Over the past years, IJB Groep has made focused investments in the development of its organization, products, and production facilities. In doing so, it became increasingly clear that the next step is not only about technology, but primarily about how engineering, digitalization, and production are connected. This development is an essential part of the NEXT IJB way of working, where integration, speed, and predictability are key.
Within the current way of working, handover moments between disciplines still occur, where information is interpreted, adjusted, or rebuilt. This takes time, increases the risk of errors, and makes the overall process less predictable than it should be. This is exactly where NEXT IJB sees the greatest opportunity for improvement.
Driven by this conviction, NEXT IJB actively searched for a partner that goes beyond providing tools and contributes to a fundamentally different way of working. In Vlieg Engineering, NEXT IJB found a partner that understands this vision and is able to realize it technically.
The collaboration started at the foundation, strengthening the underlying engineering logic. To enable a generic and scalable approach, adjustments were required in algorithms and calculation rules. This marked the starting point of the partnership, resulting within a few months in a stable and validated foundation that can be directly applied in practice.
Building on this foundation, the collaboration deepened, not as a traditional software trajectory, but as a joint development towards a new production chain. A chain in which engineering is no longer a preparatory step but becomes the starting point of an integrated and digitally driven process, fully aligned with the principles of NEXT IJB.
The next step in this development is the realization of a direct connection between engineering and production, where product data is not only used for drawings, but serves as the driving source for the factory. This includes automatically generating reinforcement, production data, and machine control, without manual transformations.
This approach enables a shift towards a generic process in which input from various modelling environments, such as Tekla or Revit, can be directly transformed into production, independent of specific machines or vendors. This creates a flexible and future-proof system that adapts to the decisions of tomorrow.
For NEXT IJB, this marks an important step towards greater predictability, higher speed, and reduced dependency on external parties, not by optimizing existing processes, but by fundamentally redesigning the chain, as envisioned within NEXT IJB.
This development aligns with the broader movement within NEXT IJB, where an integrated approach to engineering, digitalization, and production is being established. Within NEXT IJB, this way of working is further developed towards a fully digitally driven production chain, with the goal of structurally improving speed, consistency, and performance.