Slalom

Use cases

What this looks like
inside Fugro.

Fifteen concrete scenarios — from vessel-side support and Geo-data landing zones to AI-assisted interpretation and product-funded software teams. Each one is a starting point for a conversation about where Slalom can help first.

01 / 05

Service Desk & Operations Redesign

Vessel, site and office IT support — re-engineered

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Use case 01

Vessel-side IT support that follows the sun

Scenario
Survey vessels in the North Sea, Gulf of Mexico and offshore Australia all log P1 incidents into a desk built for office hours in Leidschendam. Acquisition downtime burns rig day-rates while tickets sit in a queue.
Approach
Redesign the desk into a 24/7 follow-the-sun model with regional swarming pods, a vessel-aware CMDB (acquisition rigs, MBES, AUVs, comms stacks) and a chat-first channel that works over low-bandwidth VSAT.
Outcome
Mean time to restore on vessel-impacting incidents cut by half; acquisition downtime attributable to IT measurably reduced per project.

Use case 02

Field engineer white-glove tier

Scenario
Geotechnical and geophysical engineers mobilise to site with ruggedised laptops, specialist sensors and bespoke software — and lose days to image, licence and driver issues at the worst possible moment.
Approach
Stand up a mobilisation white-glove tier: pre-configured kits, a self-service portal tied to project codes, and a bot that pre-checks software entitlements before deployment.
Outcome
Mobilisation-day IT incidents drop sharply; project managers stop losing the first 48 hours of every campaign to laptop problems.

Use case 03

Conversational AI for L1 deflection

Scenario
Tier-1 takes thousands of repetitive tickets a month — VPN, MFA, SAP access, GIS licences — across multiple languages and time zones.
Approach
Deploy a multilingual conversational agent on top of a properly curated knowledge base, with safe handover to humans for anything project-critical.
Outcome
Material deflection of L1 volume, freeing the desk to focus on vessel and field work where minutes matter.

02 / 05

Cloud Platform & DevOps Operating Model

A paved road from sensor to insight

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Use case 01

A Geo-data landing zone built for petabytes

Scenario
Acquisition data — multibeam, sub-bottom, LiDAR, point clouds, photogrammetry — lands across regional clouds, on-prem NAS and project SharePoints. Engineers spend more time hunting data than interpreting it.
Approach
Design a multi-region cloud landing zone with object storage tiers tuned for hot interpretation and cold archive, identity federated across business lines, FinOps guardrails and a paved-road ingest pipeline from vessel to lakehouse.
Outcome
A single, governed home for Geo-data with predictable unit economics and lineage from raw ping to delivered deliverable.

Use case 02

Internal developer platform for Geo-software teams

Scenario
Software teams building Fugro's interpretation and digital-twin products each maintain their own pipelines, secrets, and deployment scripts — so every new hire spends weeks before shipping.
Approach
Build an internal developer platform with golden paths for Python/Node/.NET services, GPU-aware compute templates for ML, and a service catalogue that wraps Fugro's data and identity APIs.
Outcome
Commit-to-production lead time measured in minutes; new engineers shipping in their first week.

Use case 03

FinOps for compute-heavy interpretation

Scenario
GPU and HPC bills for processing point clouds and seismic-style workloads spike unpredictably; finance can't model the next quarter and engineering can't explain the last one.
Approach
Stand up a FinOps practice — showback by project, anomaly detection, commitment management, and engineering rituals that tie cost back to billable scope.
Outcome
Cloud cost-of-goods on data products becomes legible and defensible at the project margin level.

03 / 05

Automation, RPA & AI Integration

Clearing the queue from acquisition to deliverable

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Use case 01

AI-assisted survey QC and interpretation

Scenario
Senior geophysicists spend hours per kilometre of line doing first-pass picking, anomaly flagging and QA on near-identical seabed conditions.
Approach
Train and integrate ML models for first-pass interpretation (pipeline detection, boulder picking, seabed classification) wrapped in a human-in-the-loop UI, with evals and drift monitoring built in.
Outcome
First-pass interpretation throughput multiplied; senior specialists redirected to the judgement calls clients actually pay for.

