16^th EPP Global Pricing Forum

Gabor Kapus

Gabor Kapus is in charge of the business transformation deployment for commercial policy & pricing at Schneider Electric. The program creates the link from strategy to channel management, to commercial policy and to pricing structure. During the 28-year of professional experience, he held various positions in pricing and finance, in various geographies (Hungary, France, China and Russia). His carrier is balanced between operational experience and corporate change management projects. As a leader of the company, to sustain the businesses, he is keeping special attention on Digital, Continuing Education, Adaptability and Change Management.

Alex Paul Suciu

Alexandru Paul Suciu is an international top executive with global expertise in shareholders’ value creation, valued as a top specialist in profitable growth strategy development and implementation.
Alex has an extensive experience in the top 30 global markets in FMCG, working in both Developed markets and Developing markets, delivering sustained results and business strategy change projects in local, regional and global roles.
With 30 years of cross functional professional experience in FMCG industries working for MARS Inc. (4) years), Unilever (21 years), Coca Cola (4 years) and in Finance banking, Société Générale (2 years).
Alex is leading since 2016 the MARS Inc. Global Strategic Revenue Management to drive consistent profitable growth and embed world class revenue management capability in the top markets, reporting to Chief Customer Officer.

Mars is sustainability mission driven American global manufacturer of confectionery, pet food, and other food products and a provider of animal care services, with more than US$35 billion in annual sales.
The MARS Inc Is 100% privately owned company by MARS family with more that 125,000 associates and markets globally its iconic brands like: M&M, Twix, Sinkers, Wrigley, Extra, Royal Canin, Whiskas, Pedigree, VCA, Uncle Bens and many more.

Gianni Di Fede

Proactive, dynamic, analytical and ambitious. Since 2007 in Revenue Management (RM), starting with an internship in Starwood and now Vice President Revenue Management, Business Intelligence and Distribution at Radisson Hotel Group, based in Brussels. Apart from RM, previous experiences in other departments as Director of Sales (along with RM), Front/Back of the House Agent, Waiter and Housekeeper. Besides the professional career, when I was 28 years old I reached the highest Academic degree with a Ph.D. in Hotel Administration, after a BA and MA always in the hospitality business.

Louise Dahlgaard

Louise Dahlgaard is a Senior Global Pricing Manager at ALK with +13 years of experience with pricing and market access in the pharmaceutical and medical device industries.
Successful pricing is about understanding what value your product has for your customers. The right price is the pivot of everything the company do to create value. Price considerations are important everywhere, from board rooms in global companies, to the vegetable market in Nigeria, where I first developed my interest in pricing and negotiation.

Youssef Mamour

Leader with vast experience in the Healthcare industry, with responsibilities across strategy development and execution, product development and launch, lifecycle management, sales & marketing operations management, process improvement, through a broad spectrum of products and services in Diagnostic Imaging and Medical Devices.
Goal-oriented with reputation for simplifying the complex, building and managing high performance teams. Data driven to make educated and fact based decisions, while considering the impact of all aspects of the business. Proven track record in delivering bottom line impact via Pricing and Productivity Management.

Roberto Bedotto

Roberto Bedotto is the EMEA Pricing Director in EATON Electrical sector since February 2017.
He has some 20 years’ pricing experience in leading positions in five different companies.
He gained exposure to the Pricing area in a B2C environment in Electrolux (white goods) and then in Ideal Standard (bath and kitchen products). He then moved to the B2B world, leading pricing of products and services for Carrier (Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning), pricing of projects in Honeywell Process Solutions (HPS), and then in the services and software business at NGA HR.

Thomas Delloye

Thomas’ primary responsibility is to ensure Zilliant brings value to its customer and prospects. Thomas works with leading B2B companies to identify and quantify uncaptured profit and revenue that exists in their businesses today. Additionally, he helps Zilliant customers apply predictive intelligence to their data to achieve profitable growth, increase competitive advantage, reduce business complexity and successfully implement business transformation. Prior to joining Zilliant in 2016, Thomas led the EMEA client pricing team for Dell, and held various roles in competitive analysis, pricing initiative & transformation, omnichannel pricing & bid pricing. Thomas graduated from HEC MBA & ISEN (MSc engineering). He currently resides in Montpellier, France.

