Associate Partners

Si2 works with a small number of associates and partner organisations, who we trust to deliver exceptional results.

Martina Graf - Associate

Areas of Expertise: Sales and marketing for complex products and service solutions in SMEs and growth-oriented B2B companies. Specialising in the strategic integration of marketing, sales, and service to create a seamless customer journey.

Martina works with SMEs and fast-growing B2B companies that want to build, restructure, or revitalise their sales organisations. She sees sales, marketing, and service not as separate functions, but as one integrated system that supports the entire customer journey.

She is typically brought in when companies have excellent products and committed teams, but struggle with unclear processes, organisational silos, or strategies that fail to translate into day-to-day execution. Martina brings clarity, asks the difficult questions, and turns strategic objectives into practical structures and sound business decisions.

Her goal is to help organisations achieve sustainable business growth through effective sales and service processes, clear accountability, and measurable progress in day-to-day operations.

Sales and marketing professional with more than 13 years of experience in the industrial SME sector, complemented by an MBA in General Management. She has held leadership positions in sales management and sales performance management, helping organisations build stronger commercial capabilities and drive sustainable growth.

She works in German and English.

Gesa Krämer - Associate

Areas of Expertise: Facilitation and guidance of team development processes, including organisational purpose, culture development, and team alignment. Specialist trainer in team building, virtual leadership, and online learning design. Organisational development consultant with expertise in New Work, diversity, and change management.

Gesa combines extensive consulting and training expertise with hands-on leadership experience in technical sales and B2B marketing, particularly within internationally operating industrial organisations.

She develops practical communication skills and change management programmes for technical service organisations and globally connected teams, helping virtual, hybrid, and international teams collaborate more effectively while supporting individual capability development. A particular area of expertise is online learning design and digital learning programmes for international technical trainers, enabling sustainable skills development across service organisations.

Her goal is to help leaders strengthen technical service organisations by combining intercultural competence with the practical demands of global operations.

MA in Intercultural Communication, with studies in Business Administration, Spanish, and French. University lecturer in intercultural competence and online learning design, published author, and Programme Director.

She works in German, English, French and Spanish

Jean-Marc Rommes - Associate

Areas of Expertise: a catalyst for professional development and organisational change, helping managers and teams design business strategies, build customer relationships, achieve performance goals and enhance their communication skills and processes

For over 30 years, Jean Marc has built his reputation as a facilitator who contributes to the implementation of change and development initiatives at some of the world’s leading companies in the technical, automotive, retail and service arenas, mostly in Europe, but also in America, India, Africa and China. A diverse project portfolio, also in the not-for-profit sector and including a number of safety leadership programmes, has allowed him to hone his listening skills and acquire a keen eye for what each company may come to expect from an external consultant.

As a qualified coach, he acts as a sounding board for executives, managers, business owners and independents alike and his international background and multicultural experience have often been perceived as a specific added value to his service provision.

He holds a Post-graduate Degree in Philosophy and Political Science from the University of Montpellier, France, and speaks fluent English, French, German, Dutch and Luxembourgish.

 

 

AI Consult - Solution Partner

Areas of Expertise: AI Consult  supports medium-sized and established companies on their journey into the digital future.

 

Ai Consult acts as a bridge between companies and innovative technologies: We identify the right software solutions and ensure their successful, practical, and sustainable implementation.

Behind our success stands an experienced team that combines digitalization, technology, and SME consulting. With this approach, we ensure our clients’ success and drive digital transformation. See https://aiconsult.group/

Service in Industry

Deep Dive into the industrial service business.

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Service Innovation for value-driven opportunities:

Facilitated by Professor Mairi McIntyre from the University of Warwick, the workshop explored service innovation processes that help us understand what makes our customers successful.

In particular, the Customer Value Iceberg principle goes beyond the typical Total Cost of Ownership view of the equipment world and explores how that equipment impacts the success of the business. It forces us to consider not only direct costs associated with usage of the equipment such but also indirect costs such as working capital and risks.

