Keynote presentations - Symposium 2022
Keynote presentations
In addition to our live demonstrations, we offer a mix of inspirational keynote sessions with speakers from a variety of sectors. Below you can discover our program, and find more information about the keynote and its presenter.
Programme
|
09.00 |
Welcome coffee & breakfast |
|
10.00 |
Opening session: Driving innovation for a sustainable future of our industry |
|
10.30 |
Digitalisation at scale: Vision on successful implementation of industry 4.0, focusing on technology and corporate culture |
|
11.00 |
Coffee break & demo visits |
|
11.30 |
Smart scheduling of production Digital twins as basis for smart active house concepts Autonomous working vehicles in the industry Introduction to the demonstrators resulting from Flanders Make’s latest research |
| 13.00 | Lunch, demo visits & tours |
| 14.30 |
From smart processes to smart solutions Taking the innovation leap Creating value with AI |
| 16.00 | Coffee break & demo visits |
| 16.30 |
Adaptable, connected & sustainable pharmaceutical manufacturing Human centric approaches to drive innovation |
| 17.30 |
Closing session Conclusions |
| 18.00 |
Toast to the Flanders Make innovation ecosystem! Walking dinner & demo visits |
Dirk Torfs
ABOUT THIS KEYNOTE
Via a Q&A with host Indra Dewitte, Dirk talks about:
- The growing impact of Flanders Make.
- The brand new accelerator programme and our new site in Kortrijk.
- The Flanders Make strategy and the broader support for business challenges.
ABOUT DIRK TORFS
Dirk Torfs has been CEO of Flanders Make since 2014. Dirk is a Civil Engineer in Mechanical Engineering and a Doctor in Applied Sciences (KU Leuven) and obtained an Executive MBA at Flanders Business School. He has over 25 years of experience in management positions in the Flemish industry (e.g. at Trasys, ABB and Imtech) and is Professor of Quantitative Decision Making for the Executive MBA programme at Flanders Business School.
Biba Visnjicki
About this keynote
Many manufacturers are busy with transitioning to digital manufacturing. Yet, deployment of new digital technologies, adaptation of the scalable, digital architecture on the level of the whole factory and network of factories, is not there. What has to be done to enable fast transition?
About Biba Visjnicki
Over the last few decades, dr. Biba Visnjicki has supported companies worldwide in their strategy, business development and was frequently building and steering national and international innovation teams.
After finishing her PhD studies in The Netherlands, she has focused on developing her competencies and skills in strategy, analytics, methodologies, and tools for effective execution of innovation.
In 2017 dr. Visnjicki becomes managing director of the first Fraunhofer Project Center in the Netherlands. The focus for the Center was supporting industries in acceptance and organization of Industry 4.0 principles, development and implementation of newest technologies and production systems, and builds demonstrators and incubators for next-generation manufacturing leaders.
In 2021, dr. Visnjicki became global head of digitalization for the Tembo group in the Netherlands
Johannes Cottyn
About this keynote
Smart production organisation refers to the use of data and technology to support the design and optimization of manufacturing operations activities in order to manage personnel, equipment, material and energy in the conversion of raw materials to finished products. A typical example are scheduling tasks that assign work to manufacturing resources. A schedule tends te become obsolete directly after it has been created because of unforeseen events such as machine breakdowns, rush orders, missing parts and operator absenteeism. However, recent advances in technology allow state-of-the-art tools to increase the schedules’ relevance by adequately anticipating or reacting to those events. Important concepts and trends are presented and illustrated by Flanders Make research activities.
About Johannes Cottyn
Prof. dr. ing. Johannes Cottyn received his master’s degree in industrial automation at Howest in 2003. He added a postgraduate in Informatics and a pre-doctoral degree in computer science in 2006. In 2012, he obtained his PhD in engineering sciences for industrial management and operations research at Ghent University. Since 2013 he is assistant professor in industrial automation and coordinator of the automation research division at the department of Industrial Systems Engineering (ISyE) and Product Design of Ghent University. He is a member of the ISA community, promoting a national/international network of automation professionals. He actively participates in the strategic research center Flanders Make and got appointed in 2018 as core lab manager. His main research interests lie in the combination and integration of industrial control & software systems (cf. PLC, MES, WMS, KPI dashboards, etc.) and manufacturing excellence best practices (cf. Lean, Six sigma, QRM, etc.). He has gathered in-depth expertise in research and practice by being involved in various research and industrial projects. His current research focuses on the optimal design and management of human-robot collaborative assembly workplaces leveraging on flexible automation concepts, context-aware operator support systems and production digital twin technology in the make sector.
