Director – MES Practice Lead

Purpose

Lead and scale the MES Services business for the Global Delivery Center by building a strong MES competency, driving delivery excellence, and improving margins through standardization and templatization. This role partners closely with the regional counterpart to support growth, shape pipeline, and ensure successful execution for existing and new customers—while applying a strong people-first leadership approach.

Key Responsibilities

Practice & Business Leadership

• Own the GDC MES practice roadmap aligned with global/regional MES strategy.
• Define and manage the practice operating model: engagement, delivery readiness, resourcing, capability growth, and knowledge management.
• Partner with regional MES leaders to align offerings, priorities, and execution approach.

Program Leadership (Leading from the Front)

• Lead large and complex MES programs “from the front” with strong ownership of outcomes, stakeholder alignment, and execution rigor.
• Set the bar for execution excellence across program management, solution delivery, and customer communication.

Delivery Excellence & Governance

• Establish and enforce project governance across MES programs (scope, schedule, risk, quality, and stakeholder management).
• Ensure consistent delivery standards, templates, and quality gates across all projects.
• Provide leadership for escalations, enable corrective actions, and institutionalize lessons learned.

Standardization, Templatization & Margin Improvement

• Build and maintain reusable assets (delivery playbooks, templates, accelerators, estimation models, reference architectures).
• Drive productivity and margin improvements by increasing reuse and reducing delivery variability.
• Track and improve practice KPIs (margin, utilization, schedule predictability, quality, CSAT).

MES Competency Development (Capability Building)

• Develop MES techno-functional capability across architecture, configuration, integration, testing, deployment, and hyper care.
• Define skill matrices, learning paths, certifications, mentoring plans, and succession pipeline.
• Establish communities of practice and continuous improvement mechanisms across delivery teams.

People Leadership (People First)

• Lead, coach, and mentor practice leaders, project managers, architects, and delivery teams.
• Build a high-performing culture with strong engagement, accountability, and career growth.
• Drive performance management, talent development, and retention initiatives.

Customer Engagement & Pipeline Growth

• Engage with existing customers to strengthen relationships, improve satisfaction, and expand scope/footprint.
• Support pre-sales with discovery workshops, solution shaping, proposals, estimations, risk reviews, and delivery strategy.
• Drive pipeline growth in partnership with sales and regional MES leadership.

Qualifications / Experience

• Minimum 15+ years of experience in MES Services, including end-to-end delivery ownership and services leadership.
• Proven experience leading large MES programs from the front (multi-site / multi-geography programs preferred), including go-live leadership and executive stakeholder management.
• Strong MES techno-functional expertise with end-to-end delivery ownership.
• Demonstrated success in improving margins via standardization, templatization, and governance.
• Strong executive stakeholder management, communication, and customer-facing leadership.
• Track record of building and scaling competencies, teams, and delivery leaders.

Critical Skills

• Excellent people management and coaching capability; strong “people-first” mindset.
• Practice leadership: operating model, governance, metrics, delivery excellence.
• Business acumen: profitability/margins, utilization, productivity, pipeline contribution.
• Collaboration: strong partnership with regional counterpart and cross-functional teams.
• Customer engagement: credibility to lead workshops, escalations, and value discussions.

Preferred Qualifications

• AVEVA platform experience preferred, with demonstrated exposure to delivering MES solutions leveraging AVEVA technologies (e.g., AVEVA MES / related AVEVA digital manufacturing ecosystem).