Chief Science Architect@ ORTEC

I have been working for ORTEC since May 2010, and with great pleasure! I started my career at ORTEC as an OR engineer. My responsibility was the development and maintenance of ORTEC’s vehicle routing algorithms.

This work fitted needlessly with my master studies Applied Mathematics at the University of Twente, and my PhD Research at the Industrial Engineering department at the same university, where I also worked on routing algorithms. After several challenging projects, I got the chance to enhance my impact on the organization by leading a small team of OR engineers. The first thing I did as a team lead was to invite the team to reflect on the topics we were working on. I collected the output of this meeting and presented it to the Technology board. I immediately learned that such initiatives are highly appreciated at ORTEC: we not only got green light for these projects to work on, but also the team was highly motivated because of their involvement from the start.

Another important step in my career was during a tough project, in which the chosen algorithmic solution turned out not to work well. In such situations, there is a big temptation to keep on working on the algorithm to get it working against all cost, especially when you have invested already a lot of time and energy in it. However, we dared to change course, and started a completely new approach. This step not only saved the project, but it also turned out to be the foundation of a completely new generation of vehicle routing and scheduling algorithms at ORTEC.

After working a couple of years as a manager software, I noticed that the time I had left in my work to spend on my true passion, applying mathematics, had become too little. Therefore, I changed course again. Together with my manager, we decided to fully focus my time and energy on the algorithms in our portfolio, making sure they are state of the art and with true measurable impact at our customers. We summarized this role in the function title ‘Chief Science Architect’.

The first thing I did as a chief science architect was to setup a new team: the math innovation team. The main purpose of this team is to explore new promising techniques from science, and new applications of existing techniques. And with a strong focus on reducing the time to market of these techniques with true measurable customer impact. It is great to see that now after three years, we are not only harvesting the first results at our customers, but we also have a rich and promising pipeline of new and improved ways of having impact at our customers.

I experience my career at ORTEC as a nice and challenging journey. I encounter many passionate people in a professional and friendly atmosphere. A culture where good ideas and initiatives are embraced, and with a strong focus on having a sustainable impact in the world. I can recommend this to everyone with a (slight) passion for mathematics and would like to encourage you to embrace the opportunities ORTEC will give you in your career.