ASG Winter Roundtable
20-21 January 2026
London UK
Topic: Building Customer Centricity
Based in London, the ASG Winter Roundtable brought together international executives from across the manufacturing industry to explore how organisations can create greater value through a deeper understanding of customer needs and outcomes. Through a combination of executive discussions, site visits and peer learning, our partners examined how leading organisations are using customer insight, digital capabilities and service innovation to strengthen long-term business performance.
Key themes explored included:
- Lessons from our hosts in the transport and healthcare industry who are successfully advancing service-led growth and innovation.
- The role of the Voice of the Customer (VoC) in shaping service-led business models and guiding strategic decision-making.
- How organisations can translate customer insight into compelling value propositions and outcome-based offerings.
- The importance of combining operational excellence, digital technologies and service capabilities to deliver sustainable customer value.
Over the two days, partners gained practical insight through visits to Alstom’s Elizabeth Line Depot and Karl Storz Endoscopy. Participants explored real-world examples of service innovation in practice, while also benefiting from dedicated Roundtable discussions and a Partnership Dinner in Covent Garden.
The discussions provided valuable opportunities to compare approaches, challenge assumptions and learn from organisations at different stages of their service transformation journeys. Partners shared experiences, explored common challenges and identified practical ways to strengthen customer-centric strategies within their own businesses.
The Roundtable reinforced a powerful message:
Organisations that place the Voice of the Customer at the heart of their strategy are better positioned to create lasting value, accelerate service-led growth and build stronger long-term customer relationships.
Meet The Team
Our expert team is made up of researchers, practitioners and business transformation pioneers.
Sasha is Senior Industrial Fellow at Aston Business School and the Advanced Services Group. He brings more than 22 years of senior leadership experience with Tetra Pak, where he played a pivotal role in shaping service-led growth, innovation and transformation on a global scale.
Throughout his career, Sasha has been instrumental in developing outcome-based service solutions that redefined how value is delivered to customers. His leadership supported Tetra Pak’s strategic development, helping to embed advanced services at the heart of its business model and enabling sustainable, profitable growth.
Sasha’s expertise lies in turning strategy into practice, guiding organisations through complex change and demonstrating how servitization can deliver competitive advantage. He continues to champion service innovation as a powerful driver of industrial transformation.
Sandra is a Senior Industrial Fellow with the Advanced Services Group and a business consultant based in Germany. She has extensive experience in and passion for accelerating company transformation through business model innovation and technology adoption. As Programme Manager for the Advanced Services Growth programme, she supported 80 UK-based SMEs to boost GVA by £19.2M and create 70 new jobs.
Sandra supports ASG’s advisory services across Europe, delivering organisational development workshops, executive education and commissioned projects. As an Enterprise Educator and Business Mentor, she has advised more than 500 senior executives and founders, applying expertise in business ideation, lean start-up, customer value proposition design and business model innovation.
She is also an International Telecommunication Union Digital Innovation Expert, working with governments worldwide to strengthen ICT-centric innovation ecosystems. Sandra holds an MBA with distinction from Aston University.
Ian is a Visiting Industrial Fellow at the Advanced Services Group, bringing more than 20 years of senior management experience in growing service businesses within the food manufacturing industry. Over the last 15 years, he has focused on service innovation, driving the shift from product support to advanced, outcome-based solutions through servitization.
Since 2008, Ian has held a series of global leadership roles with Tetra Pak, including Director Expert Services and Director of Service Solutions. In these positions, he designed advanced service strategies, built global organisational capabilities and deployed solutions that created measurable value for customers around the world.
Ian is motivated by the opportunity to help manufacturers unlock new ways of competing, showing how advanced services can deliver stronger, more sustainable business performance.
Dimitris is a Senior Energy Efficiency Business Developer Specialist at the Swiss organisation Basel Agency for Sustainable Energy (BASE). With more than 13 years of professional experience in the field of energy, entrepreneurship and sustainable technologies, Dimitris has experience in business model innovation, valuation principles and project execution.
Within BASE, Dimitris plays a key role in accelerating the deployment of Servitization worldwide, including the Cooling as a Service (CaaS) model.
Dimitris is part of the founding team of the Servitization for Energy Transition (SET) Alliance – aiming to further engage both private and public markets to adopt the model and accelerate the path to a more climate resilient and circular future. He holds an MEng Mechanical Engineering from Imperial College and and MSc of Management, Technology and Economics from ETH Zürich.
Denise is a qualified sustainability practitioner with over 30 years of experience working with businesses in the manufacturing and construction sectors. Her work at Wylde Connections helps diverse industries create and apply sustainability strategies, ensuring businesses can meet sustainability challenges while staying commercially viable.
Her aim is to bridge the gap between academic research and industrial practice, fostering innovation in sustainability and environmental stewardship.
