“I live in Zaandam, with my wife and two children aged 11 and 13. In my spare time, I spend a lot of time with them: going to the swimming pool, the sports field, a whitewater course… If mom is not around, the three of us like to go to Six Flags. Then we are all equally enthusiastic. I also do a lot of sports myself. I played football for 25 years, then ran for a while. Now I cycle a lot, road bike or mountain bike, and occasionally go to the gym. On June 27, I will be cycling up a mountain in Italy with a few colleagues for Kika. I’m still looking for sponsors.”
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“I was born and raised in the Achterhoek and studied business informatics in Enschede. I combined learning and working at a mattress factory. After graduating, I stayed there for about seven years as an IT employee, later also in a leading role. ERP, CRM, office automation… we did the implementations ourselves, without consultants. All young people who went for it full throttle, put their shoulders to the wheel and got things done. That suits me.”

“My wife lived on the other side of the country. When I met her, I moved. I came to Gemba through a job site. It was still very small at the time, I became implementation consultant number five on the payroll. That was in 2004. In the beginning, everyone had their own clients and you really did everything yourself: implementation, building reports, support… If you couldn’t figure something out, you called a colleague. You installed Maximo with a CD, in an ice-cold server room. After that, the really fun work began.”

“Very direct. Everyone knew what everyone else was doing. The lines were short, also to customers. That is still the case, by the way. You were on location for a day or two every week. We hardly ever worked remotely. Nowadays we work more in teams, and the solutions we offer are much broader and more complex than before.”

“Together with my colleague Wouter Schouten, I am operations manager. From a dual role, we manage a team of about 25 consultants. I do resource planning, think along about tenders, step in if there is a problem somewhere or a few hands are short. And I also have a few of my own clients.”

“I am mainly about ‘just fixing it’. Not endless consultations or looking at it from six sides, but making decisions and giving customers clarity. That is appreciated. Sometimes you have to force a decision to be able to move on. It is nice to see that things I set up years ago are still running. Recently I walked through the warehouse at a customer and saw a scanner that I had installed in 2008. It is still used there every day. I have done many projects for mobile solutions, in addition to regular IBM Maximo implementations.”

“The airport of Athens. There was a partner there with a problem with a reporting tool. They asked if I wanted to fly in. I was picked up by a colleague on a motorcycle. There I went, straight through Athens, without a helmet and with my Samsonite case. First have dinner at his wife’s house, then to the hotel. The next day I thought: I’ll fix that job quickly. But I was busy from 8 in the morning until deep in the night. The day after that again. I was ready three hours before my flight. I didn’t see anything of Athens itself, but I’ll never forget that job.”

“I have experienced them all, from ski weekends to anniversary trips. Seville, Albufeira… But I thought the ski weekend in Austria was perhaps the best. I couldn’t ski yet, so I first took lessons with colleagues on a brush track in Heemskerk. Then just up the mountain. Those kinds of things – doing something new together, having fun – that is typical of Gemba.”

“Given the market demand, I think Gemba will continue to grow. And the impact of AI will be great. We are going to use it more and more, with customers and to do our own work smarter and faster. IBM is also fully engaged in it, it is only becoming more important. What remains unchanged at Gemba? That is the ‘take one for the team’ feeling. That you take over from a colleague if they leave something behind, without a process or hierarchy being necessary for that. It is characteristic of the culture at Gemba, for me it feels like a warm bath.”