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• Agnes van Driel
• Sebastiaan Schilperoort
• Johan Meuzelaar
• Janine van der Hilst
• Pieter Commandeur
• Niels Arendsen

Janine van der Hilst

‘Thinking in terms of what’s possible’

Janine van der Hilst (33) is project manager operations and black belt.

“After completing my studies in aerospace engineering at Delft University of Technology and two years of traveling and exploration, I started at Fokker Aerospace Group in 2002 as a management trainee. Since then I’ve worked on all kinds of projects and seen many different parts of the company. Fokker Aerostructures has changed greatly in the past few years, with new philosophies, lots of new people and a future-oriented approach. I work on developing the vision and strategy together with the management team operations, and I implement them together with production and supporting departments. As project manager operations my everyday work is strategic improvement projects.

One of the ways to make improvements is by eliminating waste from all the operational processes. I do that by working together with the people in the production department, because they know exactly what needs to be done to make the production process better, faster or more cost-effective. Analysis of the data helps to find the real causes. I’ve found that you can only really change things if everyone’s singing the same song. That’s easiest in companies that think in terms of what’s possible, and that know how to get the best out of their employees. In my view Fokker Aerostructures is one of those companies.”