Kerridge Commercial Systems (KCS) has appointed Camilla Lardner as its Professional Services Group (PSG) Director. Her background in project delivery and passion for continuous improvement will mark the start of a new direction for PSG, with a strong emphasis on excellent customer service and experience.
Camilla joined KCS as Project Delivery Director in July 2018 after spending 12 years in Application Delivery Services at IBM. As Delivery Director, she focused on expanding the governance and control of projects in order to provide more repeated successful implementations.
Her first few months as Director of PSG saw this inward focus continue. She maintains that the key to stabilising a department geared towards customer success is in having good internal structure, control and process. Her attention is now turning to the integration of best practices from multiple teams and solutions, which in turn will increase the value of KCS' services for customers during the implementation stage and beyond.
With respect to implementation, PSG is redefining the way in which it puts customers live. This has involved standardising approaches to implementing core functionality, creating a more agile way of dovetailing configuration with training, and giving clearer recommendations on how system features should be layered and added to in the months after a go-live.
Commenting on the priorities she will bring to her new role, Camilla said: "PSG is a department that everyone can, and should, benefit from. Getting implementation right from the outset is imperative, as this sets customers up for a positive journey with KCS. It also affords my own team greater opportunities to operate with a focus on customer experience. My intention is to shift from being wholly reactive to our customers’ demands towards proactively identifying the value-added services we know they will benefit from."
Camilla continued: "We have already built strong relationships with a number of our customers who benefit from consultancy input on a regular basis. The sophistication of our systems brings great potential, and untapping that potential in the most efficient way is something our consultants should help our customers with in the months, even years, after a go-live."
Along a similar theme, another priority for Camilla and her team will be providing a more responsive ad-hoc consultancy service for customers looking to make smaller changes to their system. With the backing of a flexible and scalable team, PSG will be able to turn around smaller changes more efficiently and effectively.
"I ultimately want our customers to receive a robust and repeatable service from us, whenever they need us, and the journey to get us there is well underway." Camilla added.
James Mitchell, KCS Managing Director for the UK and Ireland, commented: "Camilla brings to the KCS PSG an excellent track record of IT installations, from million-pound projects through to small implementations for a handful of users. All these projects have one thing in common and that is 'change'. Successful projects have the three key areas of 'people', 'process' and 'tools', all managed together in the change project. Being aware of this and designing our processes around these principles, while having strong governance to manage risk, means Camilla is successfully changing the process for KCS' installations for the benefit of all stakeholders."
