Özlem Kestioğlu Özel | Change for the better

She is a true dreamer and change maker. She started her career in Information Technologies while she was studying in University. In 1999 she joined SAP Bilgi as an SAP consultant and worked in manufacturing clients SAP implementation projects. In 2000 she started to work in ORACLE as Business Intelligence Sales Manager and then respectively worked in Account Manager and Sales Team Leader roles in 10 years. She developed many important IT transformation projects especially in Municipality, Logistics &Transportation and Manufacturing industries and achieved great results. ERP, CRM, SOA, Datawarehouse and custom application development projects were the key areas of her expertise.In 2010 she decided to join KocSistem to pursue new challenges and develop her leadership skills while managing large teams. She started to work as Sales Group Director of Technology Solutions and Services where she was responsible from Cloud Computing, Data Center Outsourcing, System Integration services, Network and security solutions. She initiated many change programs on organization, solutions, services, pricing and on people. In 2013 she began to work in Accenture as Country Managing Director of Retail, Manufacturing and Travel Transportation Industries.In 2017 she built her own consulting company "GrowRide" to help the businesses to reach their potentials and help them to build effective sales machines so that companies can ride their growth journey. She built go-to-market strategies for some top scored startups in Turkey. Very recently, in March 2018, she joined SAP as Marketing Director of SAP South Europe and Francophone Africa region. As being part of SAP’s global digital transformation strategy, she will contribute to the growth of SAP in that regions mainly through Digital Marketing. She works as an active mentor in Universities and Women networks like TurkishWin, WeConnect. She is also keen to help, to inspire and to support women in their journey for self-actualization in Turkey and abroad in a global sisterhood and encourage them to take more part in economy. She is graduaded from Marmara University Industrial Engineering Department and married with 1 son.