Role Purpose
An exciting role exists for a Professional Services Director – APAC. This key leadership role offers variety and challenge for the right highly motivated and capable individual with proven experience both delivering and leading software implementations and teams within the fashion, apparel & textile industry.
Excellent people skills will enable the growth and development of high performing teams within the region, driving added value and customer advocacy where the following objectives are key to success:
- Ensuring customer satisfaction through on time, on cost and in full delivery of Coats Digital solutions in line with contractual commitments.
- Ensuring that solutions are efficiently implemented with a clear focus on making a real difference in clients’ business performance and validating this using agreed KPIs which allow us to demonstrate a strong ROI.
- Ensuring an excellent customer experience from the project kick-off all the way through to Go-Live where a strong collaboration with Customer Success will be key to a successful handover.
Main Duties & Responsibilities – Professional Services Leadership
- Ownership and accountability for the business objectives and KPIs agreed for the Professional Services region including Revenue Recognition financial targets and in-year project completion.
- Provide timely updates, progress reports and insights to the Coats Digital Leadership team.
- Ownership and accountability for ensuing an excellent customer experience from handover with Sales/Solution Consulting through to Implementation Sign-off & Acceptance.
- Ownership and accountability for the quality of project implementation ensuring standardisation and governance across the region in line with global processes.
- Ownership and accountability for successful project implementation delivery as measured by agreed KPIs, with accurate reporting on paid utilisation and revenue recognition.
- Ownership and accountability for regional resource planning in line with agreed budgets, escalating challenges for early mitigation.
- Point of escalation and executive sponsor to customer project implementations including support to Project Steering Committee meetings ensuring early mitigation of risks and fast resolution of issues.
- Ensure data integrity and governance across the region, understanding GDPR requirements for customer data, Non-disclosure agreements and that all necessary business systems are kept up to date including TimeLogger and CRM in order to enable high accuracy in reporting.
- Advocate innovation and effectively lead through change. Lead and manage the organisation in line with Coats Digital core values and create an empowered organization with the capacity and energy to drive change.
- Other duties or special projects as reasonably requested by Coats Digital.
Main Duties & Responsibilities – Organisation
- Maintain regular communication with counterparts in the Professional Services organisation to ensure fluid cross-region utilisation of teams to enable and ensure the best resource allocation to customer projects.
- Maintain strong internal relationships, partner cross-functional leadership to ensure alignment with sales, solutions consulting, engineering, customer success, customer support and marketing.
- Maintain strong knowledge and active interest around Coats Digital’s product strategy, regularly attending and contributing to Product Steering Committees and User Groups.
- Maintain strong relationships with Customers, feeding insights internally to Coats Digital teams focussed on keeping pace with and ahead of industry trends and challenges.
Main Duties & Responsibilities – Line Management
- Be an inspirational role model by challenging and maximizing the strength of the team and aligning their efforts to the mission and vision of the organization through transformational leadership, consistent motivation, and individual contributions.
- Responsible for leadership, mentoring and team development in the region enabling the development of delivery teams highly capable of consistently ensuring customer satisfaction through the on time, on cost and in full, efficient delivery of Coats Digital solutions in line with contractual commitments and agreed customer requirements.
- Develop and execute plans for continuous personal development of Regional Professional Services Managers as well as succession planning. Evaluate team members and people managers regularly through analysis of direct observation, peer feedback, customer feedback and annual reviews. Develop team members according to the demands of the business and according to their stated individual career development goals.
- Responsible for successful regional recruitment and onboarding of Professional Services team members.
- Support the Professional Services Managers in the training and education of Professional Services team members in project delivery methodology and end to end process including analysing and writing functional specifications, business process and solution blueprint documentation.
- Conduct regular (weekly) one-to-one meetings with direct reports ensuring regular feedback on performance and progression.
- Conduct regular team meetings and wider team townhalls, ensuring open channels for two-way communication throughout the Professional Services organisation.
- Manage day-to-day activities such as resource scheduling conflicts, utilisation of the team members training, manage expense reviews and approval, leave requests and absences, activity reporting and management insights.
Experience
- Experience of working with enterprise software solutions, Cloud applications, SaaS based products in a professional services capacity within discrete manufacturing, particularly in the Apparel, Textiles and Footwear industry.
- 10+ years’ experience building or leading professional services organisations, with experience of standard approaches to coaching, mentoring, and managing a team of senior level professionals and people managers.
- Experience in delivery of large scale software implementations understanding the complexities of integration with 3rd party applications and partners.
- Experienced with project management, project problem diagnosis, solution development, client communications, facilitation of decision making, documentation, managing client expectations and team leadership.
- Sufficiently ‘hands on’ to learn to configure any Coats Digital products in detail gaining knowledge of the software configuration to fully understand the practical use of the solution.
Skills and Knowledge
- Ability to motivate and inspire across the professional services organisation.
- Strong internal matrix leadership and relationship building abilities with solutions consulting, sales, engineering, professional services, and marketing counterparts.
- Ability to prioritize resources and broker internal compromise to achieve the best outcomes for our corporation across competing internal priorities.
- Able to articulate and logically communicate concepts with technical and non-technical audiences.
- Strong project management skills, PRINCE2/PMP experience and certification desirable.
- Ability to collaborate and interact at multiple levels up to C-Level.
