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sam.donche@edge

Digital backbone for factories

Connecting machines,
data, and decisions.

I’m Sam Donche, Industry 4.0 Consultant based in Ieper, Belgium. I help manufacturers connect their assets, structure their data, and turn operational reality into decisions worth acting on.

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4+ yrs in industry & Ignition development

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// About

From the lab bench to the plant floor.

I started in biomedical research: four years of doctoral work at UZ Gent on PET-guided radiotherapy and imaging biomarkers, six peer-reviewed publications, and the kind of data analysis discipline that only comes from staring at noisy signals for a long time.

I moved to industry in 2022, first as a data engineer at Clarebout Potatoes, then as MES project engineer at Vandemoortele. Same instinct, different context: capture what the process is actually doing, structure it so people trust it, and feed it back to the operators and engineers who make decisions on the floor.

Now I do that work as an Industry 4.0 Consultant at Mustry Solutions, designing scalable industrial digital architectures across manufacturing, aerospace, textiles and energy. If you’d like to work with me, that’s where the engagement runs through.

// Timeline

Trajectory

[ CAREER HISTORIAN ] trend: live
experience current education
Fifteen years as a trend. Hover a span for details, click to inspect that chapter below.

  1. Industry 4.0 Consultant

    May 2026 — Present

    Mustry Solutions · Flanders, Belgium

    • Design and implement scalable industrial digital architectures that connect production assets and turn operational data into business insight.
    • Work across manufacturing, aerospace, textiles and energy clients using Ignition, TimescaleDB, Factry and Grafana.
    Industry 4.0IgnitionTimescaleDBGrafana

  2. MES Project Engineer

    Sep 2025 — Apr 2026

    Vandemoortele · Izegem, Belgium

    • Operated and extended a GE Vernova Proficy MES estate (Plant Applications, iFIX, Cimplicity, Proficy Historian and Operations Hub), rolling established workflows out to new sites and connecting new floor equipment like checkweighers and scales.
    • Built and extended the logic behind those workflows in MS SQL Server, and kept it all running for the plants that rely on it through a steady stream of support tickets.
    • Started bringing more structure to the work, introducing project management and application monitoring.
    MESGE ProficyiFIXCimplicityMS SQL ServerTrendMiner

  3. Data Engineer

    Jan 2022 — Sep 2025

    Clarebout Potatoes NV · Komen-Waasten, Belgium

    • Helped build the industrial data backbone from the ground up, moving scattered spreadsheets and siloed databases into a unified namespace on Ignition, published over MQTT into a historian and a data lake.
    • Built SCADA-style visualisations of the production lines and custom plant-floor applications for weighbridges, checkweighers and other equipment, with heavier logic factored into microservices.
    • Was closely involved in the Kubernetes platform it all ran on, and in rolling it out across the group’s production sites so reporting, analysis and AI projects had one structured foundation to build on.
    IgnitionMQTTUnified NamespaceSCADAMicroservicesKubernetesPython

  4. Environment & Noise Consultant

    Apr 2021 — Jan 2022

    United Experts · Ieper, Belgium

    • Consulted on environmental compliance across Flanders.
    • Translated regulatory frameworks into permit files and advice.
    EnvironmentPermitsCompliance

  5. PhD Student / Assistant Academic Staff

    Nov 2017 — Apr 2021

    Ghent University Hospital (UZ Gent) · Ghent, Belgium

    • Research on PET-guided radiotherapy and imaging biomarkers in glioblastoma models: radiosynthesis, preclinical evaluation and quantitative image analysis.
    • Author on six peer-reviewed publications ↗ spanning Raman spectroscopy, PET tracer development and PET-guided therapy.
    ImagingPET / MRIQuantitative AnalysisResearch

  6. Ghent University

    2011 — 2016

    Bio-Science Engineering · Ghent, Belgium

    • M.Sc. Bio-Science Engineering (2014–2016). Quantitative life sciences and engineering, the analytical foundation behind everything I do with industrial data today.
    • B.Sc. Bio-Science Engineering (2011–2014). Specialisation in Cell & Gene Technology.

    Professional development: Google Cloud Data Engineering · Python for Data

    Bio-Science Eng.Cell & Gene Tech

// Skills

Toolbelt

[ REFERENCE ARCHITECTURE ] data flowing
The backbone I build, from factory floor to dashboards. Hover a skill to see where it lives. Click for what it is.

Industry 4.0 / IIoT

Data & Backend

Cloud & Infrastructure

Spoken Languages

  • Nederlands · native
  • English · professional
  • Français · limited working
  • Deutsch · elementary

// Selected Work

Case studies

From data islands to a factory-wide backbone

Case study ↗

A large European food producer · Data engineering

From scattered spreadsheets and data islands to a unified data backbone across five production sites, built on Ignition, MQTT and a unified namespace.

IgnitionMQTTUnified NamespaceData Lake

// Contact

Open a channel.

Got a project at the edge of OT and IT? A pilot you’d like a second pair of eyes on? Drop a message. I read everything. Client engagements run through Mustry Solutions.

Connection ready · transport: https

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