For more than 20 years, Thomas Weber has been driving digital transformations and innova­tion throughout various industries. Today, in his roles as director of project management in the global R&D organisation of Fresenius Medical Care, he is responsible for software projects that target higher efficiencies of dialysis therapies through a more digitised product portfolio.

Throughout his career, he was faced with the management of disruptive changes that occur in business models through digitalisation. During the period when telecommuni­cation technology evolved from analog to digital and then towards an internet service (voice over IP), he worked for Siemens AG and Avaya (AT&T spinoff). Based on the new opportunities and threats that were initiated by those technological revolutions, he led projects and initiatives that accompanied vendors and customers to prepare them for resulting changes in the way they are doing business. Today, he is driving his third ‘Digital Transformation.’ The context is about how Fresenius Medical Care responds to new healthcare market imperatives with a higher perceived value of the compa­ny’s core medical device product portfolio. His background as a graduated engineer, combined with a diploma of advanced studies in business management, enables him to accompany the complete digital transformation process, starting from corporate towards IT strategies.

Kelly Keen is the vice president of the project management office at Celonic Group. In this role, she manages a group of project managers between Basel and Heidelberg for early- and late-stage projects. She leads the portfolio data and unified processes to balance project workload against capacity and priorities. She also oversees the CAPEX GMP projects for the company as a representative of the management team.

Kelly completed her MBA in international business specialising in operations and supply chain management. Her base degree is a master’s of architecture from the University of Illinois and L`ecole d`Architecture et d`Urbanisme in Versailles, France. Her ca­reer later took her into construction management, where she was building campuses for many biotechnology companies in California, including Genentech, who hired her to their CAPEX project management team to build their facilities around the world. From there, she managed a molecule in Phase II clinical trials, which progressed into her leading the CMContinuum team as the project manager for the strategy of large molecule launches in the Roche and Genentech network. After managing the largest project in the pharma-technical portfolio, she took over as the portfolio and process manager for four years before joining Celonic. Kelly sits on the board of directors for the International Society of Pharmaceutical Engineers (ISPE), the world’s largest non-profit association leading scientific, technical and regulatory advancement throughout the entire pharmaceutical lifecycle.

Tom Petzke started his career in the chemical industry in credit management. This is where he discovered his passion for process improvement, so he joined the company’s Lean Six Sigma program and later worked as a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt Finance and Black Belt Supply Chain. After that he returned back to finance to work as a global credit manager. Initially joining a chemical distribution company as finance director, he was later tasked with introducing process improvement by establishing a Lean Six Sigma organisation with a certification process as well as training and coaching of belts.

Of the numerous improvement projects he’s run, he found to be amongst the most challenging building a shared service center for customer service and a shared service center for finance. Tom has held various management positions including a managing director assignment in the U.S., but at the end of the day it always drew him back to process improvement.

Today he is a certified Lean Six Sigma Master Black Belt and works at Amadeus IT Group as Head of Process Excellence and Continuous Improvement. During the last three and a half years, his two main areas of focus have been leading a cultural change management program based on Lean principles and establishing best-in-class IT pro­cesses in the organisation through Lean and Six Sigma projects. Tom is a Certified Busi­ness Performance Coach (EMCC) and holds a master’s degree in international political science, economics and social science.

Alfonso Toraño is a member of the executive committee in Thyssenkrupp Norte, the escalators’ manufacturing facilities of tkElevator AG in Spain.

He has many years of direct experience in various aspects of project life, including project management, business analysis, business process improvement and organisa­tional design and planning. In his current role as head of operations for new installations, Alfonso’s primary focus is to ensure all projects are delivered within the agreed scope, time, cost and quality.

He is a certified (CAPM^®) and holds an executive MBA at IESE.

Pär Forsell has been working with Toyota Material Handling for 13 years and during this time has developed a deep understanding of the Toyota production system principles, being the origin of lean philosophies. He did this by working directly together with Toyota Japan in the TPS implementation of Toyota Material Handling factories in Europe and thereafter contributing to the continuous TPS development of the same. He is now responsible for the establishment and management of the Toyota Lean Academy (TLA), being the opportunity for customers to learn lean from the source, Toyota. TLA provides the Toyota core knowledge behind successful lean implementation, with the continu­ously improved evidence found in our own factories and sales network. Pär was edu­cated at Jönköping University, Sweden, studying industrial organisation and logistics.

Otto Strukelj is currently a release manager of IoT Accelerator, Ericsson’s IoT and connec­tivity platform. He has more than 25 years’ experience in the telecoms industry, mainly in mobile telecoms systems, but also in the area of IoT.