José Vela

José Vela is Director of Pricing at Spandex Group. He leads the Group pricing strategy and helps all subsidiaries in Europe and Australia to implement country-specific key actions to improve pricing power and gross margin in the areas of pricing optimization, customer segmentation, compliance and compensation.
José has over two decades of experience in General Manager and Sales Manager roles mainly in B2B organizations in industries such as Graphics, Automotive and Media. He studied Mathematics at University of Barcelona and holds an Executive Development Program (PDD) from IESE and an Executive Master in Sales & Marketing from ESADE.
His unique blend of experiences in Management, Mathematics and different Markets and Industries has enabled José to develop and implement successful pricing improvement projects.

Darius Fekete

Darius is a Business Consultant with 14+ years of professional experience in pricing and digital transformations. He is an advocate for elevating commercial excellence to strategic levels in organizations and an expert in building dynamic pricing capabilities in commoditized markets.

Before joining Vendavo, he delivered several complex business transformation initiatives in B2B manufacturing, distribution, and financial services. Darius also worked at Simon-Kucher & Partners advising clients on top-line growth, price optimization and margin improvement initiatives.

Darius holds a Masters in International Economic Relations from the Cracow University of Economics in Poland.

Shawn Ehmann

Shawn has over 23 years’ experience in directing digital transformation initiatives for Fortune 500 companies around the world. Passionate about Commercial Excellence having lead practices across many institutions including consultancies such as Deloitte, a visiting professor at EADA Business School Barcelona for global top-30 master’s program, and successful in founding a profitable healthcare start-up. At Vendavo, Shawn is responsible for strategic assessment and execution for customers success, with emphasis on continuous engagement for customer value realization.

Augustin Manchon

Augustin Manchon pioneered Customer Value Management at Deloitte (USA), founded and led the Pricing Practice of Accenture (Global) and was Managing Director of Simon-Kucher & Partners (Canada) before founding Manchon & Company (Toronto and Paris) in 2009. With 25 years of pricing at Microsoft, Walmart, GE, Schneider Electric, Orange, Lyreco, Autodistribution and Bain Capital, he ranks among the Top 20 Global Pricing Influencers (Slipstream). He embeds world-class pricing intelligence tools, establishes pricing governance, trains on value-based selling and behavioural pricing, builds self-sustaining pricing capabilities and delivers millions in new EBITDA year after year. He is passionate about reinventing business models, monetizing digital platforms and coaching CEOs and investors during the current crisis. He holds degrees from HEC-Paris, Stern-NY and ESADE, speaks 5 languages fluently and has been featured in over 50 media and conferences worldwide.

Felix Krohn

Felix Krohn is a Senior Advisor in the areas of Digital, Strategy, Innovation, Monetization, and Transformation, working for various Private Equity firms & their portfolio companies as well as for Corporate clients mostly from the TMT industries. Additionally, he is a Coach for Pricing Excellence as well as a Mentor for various start-ups. Prior to that, Felix spent eight years at Wolters Kluwer, where he advised the CEO on business optimization and growth opportunities and where he built and led a global Pricing & BI/Analytics function. Felix had joined Wolters Kluwer from Simon-Kucher & Partners (SKP), where he was most recently a Partner and Managing Director for the firm’s Spain office. Felix Krohn has a MSc degree in Business Administration from University of Hamburg and attended Clayton Christensen’s Executive Education on Disruptive Innovation at Harvard Business School.

Raju Kariya

I am working as a Pricing Manager for Twill. Twill is the newest and fastest growing brand of Maersk, world’s biggest shipping company. Our ambition is to make Twill most profitable growth channel. For this we are focusing on identifying underlying customer needs and gaining operational efficiencies through experimentation and automation. I bring my 15 years of experience in Pricing and commercial oriented roles in container logistics, FMCG and consumer electronics industries

Shyam Sundar Ranganathan

Shyam Sundar Ranganathan is a Certified Pricing Professional and Business Intelligence consultant with 7+ years of experience in guiding digital transformations to success stories. Currently working with the Global Pricing team at Schneider Electric, he focuses on creating business cases covering channel management, discount structure, pricing processes, and its associated technology landscape.
Shyam holds a Master’s degree in Business Administration from Grenoble Ecole de Management and an Engineering Degree from Anna University.

