Walid Cherfane

Ogero is the landline operator in Lebanon managed by the Lebanese ministry of telecom.

Key results area: Successfully launching the interconnect project from scratch and currently working on launching the new Conversion Billing and Telecom CRM, Business Intelligence and Big Data Projects.

Responsibilities:
• Following up on critical projects issues and preparing required reports and presentations to top management
• Responsible for guiding the team and drive cross functional deliverables. Responsible for planning and managing all details of the overall IT Programs
• Responsible for all IT projects views like technology billing, resource utilization, budget control, QoS KPIs, testing, productions, Customer Experience improvement and contract fulfilment
• Ensure projects readiness according to business necessities
• Manages and controls the IT Programs provided that it is within the Company targets, strategy, budget and standards
• Set and ensure projects management requirements in terms of supplies, sub-contractors, and resources
• Lead, control and manage RFPs, RFQ & SOWs including BOQ
• Lead, coordinate, control, manage and finalize the projects with best possible solutions for the benefit of the company
• Ensure to have clear and optimized spending plans for CAPEX and OPEX
• Enrich projects management experience within Ogero’s departments

InfoYou SARL is a Market Intelligence consultancy firm providing Market Intelligence research, analysis and consultancy services to help top business executives to identify the choices that drive successful market strategies.

Key results area: Play a major role in the overall direction, development and growth of the company by maintaining and promoting vigorous and sustainable growth based on delivering a high-quality IT services. Within a period of 6 months we developed 16 new applications and we successfully delivered them to clients. The at most achievement was the Medical patient profile responsive version. The project deadline was initially set to 125 days and it was achieved in half the period time frame. The aim of this project was to track the medical history of a patient within a hospital or doctor’s clinics. These in-house developments (web and mobile) led to 50% increase in earnings.

Responsibilities:
• Leading and supporting the technology and information teams to deliver unprecedented levels of service and quality, via a lean and efficient end user focused department
• Using commercial acumen to assess value within externally contracted services, whilst partnering with, challenging and successfully managing external suppliers
• Leading the technology strategy and ensuring the continued adoption of digital best practice
• Planning and delivering CRM strategies across the organization with a view to retaining existing customers, increasing brand loyalty and expanding the company brand
• Deciding on a final CRM structure and architecture that will work seamlessly across the business and capture crucial information along the sales funnel
• Making sure the customer database is correctly segmented for targeted marketing activities
• Collaborating with other departments ensure the CRM strategy works well for every aspect of the business
• Development of testing strategies to guarantee the most efficient approach for the organization and its customers
• Coming up with creative ideas, preparing proposals, overseeing the production process & execution and reporting the results to the management
• Implementing a testing environment and ensuring that all programs are rightly documented to meet the company quality standards
• Successfully launching the following applications:
Banking & Telecom Sector
• Online monitoring: clients can monitor the online word based on specific keywords (Major clients: Riyad Bank, Saudi Investment Bank, Alfa, ICT…)
• Social Media Listener: the mobile and web-based applications provide clients the ability to monitor the social media and generate advanced analytic reports (Major clients: Riyad Bank, ICT, Rajhi Bank…)
Pharmaceutical & Educational
• Accreditation programs: online learning programs providing doctors the ability to get accredited and none accredited certificates (Major programs: SAM Pulmonary and Rheumatology, MKSAP17, MKSAP18 …)
• Cloud CRM: adopting the right CRM and its related process through a third-party cloud base infrastructure
• Educational programs: providing online educational material to doctors (Major programs: Valeant, Decker…)
• Various mobile applications: providing healthcare materials (Major programs: Heart Failure, Hypertension, DANONE, Bledina marketing materials…)
• E-shop programs: developing online shopping pharmaceutical (Major program: eMEMI)

GroupSeven Consulting along with Adwaa Al Shehaab, a joint venture agreement, provide marketing consultancy service to Saudi Telecom Company (STC).

