Fire & Security Design Manager - Appcast Enterprise : Job Details

What you will do

The role will be instrumental in driving growth and profitability through the fire & security business, working closely with our Global Partners and wider Team to focus on 1) improving win rates, 2) improving executed margin performance, 3) increasing percentage of multi-solution sales. The role will is critical to success of the broader design to win concept and will feature in opportunity win teams and it is expected that the successful candidate will take great pride in their work and be a champion of quality at all times.

The role will be office based, and you will work with a diverse community of sales teams along with driving the estimating and design resources both within the UKI and within the global CoE’s – the successful candidate will bring a ‘work winning’ mindset and focused commercial approach to driving profitable growth both within their dedicated proposals team, and more broadly across the commercial organisation.

The Design Manager will have responsibility for meeting any defined KPI’s and be proactive managing capacity/workload. A critical success factor will be the successful candidate’s ability to leverage resources to focus right skills onto the right opportunities and support overall focus on conversion improvement.

Critically the design manager will be the lead contact to the senior team, and therefore the relationship with the sales leadership community is vital to success and achievement of objectives. The Design Manager and sales management team will work together, within a defined rhythm/process to drive incremental gains in performance and productivity as a collective.

You will require a strong core technical skill set to enable effective review of solutions and to positively challenge designs where required to ensure we are creating winning solutions and have accurate cost bases. The successful candidate will demonstrate commercial tenacity and actively ensure our win themes/differentiators are evidenced in the work carried out in Post Order Design. Critical also will be the Programme and operational management skills brought to the role.

Driving engagement with field sales is critical and quality of solutions, proposals documents and general interaction is a primary focus. It is expected that much of the best practices developed within the sales management organisation will be leveraged by the design managers for performance management, development, and continuous improvement. In summary the roles responsibilities include:

How you will do it

“Develop a work winning culture within the proposals team”

Configure

• Quality of detailed design production from the team – including value engineering/innovation ideas, production of drawings, calculations, and presentations to define the solution

• Ensure full qualification of the scope of work and define exact working requirements with the field teams

• Champion group products at all opportunities

Price

• Quality of developed cost schedules including detailed breakdowns, assessments and quotations including challenging each line to ensure accuracy and competitiveness

• Proactively work with suppliers and operational colleagues to achieve cost certainty

• Collaborate with broader business to define pricing strategy within the plan to win

Propose

• Quality and effectiveness of created proposals, ensuring use of suite of enterprise standards

• Ensure proposal reflects and demonstrates plan to win

• Update and support opportunity status within CRM solution

Leadership

• Ownership of competency matrix and training plan

• Ownership and responsibility for proactive capacity planning and resource management

• Day to day team management & coaching

• Competence and development plans for proposals engineers (technical, commercial and skills based)

• Communication, planning and alignment of priorities with field sales and within proposals team

• Champion use of salesforce.com

• Performance and engagement of proposals managers

KPI’s

• Conversion rate improvement - performance to target and versus prior year

• Installation order growth – performance to target and versus prior year

• Installation order executed margin – performance to target and versus prior year

• Increased multiple solution orders – performance to target and versus prior year

• Time to propose – performance v set expectations

• Productivity and effectiveness of engineering resources

What we look for

Competencies / Attributes / Skills

• Customer focused - deeply understands the Customer and works to meet their needs

• Innovation - challenges the norm (while maintaining compliance), will push themselves to define the best solution

• Business acumen - understands costs, and will ensure clarity of cost build up

• Team player - can work effectively in teams, and keen to ensure we win as a team

• Effective time manager - manages work effectively, and independently

• Communication - communicates positively, actively, and consistently

• Pride and quality - ensure the reputation of the business is reflected in the product produced

• Integrity and trust - demonstrated at all times

Experience

• Ideally experience in leading a team

• Proven experience in designing solutions for fire detection, and/or security systems (or related electrical/building services solutions)

• Producing proposal documents, specifications, Customer presentations and supporting material

• Cost schedule development and production

• Awareness of Health & Safety regulations/requirements, construction industry processes and contract documentation

• Bid management

Knowledge

• Fire and/or security technical standards (system design codes along with industry relevant standards)

• Electrical wiring standards/requirements

• PC literacy, including knowledge of Microsoft Office products.

• CAD / 3-D modelling / design packages

• Configure – price – quote tools and applications

• Formal procurement and construction processes and systems

• CRM management and use

Education