Koen Maertens
About this keynote
To enable high indoor air quality and climate conditions for affordable homes, Duco Ventilation and Sun Control has build a unique process to develop and to manage active house concepts. Starting from the customer’s objectives regarding health, comfort and energy, an integral active house design process is followed, resulting in a well defined starting point for a digital twin of every individual dwelling that is produced, placed and inhabited. During the full lifecycle of the dwelling, this digital twin model is updated and keeps track of the performance and health of the smart home till its disassembly.
About Koen Maertens
With a master in electromechanical engineering from the university of Ghent, Koen started his career as PhD student at the university of Leuven on the application of modelbased control in agricultural vehicles. With his academic background on the application of artificial intelligence, Koen took the lead in several projects in industry on the integral design of smart machinery, often in close cooperation with FMTC and later on, Flanders Make.
After a career of 12 years at Picanol, Koen made a switch to Duco Ventilation and Sun Control, where he uses his experience from mechatronic design in the world of indoor climate and air quality control.
Ellen van Nunen
About this keynote
More and more companies are using Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMRs), providing them many benefits related to their production, but also exposing new robustness challenges of the AMRs. The key challenges relate to robust localization and recovery of the AMR. Flanders Make is providing proof-of-concept solutions improving the robustness of localization of an autonomous mobile robot. This is done by adding smart algorithms which improve the robustness and accuracy of SLAM (Simultaneous Localization And Mapping) algorithms. In parallel, smart recovery strategies will improve the availability of the AMRs further.
About Ellen van Nunen
After her master in Mathematics, Ellen worked for a few years at NXP at an electronics department. In 2007, she started as researcher for TNO (The Netherlands Organisation for applied scientific research) on autonomous driving in the Automotive industry where she contributed to various topics – from active safety to sensor fusion and fault-tolerant platooning. Together with her colleagues, she was the first in the Netherlands to drive cooperative and fully autonomously (at 0.3s time gap) on the public road. She has implemented several fault-tolerant algorithms (to recover from packet loss and / or a sensor failure) and gained many hours of experience in both testing as well as demonstrations of cooperative automated driving. After 11 years, she started at Flanders Make, where she currently fulfills the role as Senior Project Lead and Tech domain lead on Autonomous for the agriculture, manufacturing and logistics.
Marc Engels
About his keynote
Discover the highlights of this year demonstrations. You will see how you can improve the ergonomy for your operators, how you can train deep learning networks without data, how you can realise powertrains with a higher power density, how you can take the production process into account during product design, and much more …
About Marc Engels
Marc Engels is COO of Flanders Make. Marc has extensive experience in research in collaboration with industry (KU Leuven, Stanford University, IMEC, LoraNet, FMTC, Flanders Make). He has an engineering degree and a PhD from the KU Leuven.
Veerle Van Wassenhove
About his keynote
The digitalisation is being scaled up at high pace throughout Bekaert’s global operations. The Industry 4.0 roll out across plants, allows connecting key processes from any location to a central database and to our process & product experts. This is unlocking smart processes. We see now that a lot of the key elements that brought Bekaert to its current position (technology leadership, broad & global customer base and wide product portfolio), are exactly the ones that will allow us to develop and offer smart solutions to our customers. Products that report data on their expected remaining lifetime, climate conditions or even visual inspection of cable ways along the full length are no longer in the distant future, but currently under development at Bekaert.
About Veerle
Veerle Van Wassenhove first graduated as a Master of Science in Civil Engineering at UGent in 2000. She further focused on Advanced Textile Engineering in an Extra Masters. This quickly led her to a job as a Project Manager to later Product Release Coordinator at Picanol, where she worked from 2001 up to 2009. After 8 years she took the step to Bekaert, climbing the ranks from R&D Project Manager up to VP Innovation. She now uses her expertise gathered throughout the years to keep innovating the sector by further developing the product and production systems at Bekaert. Innovating while building on the company’s strengths, has led Bekaert to develop smart solutions in places you wouldn’t expect them, strengthening their position in safety critical systems.