Use case 02

Intelligent document processing for tenders & reports

Scenario
Bid teams re-key data from RFPs, tender clarifications and client specs; reporting teams reformat the same survey results into client-specific deliverables.
Approach
Deploy IDP pipelines that extract structured requirements from tender documents and a templated generation layer for client deliverables, with reviewer workflows and audit trails.
Outcome
Bid response time and report turnaround compressed; consistency across regions improves win rate and reduces rework.

Use case 03

Copilots for client-facing Geo-data portals

Scenario
Clients log into Fugro portals to find specific deliverables, charts or anomalies — and end up emailing project managers because navigation is hard.
Approach
Build a RAG-based copilot grounded in project data and deliverables, with strict per-client data isolation and evaluation harnesses tuned to Geo terminology.
Outcome
Self-serve data retrieval becomes the default; PM time shifts from look-ups to advisory conversations.

04 / 05

Application & Data

From acquisition systems to data products

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Use case 01

Application rationalisation across business lines

Scenario
Marine, Land and Geo-consulting each carry overlapping CRMs, project management tools, time-and-expense systems and bespoke interpretation software accreted from acquisitions.
Approach
Run a TIME-style assessment across the estate, agree a target architecture, and sequence a retire/replatform/refactor roadmap aligned to business-line P&L.
Outcome
Double-digit reduction in application count, meaningful licence savings, and a single coherent path for new tools.

Use case 02

A Geo-data product platform

Scenario
The same bathymetry, geotechnical and metocean data is re-extracted, re-cleaned and re-shaped for every analytics or AI initiative.
Approach
Define Geo-data products with owners, schemas, SLAs and contracts on a lakehouse architecture; expose them through a catalogue with lineage and quality scores.
Outcome
AI and analytics teams build on certified, reusable data; time-to-first-insight on new use cases collapses.

Use case 03

Integration backbone for acquisition-to-delivery

Scenario
Acquisition systems, processing software, project tools and client portals are stitched together by point-to-point integrations and overnight batch jobs that nobody dares touch.
Approach
Introduce an event-driven integration architecture with domain APIs, a developer portal and observability — replacing brittle batches with contracts.
Outcome
Project data flows in near-real-time from vessel to client; new integrations land in days, not quarters.

05 / 05

Product-based Ways of Working

Durable teams around Fugro's digital products

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Use case 01

From project IT to product-funded Geo-software

Scenario
Digital initiatives at Fugro are funded as projects with end dates, so platforms lose their teams the moment they go live and quietly decay.
Approach
Identify the durable Geo-software products (data platform, client portal, interpretation suite), stand up persistent teams with clear ownership, and shift funding to a quarterly outcome-based model.
Outcome
Platforms gain owners and roadmaps; leadership steers by outcome metrics rather than project gates.

Use case 02

Quarterly outcome planning across regions

Scenario
Annual planning forces every region to commit to a feature list 14 months out — and most of it is wrong by Q2.
Approach
Replace the annual intake with quarterly outcome planning: north-star metrics per product, leading indicators, and a lightweight reallocation forum with regional and global leadership.
Outcome
Investment follows evidence; the business stops paying to finish features it no longer wants.

Use case 03

Engineering retention through coherent work

Scenario
Specialist software and data engineers leave because their work is fragmented across short projects with no ownership of outcomes.
Approach
Restructure into product teams aligned to value streams, introduce engineering career paths and rituals (demo days, blameless retros, technical investment time).
Outcome
Voluntary attrition in critical engineering roles drops; recruiting story becomes credible to senior candidates.

Which one should we start with?

Pick the scenario closest to a problem you're carrying and we'll shape a two-week diagnostic around it.

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