Stijn Hoegaerts

20+ years of IT leadership in international manufacturing: aerospace, automotive components and glass moulds for the global packaging industry.

Organisation-wide programmes: multi-country SAP rollouts, digital customer services and new business development where IT and strategy meet.

A pragmatic people-first leader: aligning people, processes and priorities, because the technology is rarely the hard part.

By day, I'm Global IT Director at BMT Group, a Belgian industrial group active in aerospace, automotive components and glass mould production. Working across divisions, countries and cultures, I've spent much of my career bridging IT and the business, driven by one conviction: IT should be a value driver, not a cost center.

Over the years I've navigated quite a few waters, and they taught me one thing above all: context matters. What works in one place isn't necessarily the answer somewhere else. Analogies can certainly help, but it's understanding the context that decides whether a solution stands a chance.

My motto is "No sweat, no glory." Nothing comes by itself. To reach your goals, you have to work for them, create the right context and give luck a helping hand. To my younger self I'd say: stay ambitious, but accept that time can be your ally too.