Interim COO
Interim COO for technical service, installation and industrial organisations in a phase of growth, recovery or change.
More than 25 years of experience in technical operations at KPN, Philips Healthcare, ASML, Fresenius Medical Care and Mansveld Techniek. Available immediately.
I step in as interim COO or operations director when a technical organisation has to grow, improve or change while keeping its operations predictable. I set up the organisation, make performance visible and hand over to a team that can carry it on its own.
I started in 1999 as a field service engineer at KPN. I then worked for twelve years at Philips Healthcare, including as Six Sigma Black Belt and Director Remote Service, and for more than seven years at ASML. There I spent three years as Director Customer Support Japan, with P&L responsibility for 140 employees at five sites. At Fresenius Medical Care I led Technical Operations in the Benelux (40 employees, EUR 12 million revenue) and then the repair organisation for Europe. My most recent role was COO of Mansveld Techniek, with around 200 employees in projects, service and panel building.
I have a technical background (Bachelor of Electrical Engineering, 1999). In 2005 I gained my Six Sigma Black Belt and in 2013 I completed Magellan, the Philips MBA programme. I work in Dutch and English.
I work as an interim manager at board or management team level. Assignments usually fall into one of these three types:
Temporary end responsibility for operations, including P&L, during a vacancy, a growth phase or a reorganisation.
P&L for organisations of 40 and 140 employees; COO of an organisation with around 200 employees.
Leading customer support, field service, repair and installation, with uptime, turnaround time and customer satisfaction as the key metrics.
Service director in Japan and the Benelux; repairs for 22 European countries.
Lean and Six Sigma programmes and organisational change, from design and decision-making to implementation on the shop floor.
Lean transformation for 800 employees at ASML; Six Sigma Black Belt.
Experience in: semiconductors, medical technology, technical installations and telecoms.
Every assignment follows the same five steps, from analysis to handover:
I map the operation using figures and conversations on the shop floor: performance, costs, bottlenecks and the people who do the work.
I translate the assignment into a plan with goals and measurable KPIs. I then secure the decision and the support for it from the board, the management team and, where needed, the works council.
I set up the structure and select the people for the key roles. In two reorganisations I selected the team leaders for the new organisation myself.
Teams work with fixed daily stand-ups and visible KPIs, so problems surface early. In a service organisation of 800 employees this reduced escalations from around five to two a week.
I standardise the processes and hand over to a permanent successor or to the team itself, with a meeting and management rhythm that keeps working without me.
Five examples from my career, with the figures as they were measured. I leave out client names.
A complex on-site upgrade kept a customer system out of production for 12 weeks. Together with Customer Support, Supply Chain and R&D I redesigned the process using value stream mapping and SMED. Part of the work moved from the customer site to the factory.
Faulty devices of home patients were repaired locally in 22 countries. I led the roll-out of three regional hubs and set up the hubs in Portugal and Prague: staffing, warehouse and logistics to and from the countries. When I left, the hubs served Spain, Italy, France and most of Eastern Europe, among others.
Belgium and Luxembourg on one side and the Netherlands on the other each had their own management, administration and project organisation. I merged them into one organisation of 40 employees, selected the team leaders and extended the Belgian water quality laboratory to the Netherlands.
After the Kumamoto earthquake in April 2016, 8 of the 10 ASML systems at a major customer had damaged foundations. I expanded the local service team from 6 to 65 engineers and led the recovery on site. By the end of July all systems had been restored and fully recalibrated.
When imaging equipment broke down, an engineer always had to travel to the hospital. I set up technical customer care centres in China, India, EMEA and Latin America, where faults are investigated remotely first. The new centres work at the same level as those in Europe and the US.
Would you like to discuss an assignment? Send a message using the form or email info@berchum-interim.nl.
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