IMPORTANT INFORMATION

Only applications that meet the predefined criteria of Aquafin (skills, work experience, language proficiency, and availability) in this job post will be considered. If the above is not respected, Aquafin reserves the right to reject the application.
Enclosed you will find various documents that form an integral part of the “Statement of Work” and are deemed to have been read and approved upon the consultant’s start.

About Aquafin

At Aquafin, we connect people with people, water with technology. We stay ahead of change and work towards a living environment in harmony with water. We do this with water purification and sewerage, but also through innovation and the energy transition.

Every day, we contribute to better water quality and a healthy living environment. We realize infrastructure projects that collect and purify domestic wastewater and continuously work on optimizing our existing networks and installations. In doing so, we support the ambition to achieve the ecological objectives for our watercourses.

As analyst & lead smart controls, you are responsible for identifying the needs of various use cases in the context of smart controls. You will provide the functional translation of those needs to the developers, as well as monitor their work and test the process end-to-end.

You will take the lead in analyzing and following up on use cases and will also act as the right hand of the product owner, for example by leading certain scrum meetings to monitor the status, problems and such, to guide, define necessary actions, etc.

The smart controls are quite complex in nature. This involves understanding business processes in operations, asset management, R&D and Innovation in the context of wastewater processing, as well as understanding the necessary data flows, data needs, internal (Aquafin) data both from internal applications and from PLCs that send data to the cloud via MQTT, as well as external data (precipitation/electricity prices/…) that are used to build smart controls.

But also the necessary insight into error messages from smart controls, alerts towards operations, as well as general and functional follow-up of each of our smart controls.

The intention is also to work increasingly towards machine learning & AI in order to make use of predictions, etc.

There is a need for a structured approach, good analysis documentation, and a lot of communication with the involved parties (Business Information Analysts per domain, Operating Technologies, source applications and stakeholders, product owners, data engineers, solution architect, business stakeholders…).

Specific knowledge & capabilities:

• Analytical thinking: a good analyst must be able to analyze and solve complex problems through logical thinking and reasoning.
• Analytical depth: sufficient experience with in-depth analysis is necessary, as the data within Aquafin can be complex and widely distributed across systems, databases, and even manual data; being able to see the forest for the trees is important.
• Ability to link business processes to systems, data, and ultimately to processes and the functional building blocks behind a smart control.
• Proven insight into operational processes, being able to link business needs to processes and proactively understanding processes to raise necessary challenges and questions to the business in order to critically evaluate their questions and proposals.
• Ability to map out business processes and transform them into functional building blocks of controls as well as integration/communication agreements such as the layout of JSON files, etc.
• Experience with data integration: the data analyst must have experience integrating data from various sources and systems to achieve usable results in the context of controls.
• Good communication skills: the analyst/lead must be able to explain technical information in an understandable way to non-technical stakeholders, as well as think along and empathize with the various business areas and digital departments to bring the final solution to a successful conclusion in line with the business needs and all stakeholders.
• Providing transfer at the end of a use case to OT and operations.
• Knowledge of relevant laws and regulations: the analyst must be aware of laws and regulations regarding privacy, security, and data safety.
• Experience with ER modeling: the data analyst must have experience creating Entity Relation diagrams at various levels (such as conceptual, logical, and physical).
• Knowledge and experience in all types of data modeling: Entity Relationship (ER) diagrams, star schemas, normalized vs dimensional, conceptual vs physical, …
• Knowledge of Agile (SAFE) methodology, sprint working, and possibly SCRUM master experience is a serious plus.
• Knowledge of business processes: the analyst must have knowledge of business processes to ensure that the solutions align with consistent & stable business processes.
• Knowledge of Azure, Parquet, medallion architecture, data warehousing, data lakes, Machine learning & AI, master data, Databricks, MQTT/ActiveMQ, PLC operation, is a plus.
• Basic knowledge of SQL and Python is required.
• Experience in the various aspects of data analysis: data source analysis, process analysis, data modeling, data reporting, data architecture, data quality, master data management, …
• Experience in developing business & functional analyses and conveying these clearly and structurally to the developers.
• Testing: experience in developing and executing test scenarios.