The fourteen companies involved represent a wide range of business types, sectors and sizes: IKEA, Eneco, Infinity Global, InnoEnergy, Innvolve, Maxxton, New Bees, Q42, Reinaerde, Rijksvastgoedbedrijf, Royal IHC, rvdb, Stanley Black & Decker, and Witron.
As a key part of this MSc programme, the consultancy project enables students to connect theory with practice. All students participate in the consultancy project in the first semester of the master, using the knowledge gained from their core courses to resolve challenges in real organisations.
To develop the practical skills necessary to deliver professional-level advice, students follow workshops on topics such as leadership, collaboration, visualisation and decision-making. Professional development is central to the project, with students reflecting on their work through self-assessments and feedback from peers, alumni and lecturers. Two students have shared their experiences with the RSM Editors: Kaja, who advised Royal IHC on how to ethically and responsibility implement AI to boost productivity, and Mika, who helped Eneco build a new onboarding process for their employees.
Maximising productivity with responsible AI at Royal IHC
Student Kaja Jurkowska and her team took on a challenge for Royal IHC, a leading supplier of maritime technology. She says, “After a period of economic pressures and restructuring, Royal IHC is growing, and they want to find ways to maximise their productivity. They asked us to explore how they could incorporate AI and automation solutions to make HR processes more effective. We saw that some of the challenges around implementing AI lay in the communication between different groups of employees, and in their engagement. So we structured our project to focus on two pathways: technical and social.”
The team conducted 14 interviews with members of the company’s HR, finance, compliance and manufacturing. The student team also examined internal company data, including KPIs, survey outcomes, and demographic data. Finally, they researched scientific articles to look for empirical evidence for their recommendations.
“On the final day,” Kaja says, “we met with our company representatives to present our recommendations about responsible and ethical implementation of AI, followed by research-backed ideas on the technical use-cases of AI or automation solutions. Then we continued to the social pathway, using our knowledge from the course Leading Organisational Change, and outlined how important it is to engage different stakeholders –in this case, different employee groups – in designing the change, so they become more likely to accept it and engage with it.”
As with Mika, Kaja was especially impressed by the real-life application that her team's recommendations will have. She explains, “The company hired an intern to incorporate our recommendations, which is great because our project will have a future instead of being buried in a file drawer. I really appreciated the chance to see what a real consulting project looks like from the inside. It gave me knowledge and skills that I can apply further, like presenting skills, corporate communication, and time organisation. It also gave me a chance to talk to various HR professionals within the company, and this gave me insights about my own HR career in the future.”
A new onboarding process for Eneco
Student Mika Belchhaus’s team has looked at the staff onboarding process for energy supplier Eneco. In June 2025, the company went through a restructuring, which also resulted in an onboarding process that had to be adapted to fit the new matrix structure.
Mika explains, “During the 21 interviews we did with new hires, heads of department, and managers, and through our research, we saw there were a few more points that could be improved. Rather than just aligning the process to the new structure, we made quite a few suggestions on where to improve. Our final product included a comprehensive list of activities that should be included in the onboarding, together with estimations on how much time it would take to deliver each module. We worked with three different versions, based on how many resources are needed to develop each: minimum, medium, and ideal.”
For Mika, who plans to pursue a career in human resources, the most impressive part of the project was creating something with the potential to help people integrate quickly into their new workplace. “Eneco is a leading green energy company, with over 4,000 employees and 2 million customers – and the work we developed will actually be incorporated, which is incredibly cool. Plus, I'll use a lot of the knowledge I gained for onboardings in my future jobs. The project was all about how to get employees engaged and started in a company, so, for my own career, this will be highly valuable.”
The consulting project ran from late September to mid-December 2025.
Would your company like to benefit from the insights our student consultants bring? Please get in touch with Sara Rodrigues Soares at msc.poc@rsm.nl
