Welcome to the MVP Show . My intention is that you listen to the stories of these MVP guests and are inspired to become an MVP and bring value to the world through your skills . If you have not checked it out already , I do a YouTube series called how to Become an MVP . The link is in the show notes . With that , let's get on with the show .
Today's guest is from the Netherlands . He works as a technical solution architect at 4 PS . He was first awarded as MVP in 2023 . He has been working with NavVision since 2007 , where he started as a consultant with NAV 4.0 . He studied economics but has always been interested in computers .
You can find links to his bio and social media in the show notes for this episode . Welcome to the show , Bert .
Thanks for having me , mark . It's a pleasure to have you all here . The introduction is good . I'm Bert , 40 years old , from the Netherlands , a very small town , barnveld . It's in the centre of the Netherlands . I live there with my wife and three kids . My oldest son is nine and two daughters from six and three .
Wow , isn't that region you live in famous for chickens ?
Yeah , the contents of chicken farms are quite condensed in Barnveld . That's the famous about it . We've got also the museum about all the chickens . Maybe all other guys say , okay , that's crazy , a museum only for chicken . But it's coming quite a lot of people in there , so that's really crazy and nice to have it .
Nice . Now tell me , what do you do for fun ?
Well , what I do for fun mostly is working at my house reconstructing everything , Because a couple of months ago , three months ago , I've moved from one house to another house and we have to renovate all our living home . So right now , that's what I'm doing for fun right now .
Nice , nice , and let me see if I can get . No , I'm not going to try and guess , but what's your favourite food , or what food do you recommend when people visit the Netherlands that they should eat ?
Well , it's mostly that's quite difficult . I like in the winter . That's mostly that , the heavy costs . It's quite heavy food but we call it burkel , a circle that's with potatoes and sauerkraut and that's quite nice to eat in the winter times .
And just before we jump into your career path and whatnot and what you've done as an MVP , the Netherlands always stands out as one of those countries that are very advanced in like renewable energy , the adoption of solar One of the things like I'm growing plants , vegetables and stuff on my property all the time One of the things that was in the Netherlands .
They invented this idea of growing plants vertically , so therefore , per square meter , you could get a much higher yield .
And then I know that there's either paths or roads that are all solar panels and they charge , and I have a feeling I'm not sure if I'm right but something by like 2030 you'll have no fossil fuel vehicles or something like that is one of the goals .
That is indeed one of the goals , indeed , and that is also typical Dutch . We want to always the first in the classroom with the best degrees and stuff like that . So we have set the goal in 2030 with no only electrical cars , but that's also typical Dutch is from the history .
We are a trading company , so we trade a lot of with all other companies sorry , all other countries and that's quite . Also had our speaking . We speak more English , german , french and Spanish . Then the Netherlands , and we adopt very fast with it and because it's also a small country , yeah , we have to innovate from what is the best way to do it .
Also have with with plants growing indeed what you said , vertical but also with our water . Netherlands is below sea level and six years ago we have quite a lot of six years it was just a food coming from from sea lands , so all is drowning , so we had to prevent that for it . So that's , yeah , we are a little bit quite innovative .
And , of course , great explorers , my , my country is called New Zealand , and that's a Dutch name , isn't it ? That's been given to our country ?
Yeah , yeah , indeed , we have in province also called sea lands so and that they were selling from sea lands and then discovered new sea lands and give it a name Same as New York . It's called New Amsterdam , but fortunately they have to sell it .
Yeah , tell me a bit about your company for PS , if I've got it right in the translations , and whatnot . Is it use specializing ? Is it construction ? Is that the area of where you operate ?
Yeah , we do only companies in the construction industry . 20 years ago we did it only in the Netherlands and we said , ok , we want one product and that's that's Microsoft .
We buy it from them and from back then it was a new vision because it's really customizable and we said , ok , how we do one product , we are one ISV only doing it in the construction market and that was growing and now we also have an international spread partnerships to other companies in there .
So I take it you've created a vertical overlay for business central for the construction sector . Is that right ?
Yeah , yeah indeed .
Is there much you have to do from country to country ? Is there any kind of ? Is there many nuances between how construction is reported on , quantified etc . In BC ? Does it differ from country to country much or it's negligible ?
Well , the base is almost in the same . You have a project and you have to control on that and your administration . But indeed there are suspicious country versions , for example , uk you have cuts with separate contractors . Germany is slightly different again .
So indeed we built a W1 based on W1 of Microsoft and we have also country versions like the same model as Microsoft does .
Yeah , yeah . And are you seeing much need to also use the Power Platform and things like Power Automate , power BI , power Pages ? Are you starting to see that integrated power apps etc more , or is it still quite separate , or are you locking that into part of your ISV story as well ?
Yeah , in a couple of years . And the construction industry is very conservative , so the innovation are going there very slow , but in a couple of two years ago we saw an immense grow of people that said , okay , we want to automate things and you can do it with the Power Platform .
So that's also that we acquire another company specialized only in the Power Platform so they can consult our customers on that one , because there wasn't growing demand on , indeed , power Apps , power BI , power Automate , and had just to , not from an ISV standpoint , but only for customizations , because a company is always special , they said , and they want always some
nice features that we don't build in our product and therefore the Power Platform is very strong for that one .
In the solutions that you've done in business central . Let's say , where do you see the role of AI playing in the next two or three years in the actual product ?