As an example, we looked at how MAN Truck UK used this method to develop services that went beyond the prevailing repairs, parts and maintenance to methods (through telematics and clever analytics) to monitor and improve the performance and  fuel consumption of their trucks. This approach helped grow their business by an order of magnitude over a number of years.

Mining Service Management Data to improve performance

We then took a deep dive into how Endress + Hauser have developed applications that can mine Service Management data to improve service performance:  

Thomas Fricke (Service Manager) and Enrico De Stasio (Head of Corporate Quality & Lean) facilitated a 3 hour discussion on their journey from idea to a real working application integrated into their Service processes. These were the key learning points that emerged:

Leadership

In 2018 the Senior leadership concluded that to stay competitive they needed to do far more to consolidate their global service data into a “data lake’ that could be used to improve their own service processes and bring more value to customers. As a company they had already seen the value of organising data as over the past 20 years for every new system they already had a “digital twin” which held electronically all the data for that system in an organised fashion. Initially, it was basic Bill of Material data, but has since grown in sophistication. So a good start but they needed to go further, and the leadership team committed resources to do this.

  • The first try: The project initially focused on collecting and organising data from its global service operations into a data lake.  This first phase required the development of infrastructure, processes and applications that could analyse service report data and turn it into actionable intelligence. The initial goal was to make internal processes more efficient, and so improve the customer experience. E+H looked for patterns in the reports of service engineers that could:
    • Be used to improve the performance of Service through processes and individuals
    • Be used by other groups such as engineering to improve and enhance product quality.
  • Outcome: Eventhough progress was made in many areas, nevertheless, even using advanced statistical methods, they could not extract or deliver the value they had hoped   for from the data. They needed to look at something different.
  • Leveraging AI technologies: The Endress+Hauser team knew they needed to look for patterns in large data sets. They had the knowledge that self-learning technologies that are frequently termed as AI, could potentially help solve this problem. They teamed up with a local university and created a project to develop a ‘Proof of Concept’. This helped the project gain traction as the potential of the application they had created started to emerge. It was not an easy journey and required “courage to trust the outcomes, see them fail and then learn from the process”. However after about 18 months they were able to integrate the application into their normal working processes where every day they scan the service reports from around the world in different languages to identify common patterns in product problems, or anomalies in the local service team activities. This information is fed back to the appropriate service teams for action. The application also acts as a central hub where anyone in the organisation can access and interrogate service report data to improve performance and develop new value propositions.
  • Improvement:  The project does not stop there. It is now embedded in the service operations and used as a basic tool for continuous improvement. In effect, this has shifted the whole organization to be more aware of the value of their data.

Utilizing AI in B2B services

Regarding AI, our task was to uncover some of the myths and benefits for service businesses and the first task was to agree on what we really mean by AI among the participants. It took time, but we discovered that there are really two interpretations which makes the term rather confusing. The first is a generic term used by visionaries and AI professionals to describe a world of intelligent machines and applications. Important at a social & macroeconomic level, but perhaps not so useful for business operations -at least at a practical level. The second is an umbrella term for a group of technologies that are good at finding patterns in large data sets (machine learning, neural networks, big data, computer vision), that can interface with human beings (Natural Language Processing) and that mimic human intelligence through being based on self-learning algorithms. Understanding this second definition and how these technologies can be used to overcome real business challenges is where the immediate value of AI sits for today’s businesses. It was also clear that the implication of integrating these technologies into business processes will require leaders to look at the change management challenges for their teams and customers.

To understand options for moving ahead at a practical level we first looked briefly at Husky through an interview with CIO Jean-Christophe Wiltz to CIOnet where we learned that i) real business needs should tailored drive technology implementation, and ii) that before getting to AI technologies, there is a need to build the appropriate infrastructure in terms of database and data collection, and, most importantly, the need to be prepared to continually adapt this infrastructure as the business needs change.