Ken Somers

Ken Somers joined McKinsey in 2004 and is based in the Antwerp office. His main interests and activities are in the field of transformative industries, with a specific in operations, in particular yield and energy efficiency.

He has primarily served major clients in Global Energy and Materials on a worldwide scale. Some examples of his recent work are:

-Developing the energy efficiency program of four major global steel players, and two major European chemicals players

-Developing the energy efficiency program of one major power plant operator, one major refinery player and three major pulp and paper player

-Supporting yield value creation optimization at major chemical and refining clients

-Assessing the energy savings potential of major European, Chinese African and Indian steel, paper, metals, food, retail, pharmaceuticals, petrochemicals and chemicals players through quick diagnostics

-Application of advanced analytics to improve variable profit (yield, energy, throughput, quality) in steel, metals, power generation, chemicals, pharmaceuticals and mining

Ken leads McKinsey's resource productive operations service line and has assessed the energy efficiency of over 100 plants in the last 5 years. He has been leading the use of advanced analytics in heavy industry variable profit optimization and the design of advanced analytics transformations at scale.

Ken worked for 4 years at the IWT in the chemistry lab of Arnout Ceulemans at the KULeuven and obtained a PhD in theoretical chemistry (focus: protein modeling and spectroscopy). He also holds a Chemistry degree with “Great distinction” from the KULeuven, and an academic degree in Teaching