Jan Casteels
About his keynote
Duracell: Transformation into a model plant in Belgium in 5 years time
About Jan Casteels
Jan Casteels is Vice President of the Duracell plants in Belgium. He studied Chemical Engineering at the University of Ghent and holds a postgraduate in Industrial Management from the University of Leuven. He has a passion for efficiency and simplification in all its forms and loves building high performance organisations. After having held a broad range of supply chain positions in planning, manufacturing, logistics and customer service at Procter & Gamble in Belgium and Germany, he built the all-new Duracell Distribution network for EIMEA, following its acquisition by Berkshire Hathaway in 2016. Since then, he has been leading the manufacturing plant in Aarschot, driving innovation and digitization and since 2021 integrating it with the Duracell site in Heist-op-den-Berg into one organisation.
Wouter Denayer
About this keynote
Artificial Intelligence is all the buzz these days and it seems like it will either save us or destroy us. So which is it? What can it really do? Where are the limitations? And do we fit powerful technology into a bright future for humanity?
About Wouter Denayer
Wouter is a technology optimist, innovator and keynote speaker. After 25 years of working with top enterprises, the last 7 as CTO for IBM Belgium, he has now started his own company Briteflo to use all that experience to help companies on their digital transformation journey. His focus is on the use of new technologies for true disruption while putting the human squarely in the center. He is currently on a mission to strip away both hype and fear surrounding Artificial Intelligence, so that its true potential for business and society can be realised.
Yves Vancleemput
About this keynote
Adaptable, Connected & Sustainable Pharmaceutical Manufacturing
About Yves Vancleemput
For 30 years, Yves has been thriving in chemical and life sciences manufacturing. He started as a chemical process engineer, gradually moved into Operations Management and is currently Director Business Development at Janssen. Throughout his career, Yves embraced technology innovation as the engine for future ready manufacturing. He complements this with his passion for Talent development and is a longtime advocate for ‘Ondernemers voor de Klas’ and ‘Toekomst Atelier’
Ank De Wilde
About this keynote
Is an innovative company culture the real driver for innovation? Can a business really grow & flourish through putting people first? Anks journey with her company Absolem over the last 10 years proves that point. But what does putting people first really mean? And where do you start?
About Ank De Wilde
With over 10 years experience as an entrepreneur and CEO of engineering company Absolem, Ank is guiding the company into a new narrative. She questions longstanding rules about drivers for innovation and collaboration. Ank creates a company culture that fosters economical growth without it becoming an obsessive, tunnel-vision goal. She not only believes that people and technology can really go together, but that through connecting people to themselves and to those around them, sustainable value is created for both organisation and society.
Her story is one of finding strength in vulnerability and the power of connection. Ank proves that a business can grow & flourish through putting people first. She’ll show that a human-centric & sustainable vision drives sustainable growth.
Urbain Vandeurzen
About his keynote
Towards a sustainable, digital and competitive industry: Conclusions.
about Urbain Vandeurzen
Dr. Urbain Vandeurzen is, since the start in 2014, chairman of Flanders Make. He was also the founder and chairman of Flanders Drive in 1996. Since 2012, he has been a director at KU Leuven and chairman of the "Opening the Future" fundraising campaign. Furthermore, since 2013, Urbain Vandeurzen played a leading role in the transformation of the local economy in Limburg as president of the Entrepreneurs Platform Limburg (OPL and the Limburg Innovation Center (Limburgs Innovatiecentrum).
He is the founder and chairman of Smile Invest, a large new private equity fund for innovative growth companies. But before that, back to 1980, he co-founded the high-tech company LMS International, where he took up the role of chairman and CEO until he successfully sold it to Siemens in 2013.
In addition, he has also been the Chairman of the Board of Directors of VOKA from 2006 to 2009, of which he is now Honorary Chairman. He also served as Vice-Chairman of the Federation of Enterprises (VBO) in Belgium, Vice-Chairman of Agoria Flanders and Vice-Chairman of the Leuven Chamber of Commerce, and he was the chairman of the board of directors of Gimv NV from 2011 until 2016.
In addition, he is currently a director in a number of technology, industrial and financial services companies.