Who are our directors? What drives them, and what do they do? In Boardwalk, we go out with a director every quarter and visit a special place on campus. In this episode, we meet Vice-President Patrick Groothuis. He talks about the new Operations Strategy 2026-2030 and how the support services, together with the faculties, ensure that students, lecturers, and researchers can fully focus on our ambitions.
The university wants to improve its operations further and align them more closely with what the faculties need. A new plan has been developed for this purpose, ensuring that the entire business operations become more effective and efficient, with room for a personal approach. Every employee must deal with it.
Challenging goal
TU/e has set itself a challenging goal, says Groothuis: "By 2035, we will be the most personal, connected, and seamless university organization in the Netherlands. And that also means that our business operations must be reliable, professional, clear, and accessible."To achieve this, in the coming years, the university will increasingly work in multidisciplinary teams that take full responsibility for the entire TU/e value chain, from start to finish.
Personal, Seamless, and Connected
Groothuis continues: "Personal, seamless, and connected are the keywords in this operation. In ten years, we want to score at least a seven everywhere.
We are becoming more effective and efficient. And the user comes first. To do this, we will approach things differently at the back end. So, we are not going to work vertically, but rather more horizontally within the organization. In chains, so to speak."
Working in chains
There are already examples in the organization where work is done in the 'chains', for instance, at Education and Student Affairs (ESA).
Jeroen van Kilsdonk is a manager at ESA and, together with his team, has handled the entire chain of registration, admission, selection, and registration in recent years. Van Kilsdonk: "Ten years ago, it could take three months before you got an answer. Now there will be a first response within 48 hours, and there will be a definitive answer within 30 days." But we are not finished yet and continue to develop, because as van Kilsdonk says: "We work with many departments and there are still opportunities there. We can also make significant progress through innovation. It can be even better; we are not perfect." Especially because student numbers continue to grow, it is also necessary to work more efficiently. In 2025, a record 3,299 new students enrolled at the university, bringing TU/e to 13,854 students.
Teamwork
Another example of efforts already made to put the user first and work in chains is supporting researchers in applying for grants. With Research Life Cycle Support, the university aims to help its researchers throughout the entire process from idea to impact.
Associate Professor Yali Tang was awarded an ERC personal grant in 2025 for the Electrons to Iron project. She wants to conduct further research on the latest developments in metal electrodeposition, with the primary goal of maximizing the benefits of this green iron-production approach. "Because we know that it works, but not yet enough about how it works exactly," Tang explains. "We want to understand the whole process well, because then we can really drive innovative and sustainable iron production technologies."
Project Development Officer Jean-Paul Krugers supports Tang. Together with his colleagues from the Research Support Office , he arranges a lot for researchers, from research requests to drafting cooperation agreements. They think with you and give researchers the space to do what they do best. But both Tang and Krugers say: "It's teamwork."
Charm
They will also continue to develop within the RSO and work even more closely in line with the new Operation Strategy.
The next step is to harmonize the process in a system.
And with that, they work even more seamlessly, with even better coordination and overview. That project is called Charm: Chain Harmonisation and automation of research support management.
The next step
Patrick Groothuis sees the examples of ESA and RSO as inspiration and direction for the other services."The next step is for all our services to work in this way, step by step, day by day, a little better. Our motto is 'progress over perfection', so it doesn't have to be all at the same time; continuous improvement is paramount."
