Joeri Willems

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till now
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Principal Analytics Architect

Joeri Willems has been active in Business Intelligence & Data Warehousing since 2003. Joeri graduated in 2001 as an Industrial Engineer in ICT & Electronics at Groep T, nowadays part of the KU Leuven University group, and complemented this with a specialization in Business Economics (2002).

Joeri started his career as a business analyst at Estee Lauder, where he was given the opportunity to start working in the Global Business Intelligence division, working with IBM Cognos. He developed new auditing techniques and set up new financial reports for the business.

In 2005, he moved to DHL Express, where - as Business Analyst - he assisted in rolling out a new and improved Business Intelligence system, once more, based on IBM Cognos technology.

Joeri focused initially on the technical side and gained deep knowledge in the areas of report design, framework design, system administration and database modelling. He grew technical expertise in all products of the IBM Cognos Analytics suite. Besides these, he also added experience in database design (Oracle) and SQL query building. He also developed a few Javascript add-ons to improve report functionality in IBM Cognos.

In 2010, he evolved to the role of Business Intelligence Product Manager of all DHL Aviation BI front-end applications. In this new role, he was responsible for the full BI system on the front-end side, and for the full change management and implementation of new product releases and reporting projects.

Joeri enjoys being the link between business users and IT and loves to create useful and good-looking reports and dashboards, that effectively really do grow the Intelligence within a Business.

Joeri joined element61 in 2018. His first assignments were focused on IBM Cognos Analytics (server installation, configuration and upgrades from Cognos10). Over the last years, Joeri has migrated most of our customers from their older Cognos BI environments towards the new Cognos Analytics (v11.x) platforms and assists them in their minor upgrades. He also has helped some of our customers by improving their reporting environments in the long run. This is by enhancing their system performance, implementing automation & templated structures, and rolling out improved reporting content that adheres to a philosophy that reports should be both correct, visually appealing and practical to use. Next to his existing deep IBM product knowledge, Joeri added also Microsoft to his competences with a first focus on Power BI and SSIS ETL and PowerApps development.

Since then, Joeri gradually moved into the new and fascinating Data Governance practice. In the DG Competence Center, we focus on Master Data, Data Quality and Data Cataloging projects and software solutions. Joeri also teaches the courses of the element61 Academy on these subjects.