Benelux CIO interview: Benoît Dewaele, Vandemoortele
Summary
This article can also be found in the Premium Editorial Download: Benoît Dewaele, chief information officer at Belgian food group Vandemoortele, is looking to connect with the chefs of Europe. “We need to find ways through social media or mass marketing campaigns to capture them, then we need to nurture them and inspire them and create brand awareness on our company and branded websites, to have a kind of personal communication with them through portals.” Although engaging customers is not strictly a job for IT, Dewaele says his team work in close collaboration with marketing to help promote products digitally and boost customer experience – for end-consumers as well as retailers and wholesalers. Another important project is unifying the company’s customer relationship management (CRM) systems which have sprouted up over time, partly through a series of acquisitions. It was conceptually already possible from the beginning to be able to work from home.” The challenge of the pandemic has been operational rather than technical, he says, because the pattern of demand changed as restaurants closed and people ordered products through e-commerce. Outside work, he is keen on cycling, skiing and padel, a tennis-like racquet game played in fours which has enjoyed huge growth in Belgium during the pandemic as one of the few group activities allowed during lockdown.