As an experienced & passionate leader, Rob has held senior leadership positions and has worked with some of New Zealand’s best known brands. Achieving a record of success in business operations, change management, management of highly technical teams and complex projects. As a strategic planner he actively pursues strategies for achieving excellence in operational performance, utilising the latest technologies and developing people to use those technologies to achieve competitive advantage through a process of business analysis, managed change and continuous improvement.

Rob has achieved a deep understanding of the benefits of technology on an organisation and the consequential impact this can have on a team’s culture and operational success. He is an experienced project professional and has successfully lead organisations, teams and individuals through the change management process that is critical in the adoption of new technologies to ensure the best possible outcomes and full realisation of the project benefits.

A key aspect of Rob’s career has been visionary and always looking to the future, exploring the full potential of new technologies and how they might be adapted or utilised to improve efficiencies, save costs, improve resilience and expand capability within an organisation. Often taking a long-term strategic viewpoint and leading the team towards the ultimate goals through a strategic portfolio or programme of achievable steps and projects.

About Rob

Career History

Head of Global Operations

Jun 2021 - Nov 2022

Contract Role based in Wellington, NZ

Retail Directions

Retail Directions is a software development company with three key centres of operations in Australia, UK and South Africa. The company is a leading provider of retail software and solutions. Through its many clients it has a global footprint of over 25,000 Retail Point of Sale terminals operating in 40 Countries.

Member of the Senior Leadership Team contributing to strategic and operational goals and achieving overall business aims, reporting directly to the Board.

Team Leadership, Global IT Operations, People Management & Development, Project Management, Strategic Planning, Digital Transformation, Client Care, Business Process Review, Agile Development, Quality & Compliance, Business KPI’s.

Product Manager, RD Analytics Solution, Software Development & Strategic Road Maps.

Key Responsibilities

  • Responsible for a team of five direct reports, all very skilled and experienced technical people. Key activities included role definitions, team recruitment, skill development, annual reviews and goal setting.

    Direct Reports

    • Client Care Team Lead APAC

    • Client Care Team Lead EMEA

    • IT Manager

    • Technical Consultant

    • Analytics Team Leader

    • Project Manager for the successful implementation & adoption of Microsoft 365 across the organisation, including live migration of Sharepoint Server and Exchange Server from Melbourne datacentre to Cloud based solution.

    • Technical Project leader for the deployment of 2FA for Microsoft Cloud, Azure, DevOps and M365.

    • Key architect in the setup and management of a new Client Care function within the organisation. The team was recruited and established across three countries, Australia, South Africa & United Kingdom and served multiple time zones to provide practical global technical support for clients.

    • Product Manager for RD Analytics, a web-based business intelligence software solution. Developed using agile methodologies in Azure DevOps with Microsoft .Net and DevExpress Angular technologies. Responsible for managing the software development team, defining the Strategic Roadmap in line with the business requirements and introduction of new features and toolsets to enhance product adoption across the established client base.

    • Project Manager for successful evaluation, selection and deployment of Cloud PBX solution.

    • Project Manager and Lead Technical Consultant for the key strategic buy-back and operational transfer of The Body Shop New Zealand Franchise by The Body Shop International. The project required the coordination of multiple resources and technologies across several countries including New Zealand, Australia, Singapore and the United Kingdom. A large and complex endeavour that was completed successfully on time and under budget.

    • Project Manager and Lead Technical Consultant for the development and implementation of an innovative eCommerce fulfilment model removing the need for a centralised national distribution centre. The project included the decommissioning of the existing facility, run-down of NZ$1m of existing stock and enhancements to the demand planning methodology to ensure continuity of stock supply for future web-based sales.

    • Lead Technical Consultant in the project to migrate client’s multiple legacy Gift Card schemes to a single unified solution for in-store and online transactions. A total of 28,000 gift cards with a combined value of over AU$8m were migrated with zero downtime and zero customer impact.

    • Project Manager and Lead Technical Consultant for the expansion of the retail operations of The Body Shop International into mainland China. The project entailed the creation of a full enterprise retail system based on Microsoft SQL Server and the Retail Directions retail solution from scratch and the coordination of the development for integration to The Body Shop SAP systems in Europe. The system was built & hosted within the Microsoft Azure China operated by 21Vianet.

