Hard hat missing in Aalst

On Sunday 2 October 2022, for the Open Company Day, Jan De Nul opened the gates to everything behind its office in Aalst: warehouses, workshops, garages and a building site. The company that helped widen the Panama Canal had exactly one problem that day. Jan was missing.

Jan is the mascot. A white hard hat with arms, legs and, when he’s on the case, a moustache. He had hidden himself somewhere on the site, and 7,500 visitors set out to find him. With their phones, and with what we built: the registration at home, the QR code at the gate and the treasure hunt along the way.

An open company day is free, but a workshop is not a festival field. A one-kilometre route between lathes and overhead cranes can’t take 7,500 people at once. So you registered in advance, per time slot: eight slots from 9 am to 5 pm, each with a ceiling. Full is full. A fully booked hour simply vanished from the list. No waiting list, no “sorry” email, no arguing at the gate.

The form asked what the organisers actually needed, and nothing more: how many of you (twelve and over and children separately), how you’re getting there (the parking stewards wanted to know), in which language and why. The newsletter was a box you had to tick yourself. As it should be.

After registering, you got a confirmation email with the practical info and a personal QR code. Print it or show it on your phone, either was fine.

At the gate, a staff member scanned that code with the browser of an ordinary phone. No scanner app, no special device, no cables. The screen showed right away who was standing there and how many of them. And since a family rarely turns up with exactly the number it filled in three weeks earlier, the staff member adjusted the numbers on the spot. Anyone who showed up without registering was still counted, via a separate button. In our code, that button was called “Free Willy”. Developers, eh.

Afterwards, Jan De Nul got everything in a spreadsheet: numbers per time slot, transport, language and reason for visiting. Handy for the evaluation, and for whoever organises the next one.

Inside, the treasure hunt began. Again: no app to download. Nobody installs an app for one Sunday afternoon, and nobody wants to explain how at the gate. Scan the big QR code at the start and your phone becomes your guide.

Jan introduces himself, explains that he’s gone into hiding and shows the map with every spot he might be in. Then a warm-up question: how many cars does Jan De Nul have for its employees? 115, 275 or 900? The hint was right there: sometimes the answer is in the room you’re standing in. You were standing in the company car garage. It’s 900.

The route ran from the small garage past the warehouses, goods reception, the welding shop, the turning shop, the paint shop and the big garage, across the building site of the new office and into the joinery. Every room had a QR code. Scanning it opened the right set of screens, and the map showed where you were.

Each stop is a handful of screens to swipe through. What happens here? A few facts with big numbers, like the 6,000 shipments Jan De Nul organises every year. A question or a task: how many boxes fit in a trailer, or take a selfie with your favourite machine. And every stop ends with Jan already walking off: “Too bad! I’m not hiding here.”

The best part was the stories. What gets welded, turned and painted in Aalst leaves for sites and ships all over the world. So five stops came with a flagship project: a wind farm off the coast of Taiwan, the new locks of the Panama Canal, an underwater breakwater in Benin, a power cable to Crete laid deeper than anyone had ever laid one, and the Northwester 2 wind farm off Ostend.

A rack full of spare parts gets a lot more exciting when you know it ends up in Panama.

In the joinery, you were done. Jan found, congratulations, and now trade your vouchers for a drink, a healthy snack and a surprise. Anyone with battery left paid the photo booth a visit.

Jan De Nul supplied the stories, the facts and the questions. We built the rest: the registration site, the emails, the check-in, the treasure hunt and a back office where every text, question, answer and photo could be changed without a developer. Because an event app only lives for one day, and the last text change always comes the night before.

A phone as an on-site guide is something we also made for Testerep, cycling across a vanished island. And registrations with numbers, a waiting list and exports are also part of the ImmoGolf tool.