Frans Van Der Merwe

CAREER OBJECTIVE AND GOAL

Being a tech-savvy professional moving into the more operational business side of the company, I would like to use my personal proven experience in strategically analyzing and adding value by implementing any potential improvement solutions to technologically hungry forward-thinking organizations of the future.

I thoroughly enjoy and embrace manageable challenges in the workplace and to assist co-workers to realize the benefit of these changes. Constant innovation improves business processes delivering the organization's core objectives, products and or services to their customers faster and more efficiently. By endorsing the value of information and data in a secure manner can bring worlds of knowledge to leverage on.

I also find joy in staff motivation and welcome diverse future generations to the marketplace, but also have respect and acknowledge the senior workforce who brought the industry to where it is today.

I embrace opportunities to work hands-on with various members from across various departmental business units and vendors to ensure the strategic vision, goals / targets of the organization are measurable and accounted for on the bottom line.

Lastly, I believe my historical safety company experience within the IT and later Operational fields, together with the business acumen my MBA degree provided me, shall allow me to successfully take up a new challenge in multiple key service, product, technical or all-round business-related management areas. I am looking for long term future stability within my personal life as well as career growth.

I am as strong as my team and thus believe it is important to earn their trust and enable them to take responsible measured risks and ownership for growth. I believe in:

• Be punctual
• Be thankful
• Teamwork
• Read, Do Research, Ask, be inquisitive and stay involved
• Evaluate risks and taking calculated chances
• Taking ownership if you made a mistake and celebrate a win as they are equally important
• Post-mortems on past experiences for constant learning on how to improve the future outcome
• Identify, embrace, award, grow and retain talent
• Collaborate and identify on how to improve efficiencies – share knowledge
• Get it done and move on
• Stay in touch, Provide feedback, Follow-up – communication!
• Be a passionate proud ambassador for your job
• Whilst still strategically heading both IT as well as the profitable Operations departments at my current organization, I have successfully achieved and is constantly improving on the following:
• Operational Successes since March 2019 during the COVID-19 Pandemic that caused lockdowns:
• Took over a detached department and made it one unity boosting morale, remotely
• Inspired change and collaboration by focusing on improved results due to teamwork
• Lead and accountable for 6 senior direct reports and over 200 (mid & Jnr) indirect reports managing about R100m worth of consignment PPE inventory across more than 150 VMI stores across the South African mining industry
• Today this value was made much leaner and reduced to about R45m due to focus on improved calculated inventory management based on consumption with a monthly sales revenue increase of about R14m
• Politically aware within the industry and embracing external factor or governmental changes such as when mining charter B-BBEE levels inspired mines to become more compliant
• We adopted a model with various options to suit their unique policy needs per client
• Improved on local sourcing and supply to clients with alternative options
• Improved on Inventory reporting to assist with forecasting and fill-rates
• Reduced back-orders to an acceptable level per vendor client
• Building locale small Enterprise Social Development companies with local partners to grow community involvement
• Retained multiple existing contracts aged over 24 years with excellent service, despite COVID challenges through tender negotiations or price matching exercises
• Obtained new clients in new industries
• Assist clients with new product designs and policies to safeguard their workers
• Build new and retained existing supplier relationships
• Improved data integrity and user accessibility for quick decisions
• Constant review of service offerings to improve various strategies by combining system data and historical experience to improve on future offerings with competitor advantages

OTHER TASKS AND SKILLS INCLUDE

• Part of upgrading to SAGE ESS Payroll application and implement VIP People package
• Strategic alignment of inter-departmental requirements to reach common organizational goals for profitability
• Financial planning and budget preparations / executions for department SALES (R550m), OPEX and CAPEX budgets per company / division
• Hiring strong suitable team members to outperform my duties for overall company effectiveness
• Delivering an outstanding IT service with the best technology at a cost-effective price
• Delivering an outstanding onsite store VMI solution to various clients with detailed reporting, feedback and ownership
• Monitor and track effect of impact after changes was implemented, continuous improvement on good changes but urgently re-evaluate and rethink less acceptable results
• Servicing other departments’ needs with good synergies complying to US SOX Audit standards
• Ensuring data is handled in an acceptable regulatory manner such as POPI and GDPR between interfaces
• Undergo and deliver exceptional results with internal and external audits
• Meet and discuss client requirements for in-house developed application to ensure customer satisfaction
• Travel to various sites (National and International) to do presentations for new potential pipeline clients, analyzing their requirements and build proposals accordingly with business
• Ensuring the correct pricing structure is loaded per client
• Leading an agile team, ready for change and adopting to new requirements in a positive professional attitude, making sure they do not give up until they successfully resolve the issue at hand
• Continuous feedback and reports portray good communications skills with other team members and clients
• Strategically working closely with other business leaders (operations, sales, marketing, sales, HR and logistics) to ensure a synergy between departments and providing systems with change control by means of easy interfaces to middleware for example:
• Introduce dashboard reporting on KPI’s
• Automate several functions for admin and operations in on-site store system as well as ERP system improving turn-around time
• Implementing a point of sale system integrated with
• ERP system o Assist in opening Retail Stores in key areas o Successful roll-out of developed system upgrades to all on-site stores including the training requirements o Identifying and assisting with key metrics in data analysis by means of reporting

• Select PPE is one of the largest supplier of multi-brand personal protective equipment in SA to various industries from which mining is the largest, operating in the safety wholesale space. The previously American owned company (MSA Africa) strategically decided to sell Select PPE to a Russian owned company in February 2016 bringing lots of change, operational and cultural and I ws part of the team leading the change for the organization.
• Currently the main growth focus for the company is to become sales driven instead of operational driven. Focus is also placed on expanding into multiple sectors (such as OGP, manufacturing and retail). Expansion into other African countries has started to become the largest safety solution provider in Africa. Select PPE has a unique on-site offering to clients by making use of an in-house developed Vendor Managed Inventory (VMI) application to control the PPE issuing to the employees of the clients to reduce their risk and save on costs.
• My duties included identifying and establishing JV Partnerships with local black business enmities conforming to the client's local black empowerment criteria for BBBEE and setup a supply and licensig agreement with them and upskill them to make a success of their business.

30 Day Notice