  • Leadership · People Management · Project Management · IT Operations Management · IT Strategy · Business Transformation · IT Infrastructure Design · Account Management · Financial Planning · Enterprise Software · Amazon Web Services (AWS) · Microsoft Azure · Microsoft DevOps · Agile methodologies · Microsoft 365 · SQL Server · Retail Management Systems · Hybrid Cloud Architecture · Business Process Improvement · Business Intelligence · Change Management

Operations Manager

May 2005 - Jun 2021

Permanent Role based in Wellington, NZ

The Body Shop International is a global cosmetics and body care retailer with over 3,000 outlets in 65 countries around world, originally founded by Anita Roddick in 1976 it has grown to become a leader in natural body products. Purchased by L’Oreal in 2006 and then sold to Natura & Co in 2017 for $1.7b, The Body Shop continues to expand into new markets and increasing its online presence.

Member of the Senior Management Team for 16 years, providing significant contributions to the strategic operations of the business, successfully completing multiple technology and process improvement projects, defining operational goals and achieving overall business aims, reporting to the Managing Director.

Leadership, Head of Technology and IT Operations, Head of eCommerce & fulfilment, Head of Supply Chain & Logistics, Customer Loyalty, Digital Marketing and Business Intelligence.

Architect of Digital Transformation, Cloud Migration, Change Management, Strategic & Resource Planning

Key Responsibilities

  • Responsible for a diverse team of six direct reports, all highly skilled and dedicated people. Key activities included recruitment, skill development, personal reviews and individual goal setting.

    Direct Reports

    • IT Manager

    • Digital Marketing Manager

    • Warehouse Manager

    • eCommerce Manager

    • Forecast Demand Planner

    • Stock Administrator

    • Project Manager & Technical Lead for the successful migration of on-site datacentre to Amazon AWS Cloud, this was a significant a complex project of digital transformation completed over series of stages, the total project encompassed all existing legacy software systems, the Retail Management solution, multiple Microsoft SQL Server databases, Business Intelligence solution, Digital Marketing solution, Sage & MYOB financial software & Multiple Payroll systems. Each stage of the project was completed with little or no impact on operational performance and resulted in a significantly more robust infrastructure completely independent of a fixed geographic location.

    • Project Manager & architect for the selection, build, test and deployment of the eCommerce solution, the successfully completed project resulted in a fully integrated online sales channel providing perfectly alignment between in-store and online systems, stock and customer information, promotions & pricing.

    • Responsible for the adoption & operation of the Google Analytics solution for the eCommerce website and the definition, optimisation and management of the website SEO though Google Adwords, Google Merchant Centre and Google Search Central.

    • Project Manager & advocate for the integration of the AfterPay BNPL payment solution for both in-store and online channels, the project was completed in a short time frame launching in November to ensure peak sales were captured during Christmas Peak sales. The payment channel was immediately responsible for increasing the online sales by 20%. After twelve months over 40% of online sales were through this payment gateway.

    • Designed, established and launched a new Customer Loyalty Programme for New Zealand based customers, the solution was points / rewards based and successfully deployed to the eCommerce Channel as well as in-store.

    • Developed and implemented a fully integrated push replenishment stock control system for retail stores in New Zealand. This project resulted in significantly reduced stock management efforts throughout the organisation and increased store stock availability from 80% to over 99.5% whilst maintaining the same total value of stockholding cost. Another benefit of this solution was the virtual elimination of aged stock due to signficantly better distibution and allocation of slow moving items.

    • Architect of a complete reorganisation of the warehouse layout and business processes, introducing new technology to improve picking accuracy from 95% to 99.6% whilst reducing picking time and increasing ultimate capacity of the warehouse space.

    • Successfully introduced a continuous stock control methodology made possible through new technologies on data analytics resulting in reduction of shrinkage from 6% to 0.34% across the entire organisation.

    • Responsible for the successful adoption of advanced retail business intelligence dashboards to better communicate critical information to key stakeholders enhancing internal communications and providing real-time sale information directly to the in-store teams.

    • Architect for the successful design, build and administration of a retail data warehouse providing critical business information to assist in the retail planning process and stock forecasting operations.

    • Project Manager & technical lead for the fully integrated eCommerce fulfilment solution, deploying handheld computers for picking & packing, automated label printing and full courier integration. The solution was specifically designed as a scalable solution and this was amply proved during the COVID lockdown when the eCommerce fulfilment, being the only channel able to trade, successfully increased activity by 3,000% in a matter of a few days without creating any significant backlog.

    • Responsible for the implementation of an Amazon AWS based Email Marketing Solution using SES, the cost of email marketing campaigns was reduced from $4,000 pcm to $200 pcm a cost reduction of 95%. The solution also enabled the implementation of personalised emails allowing customised, highly relevant and detailed information to be send to each unique recipient.

