Siemens PLM Software have a large in-house consulting team who are used to deliver services to support the implementation of their PLM software products. The large majority of their services revenue comes from supporting the Teamcenter range of products in the field. The success of this team relies heavily on maintaining high levels of team utilization (> 90%) and high margin levels. In order to achieve this Siemens train and deploy consultants across the US.Their capabilities are closely managed and the opportunity pipeline is finely tuned to ensure that the consultants and project managers are deployed on projects aligned with their skill sets and their individual utilizations are kept at high levels.
In order to acheive these goals a team of Consulting Managers manage geographically focused teams which are, typically 30-40 consultants. Those managers are responsible for maintaining the health of the team and the quality of the deliverables. They are also responsible for maintaining high levels of communication with other Managers to 'trade' skills across the organization to ensure that customers are supported in a timely manner but things like travel and living are optimised to avoid having to pass unreasonable costs onto the customer. In addition they are also responsible for keep attrition levels low and for maintaining the teams with new hires where necessary. In addition, when needed, they are expeceted to engage third party companies for staff augmentation or negotiate with offshore resource teams to develop code or get additional architectural support.
The Consulting Team at Siemens were a finely tuned organization. They routinely provide high contribution levels to the Siemens PLM organization and, at the same time, ensuring the success of the software being implemented. Siemens customers who are serviced by the consulting team tend to be a very loyal group of customers and they are generally highly regarded by the customer base which helps the sales organization generate additional on-going revenue.
I was the Consulting Manager for Siemens PLM for the US Northwest Team. This team was approximately 30 consultants strong and, in general, serviced the customers west of the Mississippi and north of San Luis Obispo. I was responsible
for the health of the team, for team development, salary planning, performance reviews, hiring, and (when necessary) performance plans, workforce reductions and terminations. I was also responsible for working with
third party resource providers and offshore sources to ensure the health of the ongoing business.
At Siemens we maintained a graduate hiring program and each year I was responsible for bringing new graduates in from
Universities on the west coast. This program proved very beneficial to Siemens in providing a new source of talent on a yearly basis.
