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 (KU Leuven University) 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 Aviation & DHL Express as a Business Analyst, where he assisted in rolling out new and improved Business Intelligence systems, 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 modeling.

He grew technical expertise in all products of the IBM Cognos Analytics suite, as well as in data quality, database design, and data warehousing. (Oracle, SQL) He also developed several Javascript add-ons for the IBM Cognos product suite to improve reporting functionalities.

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 ensure reports and dashboards tick all of the important boxes: being useful, utilized, efficient, correct, able to make a difference, and competent, but also being presentable, visually appealing, and attractive.

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 newer Cognos Analytics (v11.1.7 and v12.0.x) platforms and has assisted them in their minor and major upgrades. With his extensive knowledge of the product, he can make the IBM Cognos environment stand out and be still competitive with other brands.

He is known for looking into BI systems and squeezing the maximum out of them. This by enhancing the system performance, implementing automation & templated structures, utilizing all customizations possible inside the product, and by his unique vision into advanced reporting, visual reporting esthetics, and layout techniques.

Next to his existing deep IBM Cognos product knowledge, Joeri also has experience with building content in Microsoft PowerApps and Microsoft Power BI.

More recently, Joeri has been growing his functional and technical experience in the new domain of Data Governance. In the DG Competence Center, he focused on Master Data, Data Quality, and Data Cataloging concepts. He is both a trainer in these domains at the element61 Academy, as well as our lead technical consultant in the Ataccama Data Governance projects we handle.