Commercial Director

Alexander Dennis Limited (ADL) is the UK’s leading bus and coach manufacturer, employing over 2,300 people at facilities in the UK, continental Asia and North America.The fastest growing bus and coach builder in Western Europe, ADL encompasses three famous and successful marques – Alexander, Dennis and Plaxton.

The Challenge:

ADL has grown rapidly in recent years and has an ambitious strategy to continue this growth, doubling its turnover to £1 billion by 2020.

To this end the company has recently embarked upon a journey to establish and align its Vision, Values, Brand, Strategy and Operational Deployment. The Operational Deployment encompasses organisational alignment, the implementation of fit for purpose systems and the establishment of processes which will efficiently deliver timely and effective support to both the domestic and international Sales teams.

This new role will be pivotal to the operational deployment and thus the delivery of the strategy.

The Role:

ADL is seeking a dynamic and experienced Commercial Director with a track record of leading successful Commercial Teams across multiple sites. The role itself will be based in Larbert, Scotland.

Reporting to the Group Commercial and Business Development Director, the key purpose of this role is to establish and lead a world-class commercial team and to instil leading edge practices on product configuration, tendering, contracts management/execution and maximising the price advantage. Execution excellence and margin enhancement will be their watchwords.

This team sits squarely in the ‘back office’ camp, but will, and must, exert significant influence – driving and challenging both inwardly (operations, procurement and engineering) and outwardly (sales and business development). Whilst this is not a role for a salesman, the candidate must have the presence and gravitas to be able to interact comfortably with customers at a senior level.

In order to be successful this person must be a credible business leader capable of leading a diverse team through a period of change whilst working collaboratively with both UK and International sales teams, Operations, Engineering, Supply Chain and Finance to drive continuous improvement and develop a competitive pricing strategy to grow revenues and margins.

Key Tasks: 

Immediate challenges will be:

• Complete the implementation of the Product Configurator software and underlying principles and optimise the use thereof
• Establish and enforce clear processes and rules for post-contract amendment control
• Establish an internal Price Book model, and monitor/control pricing
• Become the intelligent interface between VAVE activity and the Customer
• Develop a clear model for value-based pricing and drive the delivery thereof

The Candidate:

To be successful in this role, applicants should possess the following qualifications, experiences, key competencies and personal qualities:

• Degree qualified in a relevant financial/business/engineering discipline
• Experience within the Commercial function within a role of similar size and scope
• Proven track record in functional leadership of commercial teams including tendering/bidding and contract management
• Specific commercial experience in systems and processes development and designing high performance organisational structures
• A track record of commercial/bottom line delivery of cross-functional projects as part of a business team.  Demonstrate understanding of commercial implications of decision making and can provide pragmatic solutions which fit to the business need