Many supply chains are optimised to deliver today, but not designed to scale.
I help COOs and CSCOs move from operational firefighting to structural improvement, and I stay until it runs. Not an adviser who leaves when the strategy is finished; where the doing is the hard part, I do it.
You are the one accountable for where the operation has to go: turning the growth ambition into operational choices, making the operating model carry them, getting a planning rhythm that actually steers decisions, and setting the digital strategy. But the day runs you. Inventory builds up. Service levels slip. Initiatives stall. You carry the target anyway.
Nobody knows this operation better than you and your team. Your team is not weak, and your plan is not wrong.
And there is nobody at your own level to think it through with. The higher your role, the less anyone tells you what they actually think.
Then something makes it clear it will not work like this: growth stalls, customers drift away, a reorganisation does not land, or a study is delivered and nothing follows. And the cost of another year like this does not appear on any report. What is hard to see from inside it is what keeps the ambition from becoming reality.
Everyone thinks they know the goal. Everyone says something different.
Nobody knows how to reach the goal. Or what it costs, either way.
The plan was written for the team rather than with them, so nobody owns it.
The meeting where decisions need to be taken either does not exist, or decides nothing.
A report moves nobody, and a good conversation fixes no operation. It takes both, from the same person. What decides whether any of it lands is in the room: who goes quiet when a subject comes up, where the same argument keeps returning, which decision everyone talks around.
The steps from ambition to results are straightforward: a shared ambition, a plan the team makes its own, and the work under way. Getting people to own them is the work, and it is why it holds after I leave.
Most of what has to happen has not been said out loud, priced, or decided. So I do not arrive with a finished plan, because a finished plan gets received rather than owned.
A firm brings brand, scale and a method, and a team that needs staffing. I bring one person with an operational track record, and no follow-on engagement to protect.
The content is the entry ticket. What makes the real difference is how Peter connects with people and gets things moving.
Tjarko Bouman
CEO, BDR Thermea
Built from what already works elsewhere, and deliberately unfinished. The gaps are the point.
You correct it and fill in what only you know, and I keep asking, to understand it and to challenge it.
The decision is yours, and so is explaining it to the organisation. The architecture was mine, but by then nobody needs to remember that.
The three differ in who decides. Most engagements start in the middle, with advisory.
I join the team and set the direction myself, then validate it against what I hear. The one form where the decision is mine, because the accountability is too.
In twelve months: inventory down 15% with service levels held, backlog down 98%, and the 2030 operations strategy in place.
Peter doesn’t just set the strategy. He makes sure it lands. He turns long-term ambition into actions the team can act on, and knows how to get the organisation behind it.
Luigi La Morgia
CTOO, BDR Thermea
I design the route and take the team through it. They get something to respond to, not to approve. The decision is theirs; getting it made is mine.
A warehousing strategy and target operating model, with a three-year roadmap and the governance to run it.
When I was tasked to set up a new Operation it was fantastic to have Peter on my side to co-design our vision and work with my leadership team to have it embraced as a “team one”.
Eric-Jan Heling
Head of Delivery (Logistics), ASML
The conversation is the advice. You think out loud and I push back, because at your level nobody else does. The conclusion stays yours.
Board member and sparring partner since 2021, through 50% growth a year.
As a founder, there is nobody to test your reasoning against on the big decisions. Peter asks the questions nobody else asks, and challenges my thinking without taking over. The conclusions are better for it.
Jean-Baptiste Clouard
CEO, Flowlity
Peter simplifies the complex, makes it visible, and engages people so they take ownership and act.
Jean-Paul Schreurs
Business Director Healthcare & High Tech, BBTG
That instinct shows up everywhere in my life. I am drawn to minimalist architecture, to spaces where everything has a purpose and nothing is superfluous. I cut rather than add. What I look for, in a room or in an organisation, is what remains once you strip away the unnecessary. That is where clarity begins.
Finding the structure is only half of it. The other half is making it visible. And what I am looking at is rarely only the content. It is the same few dynamics turning up in company after company, in different clothes. That is what fascinates me: the problem in front of me is always new, and almost never original.
I am Peter Schram. Industrial engineer by training, twenty-five years in operations, consulting and research at Accenture, DAF, IG&H, Signify, Gartner, ASML and BDR Thermea. Non-executive board member at Flowlity since 2021.
I have never been interested in being the smartest person in the room. I am interested in what happens when the room gets smarter.
You do not need answers to these. The one you avoided is where we would start.