Welcome to the next edition of Leadership Matters where we ask leaders around the Pacific Zone for their insights and advice about leadership matters to support our continuing journey of personal and professional development.
In this edition, we hear from Pacific Director, Customer Satisfaction & Supply Chain Nirmani Amerasinghe, who is responsible for spearheading our customer excellence and innovation strategies across supply chain and commercial teams in Australia and New Zealand.
With extensive experience working across Asia-Pacific, delivering operational and service excellence, and managing cross-functional teams, Nirmani is known for driving sustainable growth, cultivating talent, and her customer-centric leadership. Nirmani is also a strong advocate for the benefits of diversity and coaching. In addition to her current role, she is a board director of the Australian Supply Chain Institute and is an alumna of INSEAD.
What motivates and excites you about your role at Schneider Electric?
What excites me about my role is the opportunity to interact and collaborate with incredible people to improve our customer experience. It is very exciting to constantly learn how our go-to-market strategies are supported by operating models to ensure we provide excellent service.
I have also seen how disruptions impact service and how teams come together with true customer first mindset to solve those issues and be proactive in our approach. My aim is to ensure that we provide a tailored customer experience by persona across the transactional, project, software, and service models we have in our organisation.
We’re one of the leading companies in the world when it comes to sustainability. How are you and your team contributing to this?
I’m personally a huge advocate of sustainability and it's also super exciting to see our customers taking on the same journey with us. Currently we are working on some very exciting projects on transitioning away from all plastic packaging from our deliveries to customers. We have seen very strong adoption of this initiative in New Zealand and our customer sentiment followed with very positive growth on delivery experience. This year, we hope to scale the solution across Australia. Sustainability remains at the core of our operating model.
Of the customers you’re working with currently, what are they doing to be an #ImpactMaker in the market in which they’re operating?
It is very exciting to see our customers’ journey towards energy efficiency. The recognition and understanding of the need for investment in digital and technological solutions has increased in the past few years. We love having information at our fingertips, including access to pictures, apps, and documents. With such an increase in demand for data, and therefore data storage, the amount of data hosted and the energy it takes to host is increasing rapidly.
The most impressive stories I have seen recently are those of data centres where our customers as #ImpactMakers in building 100% renewable energy data centres with zero downtime as their mission. Schneider Electric has been partnering with them to manage a network of reliable, cost-effective, remotely accessible prefabricated edge data centres with quality connectivity.
What was a moment in your career that was pivotal or changed you in some way?
Making a career transition to a people leadership role. It helped me to learn about myself first. The better I know how to manage my priorities helps to set the course for our collective ambition as a team. People leadership has profoundly changed me, shifting my focus from managing tasks to inspiring, developing, and empowering team members. It has been an absolutely rewarding journey to work with such a diverse team with a consistently strong performance. I have been super fortunate to work with such an amazing team and peers at Schneider.
What is the best advice you’ve ever received?
The best advice I’ve received is to give 100% to the things that you can control and leave the rest alone.
Which of our company values resonates with you most and why?
I would say ‘Purpose’ – aspiring to build a sustainable future for our people, customers, communities, and planet. Especially in the customer domain, it resonates most with me as we drive improvements and experiences that help transition our customers all over the world, and therefore communities worldwide, to a sustainable future.