Well , that's mostly how in with AI . In an ERP system that's a little bit hard because in an ERP system when you want your figures you want to do it right and that's mostly the problem of not the problem with AI . But yeah , it is percentage of right , it's only 90% right and in an ERP system you want to have fully figured , 100% right .
But I can see there is some needs from finance figures how you see your cash flow is growing over the years and all that kind of finance or stuff . But also I think there is a need in not only the cash flow but also in your prognosis on your project .
And especially we have some companies that has quite a large of projects and that's a little special company . For them they want to do a prognosis for the coming years and that is doable with AI , I think .
Interesting . Do you think AI is going to impact the construction industry ?
It certainly does indeed , Just for recognition and all the automation and stuff like that .
Yeah , interesting . I was involved in a project in Hong Kong for a construction company . One of the biggest things as we engage on this project was artifact storage . So you know , inspect site manager , whatever goes out , and they take photos of lots of stuff . And so , as cameras have advanced , those photos have got larger .
The document collection , or artifact collection , let's call it , has grown exponentially and they were even finding SharePoint was really limiting where they could go . How do you handle , you know , the aggregate of documents that are generated on a big construction project ?
There are indeed a lot of documents on that and also when you're offering stuff , there are a lot of details on that and it's quite large because you have also growing and indeed we see SharePoint has some needs .
But SharePoint is also quite good in collaboration , so that you see , also in consulting companies there's a lot of subcontracting involved in one project and that's where you need SharePoint .
But what we see also is indeed what you said that there's a limit storage on that and therefore we use Azure Data Lake or file storage Just to store all the files around there and if the project is finished , we are moving to that store .
Yeah , yeah , smart move . When I was doing that job , which was many moons ago , that didn't exist from Microsoft at that time and , of course , the limitations on SharePoint were much higher . It had an advance to where it's got to now . Interesting . How did you become an MVP ? What was that journey for you ?
Well , it wasn't for me in tenets to be coming on MVP and mostly what we see in my company , fop yes , I'm working there for 10 years we were always a little bit back from the versions .
But when transforming from Dynamics and in V2Base Central , I said to myself , oh , we need to be four on the latest versions always and investigate stuff , new features that Microsoft bring out , because when we're moving also to the cloud , you've got a lot of more features on that .
And that's why I started investigating in the community on Jammer Also , we got a little bit more collaboration with Microsoft and so you learn people , you take advice from people . And then I realized , ok , hey , I'm getting a lot of from that community and why shouldn't I give it back ?
So in a corona time someone asked me OK , I bet you can tell something about telemetry inside this central on that event . And I said , yeah , ok , sure , it is safe behind your computer , not with 40 people in the room . And that's why I started from OK , that was quite fun . Then last year a colleague of mine joined me . He's also an MVP .
I said , ok , why don't we do a session together on tech days ? So yeah , ok , I said OK , let's do that . When I said that a couple of weeks , I said why I'm doing this ? Because there were 200 people in the room , so that was a little bit scary for me for the first time , but that was quite fun . And then you learn a lot of more .
People share your knowledge , and that's my main goal just to share knowledge about what you have learned . And that's , I think , also the greatest . When you see , in the business world there's a really dense community and you know each other , you see each other at events and from just people you know they become friends Just to share other things than business .
And that's why I said , ok , have a good session . Someone said , okay , I will recognize you as an MVP . And then I said , oh shit , now it becomes a stress to recognize it .
Indeed , Wow , in your observation of coming from NAV and now in Business Central , what do you miss ? That was an NAV that you don't have anymore , and it might have been a way of working . It might have been the fact that you could touch the hardware , any number of things .
And then , what excites you , the flip side of the question , what excites you about working with Business Central ?
The most downside is , yeah , you have in the central the short curbs keys and working . Now you are working in a browser and that's a little bit slower than you have gotten a Windows application just running on your local machine and we see that it is a little bit slower down , but right now , you see also , microsoft is picking that up and working on that .
That's a little bit what I miss , but that's the only thing , because there are a lot of new opportunities in there and that's what I see is from CAL to AL language , microsoft investing a lot of new features in the language . We have a lot of objects in there .
So , yeah , it's starting a real comprehensive language , but also moving to the cloud , and that is one thing we see that we thought , ok , constructions have what I said , they are a little bit conservative , but when they move into the cloud , there are a lot of opportunities out there .
You can do stuff with Azure , with the BOW platform and all the connections are there and that's something what we said . Ok , that's a huge benefit of Business Central in the cloud and that's very interesting .
Yeah , and is it nice not having all your customers on different versions as an all upgrade pubs that you had in the NAV time frame . You'd have that a lot less now in cloud right .
Yeah , yeah indeed , and we have some customers that are on NAV 2009 , on prem still , and last year , because we are on a modified base app yet . So last year we went 130 customers from one version to another version and that went very smooth and we said , ok , if we do it for 300 customers , that will be amazing .
That's just in one month that we migrate 130 customers for one person to another .
Wow , that's incredible .
That was a really good feeling in that and we had to pressure that because there was some security issue from OO2 . So we said , OK , we must . And that was a really great feeling when the job was finished and we take a beer to really tell her and said , OK , give us a really great , good project with no issues at all .
Hey , thanks for listening . I'm your host Business Application MVP Mark Smith , otherwise known as the NZ365 guy . If you like the show and want to be a supporter , check out buymeacoffeecom forward slash NZ365 guy . Thanks again and see you next time .