Sylvain Rougemaille

Sylvain studied Computer science at Toulouse where he completed his PhD on Software Engineering applied to IA in 2008. Since then he participated in the creation of a startup which purpose was the diffusion of an IA approach to solve complex industrial problems (aircraft optimization, genomic simulation, etc.). By the end of 2015 he co-founded Brennus Analytics where he occupied the position of Chief Product Officer with the firm intention to shake the PO&M software market thanks to the unrivalled optimization capabilities of their IA. Since may 2020 and the acquisition of Brennus Analytics by PriceFx he is now pursuing the same objective as Product Manager of the Price Optimizer.

Sebastian Schwarz

Sebastian Schwarz is currently Pricing Analyst at reBuy reCommerce GmbH, Europe’s market leader on refurbished consumer electronics and pre-owned media goods based in Berlin. Over the last 6 years his team built up a daily, two-side pricing on 20.000 products in 7 quality conditions in 5 countries and two marketplaces where no out-of-the-shelf software exists.

Madhav Khurana

Currently the Head of Pricing at reBuy, Madhav is leading the efforts on making pricing of used products dynamic with machine learning technologies. He brings along an experience of eight years as a Data Scientist in various industries. In the past, he has been instrumental in revising the dynamic pricing algorithms of Careem, a ride-hailing company which is now a part of Uber. He has also led data science projects in other industries ranging from increasing retention and monetization of Candy Crush games using dynamic difficulty to overhauling CRM strategies of telecom operators using churn prediction.

Manoj Khokale

Manoj Khokale is responsible for leading pricing transformation initiatives globally for Fixed Networks business of Nokia. His area of expertise includes Pricing analytics, Commercial strategy & Competitive intelligence in B2B markets. Manoj has led large business transformation programs cutting across all functions of product monetization including product architecture, licensing, IT tools, supply chain and finance. In the two decades of his experience in Telecom, he has held responsibilities related to Commercial Management, Product Management, Business ops and Software Engineering. Manoj holds CFA Charter from CFA Institute USA, Executive MBA from T.A.Pai Management Institute, India and Engineering degree from Bangalore University, India.

Vincent Blankert

In an ongoing pursuit of optimization, we aim to find a substance which ties our global networks to our local cultures and unites strategic initiatives with day-to-day operations. I am grateful to have had the opportunity to enjoy years of experience in supply chain management, sales and contract negotiations. As I roll-out strategic initiatives, I continuously challenge myself to maintain a deep connection with the field and remind myself that success lies in the execution.

Steven Cuypers

Steven Cuypers, VP Product Strategy at Pricefx, gained 20 years of experience in multiple roles. As freelance IT admin for various companies in Brussels in the late 1990’s, he gave many organizations their first taste of the internet. He joined UltraGenda, a healthcare startup providing enterprise-wide, web-based scheduling solutions to hospitals across Europe in 2003. Starting in Support he moved up to Head of Sales. In 2013 he joined Pricefx, set up the Customer Success division and moved to Chicago in 2016, opening the first Pricefx office in the USA. Currently reporting to the CPO, he’s residing in Ghent, Belgium with his wife and their 2 children.

Sheetal Chavan

Sheetal has 10 years experience working in corporate as well as entrepreneurial setup in diverse sectors such as power generation, media, edu-tech, fashion e-commerce, logistics and ride-hailing. Her experience is focused on translating the business goals and pricing strategies effectively to the technical teams. In her most recent experience, she successfully built a dynamic pricing model for a movers and packers digital platform. Currently, Sheetal is working in a ride-hailing company, Free Now as a Pricing Strategy Manager looking at the pricing strategy for Free Now EU market. She is passionate about data and therefore believes it as a main driver for all the pricing decisions. It has also been the base for segmented targeting of customers.

