Director - Professional Services

Role Purpose

The Director – Professional Services leads the implementation of projects and ensures the successful delivery of professional services to achieve organizational objectives. The project implementation is done in a manner that exceed customer satisfaction and help drive business growth.

Principal Accountabilities and Key Activities

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 standardization and governance in line with global processes.

• Ownership and accountability for successful project implementation delivery as measured by agreed KPIs, with accurate reporting on paid utilization and revenue recognition.

• Ownership and accountability for global resource planning in line with agreed budgets, escalating challenges for early mitigation.

• Develop and manage operations budget, ensuring cost-effective resource allocation and identifying opportunities for savings without compromising quality.

• 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 (Time Sheet) and CRM in order to enable high accuracy in reporting.

• Advocate innovation and effectively lead through change. Lead and manage the organization in line with Coats Digital core values and create an empowered organization with the capacity and energy to drive change.

• Manage and mentor a diverse Professional Service Team, fostering a culture of accountability, continuous improvement and customer-centricity. Identifying skill gaps and work with HR to recruit, retain, and develop talent.

• Drive operational efficiency through continuous improvement initiatives and best practice. Champion innovation in operations, identifying and implementing new tools, technologies and processes.

• Maintain regular communication with counterparts in the Professional Services organization to ensure fluid cross-region utilization 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.

Financial Dimensions

People Management Responsibility
(direct / indirect reports)

Global Remit

Operates in:

Key Relationships

Internal
(excluding direct team and manager)

External

• Leadership Team
• Sales
• Engineering
• Professional Services
• Customer Success
• Customer Support
• Operations
• Development and QA

• Customers
• Partnerships / Agents
• 3rd Party Suppliers

Education, Qualifications and Experience

Essential

Desirable

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.

• 15+ years’ experience building or leading professional services organizations, 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 organization.

• 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.

Desirable Industry and Contextual Experience and Skills

• Strong English language skills – oral and read/ write and preferably secondary or multi- language background.

• Experience in the fashion industry as a manager of PPC / Sales, Merchandising, Production, Industrial Engineering, or IT.

• Coats Digital product experience or similar industry specific applications including supply chain planning / ERP / Shop Floor systems.

• Strong background with Microsoft Dynamics, Microsoft Business Central, Excel, data analytics, and sales & marketing software, basic knowledge of databases such as MS SQL.

• Ability to travel as needed to support global operations.

• Microsoft Power Platform – Power Automate, Power Apps, Power BI