Lecturer/Researcher Impactful Value Chains

Job title
Lecturer/Researcher Impactful Value Chains
Research group
  • Impactful Value Chains

Marco Klootwijk is a researcher at the professorship Impactful Value Chains. He also teaches Technical Business Administration in the Continuous Improvement minor.

Career

From a precision engineering background, Marco advanced to a Lean Six Sigma Blackbelt with a strong focus on quality. He graduated from Philips Hard Disk Drives and worked in business for 18 years. His roles included: process development engineer, project leader, production manager and lean manager. He did this at the companies: ASML, VDL, Yacht, Tennant, Sonion and Remeha. He worked on optimizing production parts of hearing aids, implementing a One Piece Flow line for waferhandlers, Kaizens assembly workstations and cleaning machines.

Expertise

Marco’s expertise is broad and lies in the areas of engineering, logistics, product and process development, production and assembly within the manufacturing industry. He considers one of his finest projects to be the introduction of a process improvement for coating telecoils. The quality went to a Six Sigma Capability with a reduction of the production time. A patent was issued for this optimization. In early 2017, he made the transition to teaching at Avans University of Applied Sciences.

Research
For the research for the Impactful Value Chains professorship, he is involved in Hoshin Kanri, also called: Policy deployment. This project revolves around translating organizational objectives to the workplace and communicating results to top management.