Davy Vandersmissen

Soulco
Dubai, United Arab Emirates
Oct 2011 - Present
VP Service Operations & Head of office

Setup a new office in Dubai to take over several tasks of the Belgian HQ office:
Negotiate with authorities about legal aspects. Select office location and negotiate rent and payment conditions.
Hire new staff for service, pre-sales and sales.
Create training plan for newly hired staff. Start visa process for new employees. Arrange for all legal aspect to import goods. Select and negotiate with logistics partner for warehousing and transport. Decide on Unified Communication solution to be implemented in the office.
Roll out Hosted Cloud solution for collaboration based on Office 365.
Microsoft SharePoint
Microsoft Lync
Microsoft Exchange
Design and implement processes for a virtual team based in Belgium and Dubai that
could combined handle:
Order processing
Handling Service Interventions
Presales requests
In the second stage the focus was to develop new service business and hire a business
development manager to further expand service business with a clear focus on recurring
revenue.
In the third stage the Dubai entity of Soulco will become a completely separate business entity
with a separate PL.
Apart from managing the team, logistics and office I share the responsibility for the PL, cash
flow management and service sales pipeline.

Siemens
Dubai, United Arab Emirates
Sep 2010 - Oct 2011
Head of Service MEA

Strong focus on partner management.
Setup training plan for VoIP and Unified communications.
Create resource plan together with partners
Assist in Pre-sales work when partner lacked the competences.
Escalation point in case of complaint from end customer.
Generate new service revenue for Siemens and local partners.
Local office needed to be enable for Unified Communications.
Hold workshops to train colleagues.
Introduce new business process for this new business.
In-house resource plan to complement the skills of the partners.
To introduce new concepts with end customers, I held several workshops
Introduce Unified Communications.
Cloud concept for all communications needs.
Up to 50 attendees for certain workshops.
All these efforts allowed for new service revenue generation for SEN and the local partners and
would bring service and sales closer together.

Siemens
Brussels, Belgium
Sep 2005 - Sep 2010
Resource and Professional Service Manager

Create capacity plan for new service organization in close collaboration with sales team. Reskilling plan for traditional voice engineers. Organize training in UC, Linux, Microsoft Windows Server, VoIP, ... Hire new staff (fresh graduates).
Responsible for enabling service organization when introducing new solutions. Organize Technical training. Improve business processes when needed. Determine quantity of spare parts for stock. Act as SPOC for customer escalations that needed management focus (crisis management).
Enable Professional services team in Value Selling. Coordinate with sales team to bring the PS team in to the sales process. Enable service team members to also act as presales team members. Introduce the concept of 'roles' in the team as opposed to 'jobs' to create more flexibility across the organization.

Siemens
Brussels, Belgium
Jan 2004 - Aug 2005
Solution Consultant

Design and implement Contact Centers based on business requirements:
Telephony routing
IVR
Email routing
Chat
CRM integration

Conduct technical training for customers and own team; By handing over as much technical knowledge a possible to my colleagues, I could focus more on the solution design itself. This allowed me to interact very closely with the business managers of almost all verticals and understand their business requirements to translate them into designs for Contact Centers and Unified Communication. Conduct end user training for contact center agents. Install contact center and unified communication servers, based on: Microsoft Windows Server and client Microsoft Exchange Microsoft SQL Server Troubleshoot technical problems with contact center and UC implementations. Redesign contact flow based on new business requirements. Write internal procedures to improve upcoming implementations.