Team members in the spotlight

Curious how our colleagues experience working for ACTlytics?
Read further to learn more!

In the spotlight:
Sefanja van der Lee, Business Consultant Analytics

More than a year ago, Sefanja van der Lee started working at ACTlytics as Business consultant analytics. Variation, insight and trust have been the keywords during this year. Read about Sefanja’s experiences below!

Experience through variation in customers

“As a business consultant I advise and support our clients, end users of planning-software, in the translation between them and their software supplier. Because I support clients of different types of companies, my work is also quite varied. This variation can be found in the purpose of the company (commercial or non-profit), the company’s size, where it is located (e.g. foreign or domestic) and the sector it is in (e.g. life science, food industry, chemicals). Because of this variety, I really enjoy my job. I gain a lot of insight into different types of companies, the business structures, the impact of the data on the business model and the influence of the factors described above. This allows me to keep learning on-the-job and to gain different forms of practical experience. What I find very valuable is that ACTlytics provides a stable foundation to fall back on, to ask for advice and to get coaching in a small and close-knit team.”

Creating trust in a black box

“To explain what the position of business consultant entails, I will tell a bit more about the role I had in my last projects. My role in those projects was to support planners in adopting a new planning application. These applications contain an optimization engine. The calculation behind the optimization is often a ‘black box’ for the planner, meaning that the results are not easy to validate. Since planners are generally still used to planning with tools such as Excel, my goal was to increase the confidence of planners in the new planning application and the ‘black box’.”

Different roles to get result

“I do this in different ways. For example by providing more insight into the different steps of the optimization using data, by giving training on the use of the application, or by developing dashboards where the necessary information can be found quickly and is displayed in a clear and comprehensible way. Or even, in the event that the application does not work properly, to get in touch with the software supplier.

In short, in my role as business consultant I am active as a trainer, data analyst, developer and objectively critical intermediary, depending on what the situation requires. This is what makes my work interesting since we, at ACTlytics, create a lot of value by bridging the gap between the supplier of the planning application and the end user. Because if in the end the software is used better, it will be beneficial for both the supplier and the end user.”

In the spotlight:
Peter Derksen, Business Consultant Analytics

Almost a year has passed since Peter Derksen started working as Business consultant analytics at ACTlytics. It was a diverse year with many new challenges. Something that suits Peter well. “I like that the focus is on personal development”. Read further to see how Peter experienced last year!

Learning on the job

“As consultant, I work on multiple projects in parallel. One of the projects I have been working on, is the development of tooling that calculates margins per products based on a specific supply chain. During this project, I extended existing functionality and added new features. The result was that the tooling became more reliable and could be used better by the customer. A different project was the supervision of a group of students who developed a supply chain game. During this project, I experienced how it is to be a project owner. Now, I can use this experience to communicate in a better way with our clients.”

The impact of my work

“We help our customers with the optimization of their processes. For example, by adjusting the mathematical methods used in the background, or by giving training. No matter how, it always improves the current situation. All improvements, big or small, generate impact for our customers. For bigger companies, this can be ecological impact next to economic impact, since we improve logistic processes. For smaller organizations, the improvements we bring can accelerate the growth of the organization. It is inspiring to see that my work not only has economic impact for our customers, but also contributes to e.g. the environment, growth possibilities or employee satisfaction.”

Passion for learning

“A fun element of being business consultant is that I’m busy with several activities in parallel. In this way, I get challenged to continuously learn and grow in doing my job. And when I get stuck on a subject, I can always switch to something different for the moment. On top of that, I have the opportunity to absorb expertise from my colleagues as well as gaining industry knowledge from our clients.”

Happiness at work

“What I like about ACTlytics, is that the focus is on personal development, not on making a career and proceeding to the next position. This is important to me because I get energy from developing new skills. Also, we have a small and solid team with a good working atmosphere and there is room for fun activities during the day. I appreciate this very much and it makes that I like going to work.

Are you interested in working as Business consultant at ACTlytics?

Read the details of our job opening!

Or read the article “Working at ACTlytics.”