ABOUT ME

 MY STORY
With over 25 years of experience in Digital Innovation, I started as an independent consultant. I'll take up your challenges on how to be more efficient, to be more innovative and therefore to be more successful, always having the end-client in mind! I have a broad international experience in domains like Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG), Sports and IT, I feel very comfortable supporting your business into new ways of working!

 

I started my career in 1986 at Philips Lighting's headquarters in Eindhoven, the Netherlands where Philips started to introduce the first personal computers in the offices. The first step in digital transformation! Innovation and the introduction of new technology have been ever since close to my heart. In 1996 I was part of a very small team that introduced Philips Lighting's first Internet presence with the reward winning "Light Site". In the following 4 years I was formed as a hybrid specialist in IT and marketing. At Lighting we understood immediately that connecting our business with customers and consumers allowed us to understand better the challenges and needs from the market. We launched a global white-label forum where specialists from within the company discussed and advised our target audiences on issues and questions they raised. We were involved in complex challenges and had access to customer first-hand challenges and feedback.

 

In 2000 I was a lead consultant from Atos Origin at Procter & Gamble and supported the transformation from traditional marketing (TV, print) to Interactive Marketing (or Digital Marketing). With this new channel (the Internet) we were able to build personalized user journey's and provide the consumers with the right information and services at the right time. As program manager and consultant I was part of the team building large global communities for P&G's most prestigious brands such as Pampers, Always, Tampax. The personnalisation was primarily based upon the information captured from consumers on every touch point we identified. By doing that for multiple brands and storing that information centrally we had not only rich individual profiles but were able to create overall profiles of groups of individuals all being in the same life-stage. This helped us target better offerings and services. Privacy was a matter of OPT-INS and OPT-OUTS with user consent given at every data collection point.
We worked with Microsoft to implement a single user login for all P&G brands. With Google we looked how to best use YouTube to have the most influential videos compete against each-other for a marketing campaign for Hugo Boss. The challenges were to write an algorithm that identified trending video’s in a certain domain and organise the participation in the competition. A technical challenge was to show 2 videos simultaneously in the same window in your browser and control independently the controls like play, volume and the voting.
 

We were always looking for innovative ways to bring initiatives to existing and new clients. Some examples: for Gillette we built an online engine to design your own 3D personal razor. For Head & Shoulders we used the webcam to create a personal experience with the new product, as the advertisement reacted to your emotions shown before the camera. 

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In 15 years we supported P&G to become a digital leading marketing organisation. 

 

During these years I have been a regular speaker at Atos’ Innovation centres talking how Digital Transformation will change the way you do business.

At Société Générale de Surveillance (SGS) in Geneva we innovated the inspection and approval process of international trade. By digitalisation, the processes that normally could take days were handled in just hours.

 

For Air France/KLM we sketched the user-journey for the (frequent) flyer to make your trip more convenient. For Nestlé we displayed how Design Thinking would improve the user acceptance of new internal processes when employees were moving from one department to another.

 

At Siemens we used Design Thinking to improve customer satisfaction (CSAT) by creating persona’s, user journeys and mapped that to the current processes. The pain points came up very easily.

 

In the UK I consulted the National Savings & Investments Bank (NS&I) on how to transform call-centres from traditional communications to social media communication.

 

At Novartis I consulted and gave workshops on the implementation of CSM systems to allow a fast and centrally organised content distribution network.

 

For the Swiss police organisation we prototyped a real-time alert system connected to all different blue-light organisations.

In 2015 I founded and led the Atos’ Digital Studio, a versatile Digital Innovation team actively delivering excellence in Customer Experience (CX), User Experience Design (UX) and Creative Digital Strategies and initiatives that are designed to keep up with today’s dynamic and fast changing customer behavior. The studio had a strong focus on Digital Innovation & Marketing, Digital Transition and Digital Disruption models.

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In 2016/2017 I was, as lead consultant, on an assignment with the Dutch National Olympic Committee (NOC*NSF) for its strategic project Big Data & Sport Intelligence. Here I worked closely with various sport federations and translated the business requirements around the use of data into customer journey’s and personas. The complex structures between all stakeholders led to the definition of a road map "2020" where the transformation into an overall data-warehouse was secured. By working together, the various federations created a larger value proposition for future sponsors and media companies but more important, they were able to understand much better the needs of all stakeholders, from athletes, sport-consumers, sponsors, events and communities.

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I supported the Atos Consulting team in the UK with the definition of Fan-engagement for Liverpool FC based upon the concept developed by Ian Johnson and myself, named Social Stadium. This concept allowed clubs and organisations to interact better with the fan-base all around the world. Parts of Social Stadium were added to the Smart Stadium offerings of Atos’ Major Events group that is responsible for Atos activities at the Olympic Games. For the Olympics my Digital Studio team developed the Olympic Smartplayer on tablet. A player where you could stream live all events broadcasted by the Olympic Broadcasting Services group (OBS). The trick was to insert the live data coming from the Olympic Data Feed into the video streams and render that as video stream. As white-label the smart-player was available via the OBS platform.

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Last year (2019) I discovered Google's Design Sprint methodology and followed masterclasses to train myself as facilitator. I am proud to be in the fellowship with Design Sprint LTD. who are a leading DS organisation based in Lausanne, Switzerland. We join forces to bring the best experiences around business and design to the clients in the region and beyond. The years of experience as described above allow me to not only to facilitate but add valuable experience when (service, product) user-centred design is required. 

In 2019 I met Marcel van Galen, a Dutch entrepreneur who understands very well that we need a complete disruption of the current model where the large companies such as Google, Facebook are owning your privacy, With the launch of Dappre, a mobile app the consumer is taking back control of their privacy data. Marcel and I signed an agreement and I am now officially Dappre's Swiss representative and I will be bringing Dappre to Swiss consumers from 2020 onwards. In the Netherlands we see that the large retailers and organisations dealing directly with consumers appreciate the value and embrace this initiative. 

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PERSONAL
Born in the Netherlands, I am now living in Servion with my family since 2001. I am active as football coach and volunteer at the Montreux Trail Festival. I am passionate about running, mainly trails in our beautiful mountains. 

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