Kramp is Europe’s number one agricultural wholesaler and they keep growing fast. The company is undergoing a global digital transformation, and proper data management plays a huge role in Kramp’s new strategy. The Director of Data will be of key importance to the company by setting up the data organization and strategy from scratch.

About Kramp

Kramp Group is Europe’s largest agricultural wholesaler. They offer more than 500,000 different spare parts and accessories for the sectors Agriculture, Forest & Grass Care, and Construction. Kramp is well-known for their exceptional service, next-day delivery on thousands of items, and excellent value for money. This is what makes them the ultimate one-stop shop for every agricultural dealer.

But Kramp is much more than a parts supplier. They consistently improve their services to be as efficient and straightforward as possible. By focusing on digitization, e-commerce, and innovation, they continue to maintain their leading role in the market and stay ahead of competitors.

“Kramp still feels like the start-up we were over seventy years ago. We have the spirit of a family business and the international success of a large multinational.” – Eddie Perdok, CEO of KRAMP

Each year, Kramp continues to achieve strong growth. With headquarters in The Netherlands, they also have eleven distribution centers, twenty-four sales offices, more than 3,500 employees and over one billion euros in revenue. As a leading player in their market – and supported by investor NPM Capital – Kramp is perfectly positioned to achieve their significant growth plans.

With a global digital transformation in the works, the importance of top notch data management at Kramp cannot be underestimated. The Director of Data joins the company in a newly created role that contains the responsibility to design, build, and lead Kramp’s data organization.

Job description: Director of Data

The Director of Data reports to the CTO and gets the opportunity to create a cutting edge data organization at Kramp, to drive the overarching data-driven innovation strategy. The Director of Data creates synergy between the data, business and software development processes.  They push innovation by automated decision making and ensure the cross-platform availability of the data for e-Commerce, Machine Learning and other applications.

This mandate consists of three main goals: creating the future organizational structure and putting the resources (people and solutions) in place; devising the data roadmap; and shaping the company-wide data capabilities. The Director of Data will work with the existing Data Analytics and Business Intelligence teams across several departments and countries, while setting up an overarching data strategy. The Director of Data sees to the adequate standardization of data elements to increase data accessibility for key stakeholders in the organization.

Specifically, the Director of Data is responsible for eight areas:

• Developing and implementing the data strategy, based on industry trends, best practices, and opportunities, and integrated with the wider corporate strategy.
• Enable unification, standardization and democratization of the data landscape across all of Kramp Group.
• Providing company-wide leadership and direction in setting and communicating the approach for the data management function; inspiring Kramp’s diverse workforce to commit to the necessary actions; and clearly communicating the ‘why’ behind the central data management framework toward stakeholders throughout the organization.
• Developing and steering the budget for the central cost center and managing area budgets in line with organizational strategy.
• Engaging stakeholders up to board level, identifying their needs and concerns and properly responding by leading and coordinating stakeholder engagement plans to support the communication of business information and decisions.
• Defining the future organization structure for data management and aligning it with corporate principles; defining the relationship between elements of the organization; and defining the responsibilities of managers to enable the organization to achieve its business objectives.
• Building analytical capabilities across the organization, boosting a data-driven culture, and training departments in leveraging data to inform and impact business decisions and drive profitability.
• Designing, developing, and delivering data management systems that meet organizational needs, and defining and implementing the proper data architecture, including rules and standards for design and governance.
• Developing annual business plans for data management in alignment with corporate strategy, and quantifying business outcomes for key projects

“We are setting high standards for the role of data at Kramp, and the Director of Data should share our ambition in setting up a cutting edge data organization. Everything is included: from building the team to structuring the issues and collaborating intensively with many stakeholders across the global matrix organization.” – Olivier Luxon, CTO at Kramp

The current strong sense of urgency for a strong data organization generates an interesting momentum. An experienced leader at the intersection of business and technology, with strong management skills and the ambition to build a data organization from scratch, can make a big and immediate impact in this role.

As the future data organization will be embedded in the current matrix organization, and since stakeholder engagement across the global company is key, this role requires a significant amount of travel (upwards of 30% of the time). Although the Director of Data obviously has experience with data and technology, Kramp will support them with a tailored technology onboarding if needed. However, proper people leadership and management skills are crucial from the get-go to hit the ground running.

Interested?

Kramp is working with Top of Minds to fill this vacancy.
To express your interest, please contact Hayke Tjemmes at hayke.tjemmes@topofminds.com.