But that was not the whole story. I gradually discovered that, if you stayed somewhat under the radar and found the right companions, quite a lot could still be done. The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_heusje_archive_order":160,"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[19,18,21,23,20],"class_list":["post-451","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-career","tag-career","tag-covestro","tag-dsm","tag-english","tag-work-culture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/heusje.nl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/451","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/heusje.nl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/heusje.nl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/heusje.nl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/heusje.nl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=451"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/heusje.nl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/451\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":459,"href":"https:\/\/heusje.nl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/451\/revisions\/459"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/heusje.nl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=451"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/heusje.nl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=451"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/heusje.nl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=451"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}A different story: Santa Margarida<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Looking back,<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
We are One \u2014 but I did not forget where I came from<\/h3>\n\n\n\n