Willem van Lammeren

Willem van Lammeren trained as a chemical engineer, but his passion for IT made digitalization in manufacturing the logical place to build his career. In 2006 he joined Barry Callebaut as part of a small team launching a new frozen pastry production facility in southern Spain. He then moved to AB InBev, the renowned Belgian brewery, where he coordinated and facilitated the implementation of a management excellence program across Western Europe before joining BASF.

At BASF, van Lammeren was one of the few people in IT who had actually worked in production, which positioned him to explore the emerging domain between IT and operations. He experimented with new approaches in fast, iterative fashion while also experiencing classical IT with detailed requirements and rigorous processes. He eventually moved closer to production, collaborating with David Ariens at the Antwerp site. After several years automating supply chain and lab solutions, he stepped into middle management, where many of their shared ideas took shape.

Today van Lammeren serves as tech lead for Industrial IT at Syensqo, where he leads the project to build the company's operational data lake. The idea for this book originated on an afternoon in his garden, when he called Ariens and suggested they stop talking about these ideas over coffee and start writing them down