    • Responsible for the introduction and adoption of Social Media Marketing through Facebook, Instagram and Twitter and the establishment of a Digital Marketing function within the organisation working in direct collaboration with the Retail Operations Team.

    • Manager & technical lead for the management and mitigation of an organised denial of service attacks and penetration attacks on the eCommerce website during 2017 to 2019. The management of the attacks resulted in zero dataloss and zero access by unathorised entities. The cyber attacks were all managed utilising existing toolsets and methodologies available within the Amazon AWS platform provide through WAF & Shield, Route 53 and EC2 Firewall services.

    • Successfully survived a ransomware / crypto-virus attack that resulted in a compromised network attached storage device. The successful attack was identified, isolated and stopped by the team and resulted in zero lost sales and no impact on retail operations.

    • Project Manager & Technical Lead for the adoption and migration to the DropBox online storage and file management solution. The project required the migration & reorganisation of over 2Tb of organisational files and was successfully completed within a time-sensitive deadline.

    • Project Manager for the introduction of advanced foot-traffic monitoring solution based on the CountCulture suite of applications. The project resulted in the acquisition of insightful data to the retail operations teams and improvements were made to rostering and shop layouts reducing costs and improving store staff utilisation.

    • Project Manager & technical architect for the adoption of Microsoft 365 throughout the organisation. The successfully completed project required the migration of on-site Exchange and Sharepoint servers to M365 and the re-engineering of the organisations email systems.

    • Responsible for the deployment and management of Apple iPads in the retail stores to provide enhanced intra-organisation communications, direct messaging, emails, photo-sharing and critical business intelligence information directly to the store teams independently to the POS. The iPads were all centrally managed using the ScaleFusion MDM solution.

    • Responsible for the design, selection and management of the organisational Network Infrastructure, utilising Cisco devices, Dell Sonicwall routers and Mesh WiFi solutions. The corporate WAN network was constantly monitored and enhanced to reflect the continuing enhancements to networking technologies and the deployment of multiple redundant VPNs to all remote offices resulted in little or no downtime, a critical requirement for 24/7 retail operations.

    • Project Manager & technical lead for the successful adoption and integration of Gift Cards to the retail operations and concurrently to the eCommerce website. The project was deployed in parallel to the existing paper vouchers and a managed phase-out / card replacement strategy resulted in successful acceptance by the customers.

  • Leadership · People Management · Operations Management · Project Management · eCommerce Management · Supply Chain Management · Digital Marketing Management · Social Media Management · Strategic Planning · Retail Strategy · Digital Transformation · IT Systems Management · IT Strategy · IT Network Infrastructure · Financial Management, Budgeting & ROI · Retail Management Systems · POS · Enterprise Software Solutions · Amazon Web Services (AWS) · Hybrid Cloud Architecture · Cloud Computing, IaaS · Cyber-Security · Microsoft 365 · SQL Server · Business Process Improvement · Business Intelligence Solutions · Data Warehousing · Customer Loyalty Programmes · Gift Card Solutions · BioSecurity

Operations Director

Permanent Role based in Stafford, UK

Pearson Technology was a Technology Consulting company based in UK specialising in fixed term business improvement projects. Key facilitators in the remediation of failed or failing technology transformation projects and Enterprise Resource Planning implementation projects.

Member of the Board responsible for defining and setting strategic goals, resource planning, team development and recruitment, Project management. Providing Technological Leadership during the lead up to and throughout the Y2K period characterised by high levels of change in business software solutions.

Leadership, Customer/Supplier relationships, People Management, IT Operations, Team development, Project Management, Strategic Planning, Business Intelligence Solutions, Enterprise Resource Planning.

Key Responsibilities

  • Responsible for coordinating and developing a team of independent contract consultants.

    • Project Manager and Lead Technical Consultant for the successful migration of a manufacturing company’s entire Enterprise Resource Planning solution in the lead up to Y2K.

    • Responsible for the successful setup and establishment of retail startup company's full business processes and enterprise software solution.

    • Defined client’s IT Strategy and Change management plan in conjunction with key stakeholders in the business.

    • Technological Leadership in the adoption of business Intelligence solutions fully integrated into Enterprise Resource Planning Systems.

    • Responsible for coaching and mentoring client IT personnel resulting in reduced support costs and reduction in staff turnover.

  • Leadership · People Management · Project Management · Information Technology · Strategic Planning · Business Transformation · Enterprise Resource Planning Solutions · Change Management