Winfried grew up in Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germany. He did his diploma in pure maths, writing a thesis about Knot Theory, which turned out to be linked to knots DNA forms, when making proteins. Then he moved into applied statistics for his PhD, continuing at the Technical University of Dortmund. During his PhD he worked first on a classification problem in the project “Multivariate Determination of Business Cycle Phases” in SFB475. Then he switched to a project about antibiotics in hospital sewage water working with the University of Freiburg. Finally, he wrote his thesis, Modelling Varying Amplitudes, in a project with mechanical engineers, looking at two disturbances, chatter and spiralling. Thanks to using design of experiments in the project, it was possible to understand the link between eigenfrequencies of the boring bar and the likelihood of chatter developing in the undamped process.

After his PhD he worked at MSR Consulting in Cologne, developing Customer Value Management solutions for insurances, and other data analysis tools. After two years Winfried moved to Unilever R&D in Vlaardingen, NL. At Unilever he developed a new way to plan and analyse longitudinal nutrition studies. The actual study was iron fortification in young women. The issue identified was that a classical start-end measurement, as standard in clinical trials, would not capture the process of changing the equilibrium the iron status in humans has. The development of the iron parameters was captured by adding three in-between measurements that were randomised into three time windows per person. This way it was even possible to show an average increase at the lowest dosis of iron. The most important outcome was however the proof that iron levels in healthy humans indeed level off.

Winfried worked in this time extensively with the Sensory, Perception and Behaviour department. He contributed to the development of a good mood measurement for China.

After four years at Unilever, Winfried switched to Shell Global Solutions as internal statistical consultant. Here he supported particularly the Catalysts and Lubricants R&D departments with design of experiments, both for product development as for process optimisation. The Catalysts department had several parallel reactors and a preparation robot, which allowed them to run large numbers of experiments fast. However, this made it even more important to think well about the experiments to not waste resources. It was also a catalyst project where the latest developments in design of experiments became crucial, as a project was extremely tight on budget, but still needed to understand at least the rough form of impact from its main ingredients and their interaction with process parameters. A definitive screening design allowed not just that, but even a few repeated experimental runs to understand the variability better.

In this time Winfried started work on the Road Fleet Model Scenario, for which he developed the Consumer Choice model and worked on the commercial vehicle model. For both these models he brought together technical understanding, sociological factors and data proxies for influencing factors. One shortcoming of the existing tool was that it tried to explain the full vehicle choice economically, including the size of the vehicle. This is however determined by customer needs, cultural norms, and economic situation of the country. So a share of size model was developed to reflect this and then the economic choice was only determined for the drive train. But also here psychological and social aspects were added to reflect the problem more holistically.

In 2017 Winfried became the Data Science Lead in the Advanced Analytics Center of Excellence and was responsible for building a data science team for all of Shell. In 1.5 years he grew the team from 5 to 25 people. His team worked on diverse topics from time series forecasting, over predictive maintenance, to a recommender engine for offers in the Shell Loyalty program. In 2018 he became Team Lead Customer Centricity in Data Science, retaining a team of 18 people. He then only worked with the Downstream Businesses, particularly Retail. Then after half a year Natural Language processing and Machine Vision was split out of his team, as was a team to support Trading, so he retained the core customer facing businesses. However, after the split the team had shrunk too much, so he rebuilt it back to 15 people. After COVID19 in 2021 Winfried moved with his team into IDT as Capability Centre Customer Centricity and Commercial Insights. There he led a group of more than 35 data scientists and AI Engineers, to develop data solutions for the Downstream businesses, again including Trading, which was removed again after 1.5 years.

The last 1.5 years in Shell Winfried had a strategic role to develop AI solutions for Customer Centricity.

Winfried was the webmaster of the European Network of Business and Industrial Statistics (ENBIS) from 2005 to 2010. He professionalised the website, ran a logo competition, and created a backend that made running conferences a lot easier. He was also the conference chair in Athens in 2008. After a break during his management time he is now returning to active participation in ENBIS, and nominated as President-Elect.