Elke

"A former colleague called me and asked me this question. At Componenta they were about to implement a new ERP system and there was a need for additional support in the sales back office department. I didn’t need much time to think it over. After 12.5 years at the same company, as senior customer service coordinator, it indeed was about time for a new challenge! Two months later, in 2007, I started to work at Componenta as a sales back office employee.

After six months I got the opportunity to take on the role of sales back office manager. So far I only had experience in coordinating processes and people, so I received training to learn how to grow from expertise to leadership. Still my goal remains to guide and coach people into the direction they want to grow.

During the first phase in my new position, I started to make an inventory of all existing sales processes and there seemed to be a number of quite different, individual, ways of working. In our aim towards a “single way of working”, the Dutch sales back office team started to create process flows for each process and made proposals to improve the transparency and efficiency. Some additional templates were created to guarantee the “single way of working”. This resulted in a strong team with motivated people, who perform according uniform procedures and are able to back each other up.

Componenta gave me the opportunity, assistance and freedom to evolve the sales back office to a level where we are today and into something that I am really proud of."