Karel coleads the global Metals & Mining Practice and is one of the authors of McKinsey’s annual Global Materials Perspective. Since joining the firm, he has worked across multiple sectors, including advanced industries and electronics, energy and materials, technology, and private equity.
He directs the firm’s work in China and Asia on transformation programs and business building in the materials and broader industrial sectors, which help companies become leaders and lighthouses in technology enablement, sustainability, and the energy transition.
Karel directs the firm’s work on operations and industrial IoT transformations, advising the region’s largest industrial companies on issues such as smart-manufacturing strategy, smart-plant design and ramp-up, supply chain 4.0, product development and launch, e-procurement, commercial and organizational improvement, and broader strategy development.
Karel cofounded the Industrial IoT Hub, which brings together the firm’s expertise and technology for end-to-end digital and analytics transformations of industrial companies. For almost a decade he has supported the development of the Global Lighthouse Network in China and Asia together with the World Economic Forum.
Karel has helped facilitate business-transformation programs for steel, nonferrous, and advanced materials producers, with an emphasis on “smart lean” manufacturing and digital-enabled commercial excellence. He refreshed the manufacturing strategy and footprint for different players across value chains in different industries and ecosystems. He also introduced a digital performance management system for metals producers, increasing data availability from capture through a data platform and improving performance through machine learning and embedding it in new ways of working.
Some of his other projects include designing and developing a new organizational and operating model for a high-tech multinational company in Asia seeking to radically improve its competitiveness in product design, order-to-delivery process, and portfolio and operations strategy.
In helping organizations capture value in these domains, he leverages the power of the “triple transformation”: (1) business domain impact, (2) organizational change and capability building, and (3) technology for excellence.
With Tsinghua University in Beijing, he cofounded the Innovation & Learning Center, a digital model factory on the Tsinghua campus providing hands-on capability building on tech enablement. He has also guest lectured at Tsinghua University.
Outside of McKinsey, Karel is the chairman of the board of directors of the Benelux Chamber of Commerce in China (East), a nonprofit organization that aims to strengthen business, government, and community ties between Benelux (Belgium, Netherlands, and Luxembourg) organizations and individuals in and affiliated with China.
Earlier in his career, he worked as a steel researcher in Belgium, Germany, Japan, and the United States, publishing in ISIJ International (the journal of the Iron and Steel Institute of Japan), Journal de Physique, and the Journal of Magnetism and Magnetic Materials.
Karel is a native Dutch speaker and is fluent in English, French, and German; he also possesses basic knowledge of Mandarin and Spanish.