Prof. Dr. Florian Bauer

Prof. Dr. Florian Bauer studied Psychology and Economics at the Technical University (Darmstadt), MIT, and Harvard University. He has devoted himself to research into behavioral economics and the psychology of pricing. In 1999 he co-founded Vocatus – an internationally active pricing consulting company – in Munich. Since then, he and his team have focused on systematically translating behavioral economics insights into a completely new pricing framework, which has demonstrated its superiority to classic approaches in hundreds of pricing and sales projects around the globe. Vocatus has duly won numerous industry awards for its innovative work and tools: for example, it was named “Best Consultancy” in the area of pricing by BrandEins in 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020. Besides his consulting engagements, Florian Bauer is an honorary professor at the Technical University of Munich.

Patric Kirchner

“In his almost 14-year career as a strategy consultant, Patric has advised clients from a wide range of industries on pricing and sales issues. A special focus has been on the B2B sector, where he has helped clients e.g. in the building materials, engineering, technology or wholesale sectors to grow profitably through optimized price management. Currently, topics such as "Dynamic Pricing" or "Digital Pricing Strategies" are selected focus topics of Patric. Patric is Managing Director at Accenture with focus on Pricing & Commercial Strategy. Prior to Accenture Patrhe worked as Director for PwC and Simon-Kucher & Partners.”

Dr. Marcus Demmelmair

Marcus F. Demmelmair is senior project leader within Accenture’s CEO & Enterprise Strategy practice. Marcus’ passion is to advise on commercial strategies leveraging new business models, analytics & artificial intelligence as well as innovative technologies. Over 9 years of consulting, Marcus help clients to find new levers for top-line growth across various B2C and B2B industries in Europe, Asia and the US.

Benjamin Schwarzer

Benjamin Schwarzer (M.Sc.) has been with Horváth & Partners Management Consultants since 2013 and is a Principal in the Functional Competence Center Sales, Marketing & Pricing. He is an cross-industry expert for Pricing Excellence and has advised medium and large, international companies particularly in the industrial goods, service and automotive industry in Top-Line Improvement. Benjamin has studied Business Management at the WFI Ingolstadt and WU Vienna.

Pedro Soares

Pedro is a professional with several years of work experience in Strategic Pricing and Revenue/Yield Management at worldwide companies from Industrial Engineering, Travel & Leisure, Food & Beverage and Transportation & Mobility markets. He holds a bachelor's degree in Industrial Engineering and MBA degree in Technologies for Business: AI, Data Science and Big Data. Pedro is one of the co-authors of the book “Arquitetos do Pricing” and he writes a monthly column about Pricing Strategy and Technology for the Aprix Journal.
Currently he is working as an Executive Advanced Profit Management & AI at Sixt SE, a leading international provider of high-quality mobility services. Additionally, he is pursuing a master’s degree in Management and Technology at the Technical University of Munich.

Sona Kochkanyan

Sona is a senior data scientist specialized in pricing analytics topics with AI and is leading Pricing Squad at Applied Intelligence. Sona brings 8 years of analytical product development experience, among which leading E2E AI projects for automotive, financial, consumer electronics and chemical industries as well as development of an AI-driven Spare parts pricing tool (SaaS).
Prior to Accenture Sona has been acting as a senior IT project manager at one of the big 4 companies. She holds a master’s degree in Mathematics with a focus on data science.

Pedro Argudo

Pedro Argudo is a Business Intelligence consultant with 10+ years of career in Schneider Electric. His career steps included Finance, Reporting and Pricing, in Spain and France. He holds a Business Administration degree and has a proven experience in Commercial Policy and Pricing Transformation projects in MEA, Europe and South America.
Pedro likes to see himself as a translator of data into insights, and insights into business actions for successful change management.

Olivier Viratelle

Olivier Viratelle is a senior pricing consultant with 20+ years of experience. Based in France, working for Global Pricing team focusing on Commercial policy & pricing transformation projects, deploying pricing process and tools across countries. Before joining the Pricing team, Olivier held various positions in Finance, sale and marketing functions including being Finance Business Partner for Schneider Electric France.

