Blue Ridge appoints Maarten Baltussen as General Manager of Europe

Baltussen will lead Blue Ridge’s efforts to help retailers, wholesalers, distributors and manufacturers across Europe solve challenges around shifting customer demand preferences and volatility with suppliers.

Blue Ridge’s current European customer base includes grocery wholesaler K. Ekrheim, retailer Spar Kjøp, telecommunications operator Tele2 AB, technical wholesaler Tess AS and Wine & Spirits logistics distributor Vectura AS.

“Maarten will expand our strong presence in the Nordic region into the rest of the European continent, where we continue to see increasing demand for supply chain planning solutions,” said Jim Byrnes, Chief Executive Officer, Blue Ridge. “Maarten will be responsible for driving all activities in the region, including initiatives with our partner Inventory Investments AS, using both direct and indirect channels.”

The Blue Ridge Supply Chain Planning platform includes the Demand Planning, Inventory Optimization, Sales & Operations Planning and the recently launched Price Optimization solution—helping customers reduce operational costs, improve service levels, and assure product availability to customers without creating a costly inventory surplus.

Before joining Blue Ridge, Baltussen was the Chief Revenue Officer at leading supply chain optimization provider ICRON. He has 24 years of professional experience in global, complex software sales and projects across a number of industries, as well as business processes in different cultures and countries. He has spent most of his career in supply chain planning at international leading software companies like Blue Yonder (JDA Software), SAP and Infor. He also founded Intellogic, and the company grew under his leadership, focusing on business intelligence dashboards for the logistics vertical.

Baltussen’s leadership in Europe will help the wholesale distribution industry as they solve problems around predicting shifting consumer preferences, managing disruptions from economic trends, volatility with suppliers and pricing in an environment with increasing costs and unpredictable tariffs. The industry collectively saw a year-over-year sales growth of 8% last year, which shows that there is certainly the potential for more growth through better forecast management.