Otto has more than 10 years’ experience in leading large-scale, multinational projects and more than 10 years’ experience as director of program and project offices both large and small. He’s also been a leader and contributor to several transformation projects.

Justin Byrd leads a large and diverse team of project delivery and PMO professionals responsible for delivering services to both internal and external clients. Justin centralised project and PMO resources from disparate teams transforming the way Fujitsu delivers project and PMO services to its clients and also the way in which those services are engaged by standardising PMO solutions and offering an innovative choice of operating model, offering reduced price shared service global delivery. By establishing a P3O hub and spoke delivery model and creating a PMO centre of excellence, Justin has standardised best practices, improved governance and increased revenue growth. Justin is now further maturing his PMO service offering by empowering his team to adapt how they deliver in a more agile environment.

Johannes Barsig has been the Head of R&D Project Excellence at Boehringer Ingelheim Animal Health since March 2018, after several years of service for pharma R&D project management in the Boehringer Ingelheim Animal Health organisation.

Before joining Boehringer Ingelheim in 2012, Johannes was project leader and head of project management in human pharma at Takeda in Konstanz, Germany. Trained in bio­chemical pharmacology, he started his pharmaceutical career as a lab head working for Novartis in Vienna, Austria. Over the last 15 years, Johannes has grown his expertise in project and portfolio management in the pharmaceutical industry in various positions, not least through his contribution to successful integration of project management functions in several major mergers. He is convinced that cross-functional collaboration and a project-centric way of working are key success factors for our industry.

Mia Jalava has worked in the operator industry for over 20 years in the leading roles of product, process and portfolio development. The combination of these areas has given deep insight for serving customers an extensive range of solutions. The newest insight has become the artificial intelligence and robotics applications for the best of the customer and for the business. The main focus has been creating productive portfolio in the fast-changing ecosystem.

Kamil Mroz is a certified PRINCE2 trainer and Lean Six Sigma professional with many years of experience leading projects in the biotech and pharma sectors. Currently he is working at GSK in Belgium as a senior program manager and PM capabilities lead in manufacturing science and technology. He is deeply involved and passionate about contributing to the PM community by regularly speaking at PM conferences, actively contributing to publications and enthusiastically sharing his experience with the next generation of project managers. Since 2016, he has been organising a monthly net­working event for PMs in Belgium called “Pint of PM”. In 2013, he received the presti­gious International Project Management Association (IPMA) Young Project Manager of the Year Award for outstanding leadership and project management excellence, and since then he has been part of the yearly Global IPMA Jury to select future winners.

Mark Gray is a certified professional project manager with over 25 years of experience in managing complex projects in semiconductors, defence and energy sectors around the world. With a background in electronics, a master’s in business and an ongoing PhD research project, he brings a unique blend of personal and collected experiences to the table and leverages this in sharing his passion for excellence in project manage­ment. Mark is a seasoned speaker at PMI and other events and is actively involved in developing project management in organisations in both his professional role and also as a volunteer in the PMI France Chapter (currently VP of professional development).

For over 15 years, Dr. Jörg Leute has been challenging empty phrases such as “You can still get a project done!” or “ So far things have always gone well” in project portfolio and resource management. He shows companies and organisations how to find quick and lasting decision-making processes in a dynamic project world without losing sight of their people. As founder and managing director of itdesign, the company behind the Meisterplan software, he advocates lean PPM – a streamlined and effective project portfolio management approach. He has long been interested in the interplay between strategic decision-making processes and agile implementation. Jörg received his doc­torate in business economics from the University of Tübingen in 2013 for his research on agile project management.

Ingo Kocke is currently in charge of EcoSys business development at Hexagon PPM, a company that supports its customers in their digital transformation by offering in­novative solutions to adopt new technologies applied to the management of large industrial projects.

Ingo graduated in industrial engineering and management, and he has extensive ex­perience in consultancy, international project management and project controlling. Additionally, his background in global ERP system integration allows him to support organisations by improving and transforming their processes, tools and technologies to today’s digitisation requirements.

With over 20 years of sales and management experience at both global software com­panies and startups specialising in enterprise-level solutions, Jean-Pierre Ullmo has led the European team at Changepoint for four years.

Jean-Pierre has a strong track record in launching new products for small and large software vendors and has set up subsidiaries on a pan-European basis, including man­agement of partner networks.

He holds an MBA from ISG, with a special interest in Japanese management methods.