11 July 2019
This summer, just before the start of the holiday season, SparkOptimus hosted again 3 Round Tables for C-level executives under the theme ‘Drinks, Dinner & Digital Inspiration’. Main focus for these Round Tables is that our guests get inspired to think about what digital disruption means for the way they run their business, and discuss this in an informal setting of 20-30 peers over dinner.
How to scale and implement digital & data solutions within operations
On June 26th we had the 1st Round Table of the season: the theme was ‘How to scale and implement digital & data solutions within operations’ with 5 COO’s attending Thijs Vermaat’s (Partner at SparkOptimus) presentation outlining what SparkOptimus’ approach is on implementing data-initiatives. Johan Stockmann, director industry 4.0. at Nouryon, gave a very inspiring inspiration that featured the industry’s side of this topic.
How to build a direct-to-consumer business (at scale)
The 2nd Round Table on June 27th, hosted by SparkOptimus’ partner Jur Gaarlandt, was centered around ‘How to build a direct-to-consumer business (at scale)’ and welcomed 15+ industry leaders from companies as Danone, Unilever and JDE a.o. The guest speaker was Jan Wouter KleinJan from CarNext whose eye opening, but also entertaining war stories also proved how hard it is to launch a direct-to-consumer business in a large corporate. It was a fun night with many interesting conversations over dinner.
How to use data to drive bottom line growth and scale
Last but not least, on July 3thrd as most of you know, we had the Round Table for ecommerce directors, with around 20 participants from food, fashion and other retail companies. The theme was “how to use data to drive bottom line growth and scale”, with Mia Ruotsala, the CDO of Intersport group, as a guest speaker. It was really great to hear her tell the complete story of starting and centralizing both digital and data for an organization with 2 brands and franchisers in 58 countries (and for example Germany, has 1000 franchisers within it). You’re talking transformation on a huge scale. Cool to hear about our involvement, and also really nice to hear some of the on-the-ground, mundane problems you run into that are so recognizable, eg how they try to make countries comply with data quality standards.
This autumn we will organize the next series of our Round Tables, keep an eye on our blogsite for the next update!