Matt Johnston

Matt Johnston is a seasoned commercial marketing professional possessing over 20 years Pricing, Product and Segmentation experience with Tier 1 brands in Europe, North America, the MENA region and Southeast Asia.
Matt is founder and CEO of a SaaS market research startup called EPIC Conjoint. Top global brands such as Vodafone Group, Philips, Three, Virgin Media and Whirlpool use EPIC Conjoint’s agile survey platform to optimize profit by predicting customers’ product preferences and willingness-to-pay in near real time.

Ana Susnjara

Ana is a senior data scientist and a pricing division manager with several years of experience in Predictive Layer, helping clients to leverage the power of AI to optimize their performance. Her expertise lies in the AI models’ developments in the fields of finance and pricing.

Before joining Predictive Layer, Ana obtained a PhD in Mathematics at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, with a focus on fast algorithms exploiting diverse data structures.

Ebrahim A. Elebiary

Passion for pricing comes from the diversity of topics handled internally and stakeholders involved externally. With that, Ebrahim has moved across pricing roles: operational pricing, pricing transformation, price team capability building on a local and regional basis in great companies like Goodyear, FedEx, P&G. Ebrahim has been running value finding projects in Belgium, France, and currently Germany. Given the constant changes in value generation, Ebrahim is keen on strengthening pricing organizations, learning new trends/skills, and having fun finding new paths to value.

Guido Hoogveld

Guido Hoogveld is Director Revenue Management Projects at Radisson Hotel Group, where he is responsible for strategic initiatives regarding revenue optimization, pricing and forecasting. Before that, he was a commercial strategy manager at NH Hotel Group where he focused mostly on revenue optimization for B2B segments. Born in the Netherlands, but lived in various countries across the globe, he studied Hotel Management in Maastricht and Business Intelligence at Maastricht University.

Walter Wijnands

With a background in Finance and Organizational Behavior, Walter has become a seasoned business leader and entrepreneur. A sharp businessperson with a proven track record gained over the past 25 years in the world of software and consulting in SAP ERP, Asset Management, and latest years Commercial Excellence - Pricing. Walter was as an executive with various companies throughout his career, lastly at Rizing (formerly Vesta Partners) as European co-founder and responsible for the business throughout EMEA. Walter serves currently as the Chief Executive Officer at SPOSEA – the digital pricing company – with a big passion for pricing and with the responsibility of leading the company on a trajectory of growth.

Harikishore Sreenivasalu (‘Hari’)

Provides executive leadership in IT technology and architecture and a true entrepreneur. During his career he managed and delivered multiple smaller and large-scale projects applying the latest tech. He collaborated with customers’ executives to align this cutting-edge tech solutions with strategic business goals. During recent years with SPOSEA as well as before, Harikishore lead multiple cloud & data management and enterprise solution implementations for SAP users regarding Pricing & CPQ solutions. Fueled with skills as an architect and technology lead, combined with a very good understanding of the world of Pricing, Hari is responsible as Chief Technology Officer for all aspects of Product Development, the Product Roadmap, and the strategic IT planning.

Eiko van Hettinga

Eiko van Hettinga is managing director of 7Learnings. His company helps leading European retailers to optimize prices with machine learning technology. Eiko has more than 10 years experience in eCommerce and commercial leadership.

Pavel Knorr

I'm an experienced software architect with proven expertise in market research, education, and insurance technologies. I have solid experience in cloud platform development and a strong background in data science and machine learning. At EPICConjoint I'm responsible for IT products development and support as well as information security and data protection.

Patrick C. Raab

Patrick is passionate for Pricing and Monetization, he advises clients in multiple industries and geographies. He also holds lectures (ETH Zürich, University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt) and speaks at dedicated conferences. Patrick’s expertise covers a broad range of topics in Pricing and Commercial excellence, e.g., from organizational enablement, value pricing, pricing psychology, and data- & analytics-driven optimization.
As an Associate Director at BCG in Düsseldorf, Patrick is a core member of the Marketing, Sales and Pricing practice and has more than 15 years of professional experience in the area from various industry positions (Syngenta, Vorwerk holding) and management consulting (Simon-Kucher, Kearney).

Frederic Tassin Pic