Key results area: Developing highly complex studies, producing innovative marketing plan and controlling marketing strategy to achieve market share and profitability goals for either specific industry and product or line of business. Playing a major role by increasing the Home ARPU from 31SAR to 33SAR

Responsibilities:
•Planning 2013 Enterprise Marketing roadmap in addition of establishing the Marketing Intelligence Division
•Coordinating activities and work in with cross functional teams for product development and deployment from the concept phase through the complete product lifecycle of Automated Teller Machine, Machine to Machine, Home packages (mobile, fix, data and digital TV) and Telecom Cloud Computing
•Contributing with Booz and Co to introduce the Smart Cities concept
•Formulating and recommending appropriate marketing policies and strategies from marketing intelligence and research projections
•Preparing and updating market budgets, regularly reporting on performance against target and providing variance analyses and revised projections
•Recommending pricing and volume discount policies
•Achieving financial objectives by preparing an annual budget; scheduling expenditures; analyzing variances; initiating corrective actions

Intelligit SAL along with Interkey, a joint venture agreement, is a competitive intelligence firm providing competitive and market intelligence consultancy service to Saudi Telecom Company (STC).

Key results area: Advising and providing performance reports reflecting the client performance towards its competitors. In addition to conducting special studies and research projects, identifying key information and delivering complex analytical results.

Responsibilities:
• Establishing competitive and marketing intelligence department, linked intelligence’s material to the business requirements and enhanced company image
• Generating and submitting marketing intelligence reports to the senior management for better decision making

Digicel is the leading GSM operator in Caribbean.

Key results area: Pivotal role in successful launching of telecommunication’s Green Fields and acquisitions like Samoa, Guyana, El Salvador and Suriname. Surpassed the company objective by adopting a new IT strategy leading to a spending reduction from USD 3M to 1.5M.

Responsibilities:
• Designing and planning green fields and acquisitions for new GSM operations from IT infrastructure perspective
• Prepared RFPs, selected vendors in compliance with organizational objectives and analyzed vendors’ responses
• Negotiated prices & terms with suppliers and generated Bill of Quantities
• Planning the IT infrastructure of green field in terms of hardware and software to be used
• Evaluating the acquisition IT hardware and determining what are the best to use

FalDete is the GSM mobile operator in Lebanon managed by a joint venture agreement between Fal and Detecon.

Key results area: In addition to the Operation & Billing Manager position described below, my responsibilities were to write RFI, RFQ and RFP to integrate a new billing system.

Responsibilities:
• Evaluating vendors and proposing a migration plan to implement a new billing system
• Preparing tender books and generating turnover reports
• Analyzing and implementing postpaid and prepaid billing solutions for Value Added Services: UMS, VIP, VPN, special corporate offers…

Group7 is consultancy firm based in London having a head office in Beirut. Group7 along with Al-Shuhab, a joint venture agreement, provide marketing consultancy service to Saudi Telecom Company (STC).

Key results area: Providing expert advice and assistance to marketing directors in relation to: project management, market research, product design activities and project delivery to be in compliance with assigned time, quality, cost and budgetary parameters. Contributing in increasing the Mobile ARPU from 37SAR to 40SAR

Responsibilities:
•Coordinating activities and work in with cross functional teams for product development and deployment from the concept phase through the complete product lifecycle of Mawjood, Sawa Hajj…
•Guided marketing directors in implementing project management’s tools to attain quick time to market

FTML - Cellis, subsidiary of France Telecom Mobile International, was the first GSM mobile operator in Lebanon and my first professional experience. I started as an Operating System Technician and then gradually promoted to the position of billing manger further to on job acquired skills and training development.

Key results area: Managing all aspects of end-to-end billing operations, including billing development and strategy on a national basis.

Responsibilities:
•Helping in developing the Revenue Assurance Application: provides cost effective fraud prevention, detection and investigation services. The involved systems were the following: Billing system, IN, CDR, HLR, AUC, SMSC, MMS, UMS, GPRS…
•Developing “Billing vs. Provisioning vs. HLR” reconciliation: To control and to keep coherence between billing services and HLR. This project was written in C and SQL languages
•Developing “HLR reconciliation”: To keep consistency between the various HLRs using C and SQL languages.
•Implementing the numbering plan management: applying a predefined algorithm to the available numbers before sending them to the sales department
•Managing the postpaid and prepaid billing systems parameters to provide and implement the complex analytic solutions for various VAS services in addition to acting as TADIG responsible
•Developing and implementing the Roaming reconciliation
•Handling the roaming parameters
•Handling the voucher and SIM cards management: codes generation, loading SIM cards into the various billing systems
•Operating and monitoring of the billing system (call processing, billing process, database administration, backup and restore procedures, printing/enveloping)