Shaping the Future of Closed Loop Lifecycle Management

Lion Benjamins
Chairman

Lion brings almost four decades of business development experience to Promise Innovation. A production engineer by trade, he is a business process specialist with a strong focus on organisational design in industry.

Born in the Netherlands, Lion is above all an entrepreneur, motivator and lateral thinker. He is currently based in Finland and leads strategic business development and marketing for Promise Innovation. Prior to this he led marketing initiatives for the EU PROMISE project at partner firm Trackway. Lion has experience working in multi-cultural environments in small start-up companies and established multinational organisations.

David Potter
Chief Technical Officer 

He brings 35+ years of experience in information systems to the company as well as a broad range of expertise in logistics solutions, distributed architectures and enterprise management. David established his own consulting practice in 1997 after working for 27 years at IBM, latterly as an IT Architect in the IBM Consulting Group.

Based in the United Kingdom, David chaired the Project Steering Board of the EU PROMISE project in addition to managing the development of one of the project demonstrators.

Dimitris Kiritsis
Director of Research and Academic Affairs

As an associate director of the Computer-Aided Design and Production Laboratory (LICP) of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), Dimitris was the initiator of the EU PROMISE project that led to the founding of Promise Innovation and oversaw its scientific coordination.

Dimitris, who obtained his Ph.D in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Patras in his native Greece in 1987, is active in teaching and research in the domain of modelling methods and techniques for integrated product-process-resource planning, product lifecycle information modelling and transformation to knowledge

Advisory Associates

Jacopo Cassina                 
Italy

Jacopo is a partner at the General Consulting Society, leading the software solutions firm’s work in the fields of Product Lifecycle Management, Maintenance and Logics, Algorithms and Data Management Design.

Jacopo, who received degrees in Mechanical Engineering and a Ph.D in Management and Industrial Engineering from the Politecnico di Milano, was involved with the EU PROMISE project from the start, focusing particularly on Product Data Knowledge Management and Predictive Maintenance.

With the General Consulting Society, he is collaborating with Promise Innovation on the development of software diagnostics and predictive maintenance solutions.

Dr. Wolfgang M. Partsch
Germany

He is a pioneer in Supply Chain Management and an internationally recognized thought leader in this field and has played a key role in the development of many innovative Supply Chain concepts in Europe.

He has experience in integrating and coordinating the entire Supply Chain on an international basis with over one hundred major projects in about 20 countries around the world leading to performance and profit improvements of several billions of Euros.

During 25+ years in international consulting he managed major projects in industries such as consumer products, chemical, pharmaceutical, electronics and automotive. He held leading positions in global consulting firms including Chairman of the Global Supply Chain Network at Ernst & Young Management Consulting. In addition, he managed for over 14 years his own Supply Chain consulting firm with up to 60 employees. With respect to the high degree of international experience in Supply Chain Management more and more executives were seeking his advice in this field during the last years.

He is author of dozens of Thought Leadership Papers in Supply Chain Management since 1979. He also has co-authored the book “Supercharging Supply Chains - New Ways to Increase Value Through Global Operational Excellence”, which was a best-selling business book published 1998 in USA and 1999 in Japan.

He was invited many times as a speaker at leading conferences around the world in more than 20 countries and was appointed President of the German Association of Material Management in 1990.

In all his conceptual and practical work he has focused on profit and service improvements at the same time using innovative strategic and tactical solutions of global supply chain and logistics management. During the last years he has developed advanced solutions in the rapidly increasing field of Supply Chain Security and Risk Management, where he is an internationally recognized leader.

Dr. Bela Patkai                        
Finland

Bela set up Finnovatec in 2007 to develop innovative products and services based on a decade of experience working with industry and academia building computer simulations, optimisation models for planning and scheduling, and robot control algorithms.

Educated in Hungary, the UK and Finland where he obtained degrees in Electrical and Mechanical Engineering, Bela has worked as a researcher on the integration of RFID and sensor technology for Integrated System Health Management and in aerospace.

In 2006, he was appointed Adjunct Professor in Complex Systems at the Tampere University of Technology, Finland.

He is the author of over 30 peer-reviewed publications, editor of several conference proceedings and co-editor of a book on intelligent engineering systems.

Reza Razavi                       
Luxembourg

Reza founded Ambient Activity Systems Consulting Ltd (AAS), a company specialising in the development of Life-Cycle Management Systems, in Luxembourg in 2007.

Having spent 15 years in the software industry as an entrepreneur, principal investigator, engineer and programmer, Reza saw the opportunity to create tailor-made, activity-driven, lightweight life-cycle management systems.

AAS focuses the development of its systems on jointly analysing the lifecycle management requirements of business products and processes and by implementing those requirements through reusing and extending a dedicated system architecture.

Reza is currently director of research and development at the firm.

Antti Saaksvuori              
Finland

Antti is a management consultant focusing on product and service development, product management, product and portfolio strategies as well as service development and service productisation.

The author of a widely acclaimed book on Product Lifecycle Management, Antti has performed consulting work for a variety of companies in industries as diverse as telecommunications, manufacturing and healthcare. He has an engineering degree from Helsinki University of Technology.

John Stark                          
Switzerland

John, President of John Stark Associates, is a management and technology consultant specialising in the areas of Product Development and Product Lifecycle Management (PLM).

His consultancy assignments are typically focused on improving product innovation, development, sales and support processes with the objective of increasing product value and revenues. In a consulting career spanning 20 years, he has worked with more than 100 companies, including BMW, Coca-Cola, HP, IBM, Renault, and Xerox.

John is the author of a dozen books about product development, manufacturing and information systems in the manufacturing industry. He is also the editor of 2PLM, the leading newsletter in the PLM field.