HINT 30th ANNIVERSARY
Reflections, from Wolter Last
As we celebrate 30 years of business, HINT is in a better position than ever to serve your needs. Due to economic concerns of late accelerating digital transformation, the oil, gas, and renewable energy sector has caught up to my early vision—one software platform to manage data for all your equipment and processes. We now share the same goal to advance industry automation in a concerted effort to save time and money, while maximizing profits. This involves what I like to call financial orchestration, having the right personnel, choosing the right equipment, collecting the right information, and turning it into knowledge to make the right ‘data-driven’ decisions.
As a software programmer early in my career, I had the opportunity to work in Shell’s Instrumentation Engineering department, where I helped develop a document management system (DOREZ) on a mainframe computer. When personal computers came on the scene, I kept developing all kinds of software to deliver technology solutions for Shell and its subsidiary, NAM. It was my initial exposure to instrumentation that would propel me forward to help plant managers engineer their facilities from an equipment measurement perspective. To this day, it never ceases to amaze me how changing one parameter can significantly impact a plant’s operating cost, production, and profit.
Having absorbed as much knowledge as I could on the job, I embarked on an entrepreneurial journey to build and run my own company. Thus, HINT was born with headquarters in The Netherlands and expanded to our Houston, Texas offices in 2013. With the help of incredible employees and mentors along the way, the business has grown to the thriving global enterprise it is today, offering consulting services and software products that help break down silos and enhance data integration. And as technologies continue to advance, so do our systems and solutions, leveraging the use of artificial intelligence, the cloud, and other emerging digital capabilities for greater efficiency.
From the start, we have been extremely customer-focused, as we seek to improve efficiency through Human Interest in New Technology (HINT). We do this via close collaboration with you to design the industry-standard software that will meet not just the needs of one company, but all companies who rely on accurate data to run their business. You may use some or all of the functions, but nonetheless, a single system, such as AML, allows you to do everything in one place—from data collection to analysis to problem resolution and ultimately prevention. The future holds exciting new innovations with the introduction of our Digital Toolkit, for example, which gives you more cost-effective advantages and autonomy at your fingertips. We are also researching and developing solutions that align with sustainability and renewables to support net-zero emission initiatives worldwide. Furthermore, we have plans to acquire other companies with various complementary products and services that will bring added value by increasing asset life cycle and reliability, while further optimizing data integration – tying together wells, meters, laboratories, and process control systems, as well as finance and maintenance teams.
I am sincerely grateful to our loyal customers, partners, and employees who helped us get this far and enabled us to survive the ups and downs we have all experienced in recent years. Let’s work together for another 30 years, as I begin to train my sons to carry on the legacy of HINT (although I’m not stepping down any time soon). I believe that change is here to stay, and we must all become early adopters to keep pace and succeed going forward, as we go to the moon and beyond! Finally, to quote a guru of mine, it all comes down to having a positive “mindset, heart set, soul set, and health set.”
Be well,
Wolter Last
Founder/Owner
HINT
