Introducing our newest member of the Nordics CE & Power Platform team - Thor Tankred!

Can you tell us about yourself as a person, and your previous experience?

I’m a very curious and transparent person, who enjoy delivering CE projects to different type of organizations. It intrigues me to convert a specific business process into a digital solution, especially if it involves a sometimes more creative approach. Hence my curiosity is both on the technical possibilities/limitations, but also exploring the customer's ways of working and their culture. I have been working in several different consultancies, but also on the customer side in three large international companies. 

The latter has given me a better understanding of the challenges within the customer's organization. It can sometimes seem irrational and even lead to frustration, if the customers are pushing in another direction, are challenging our suggestions, or are not delivering according to the plan. But it’s important to remember the political aspect and respect that the customers have a natural anxiety towards implementing a new framework, they are not confident in. Also, very few customer stakeholders are primarily allocated to our projects, but they need to find project time on top of their busy schedules.

Our main goal is to give them confidence and make them feel safe, for me it’s like building a new house for a family. By early giving them experiences of tangible success, being honest, and involving them in the construction, instead of sticking hard to a predefined list of requirements, they often see that we are truly there to help them. Then the process changes from a vendor-customer battle to enthusiastic co-creation. I also find it important to use humor and create a fun atmosphere within workshops and customer-engaging activities, because most people have plenty of boring meetings.

The advantage of CE is how easy and fast it is to configure it to match the customer's different processes, without using code.

What expectations do you have for the position of Teamleader for CE & Power Platform?

I would really enjoy seeing us establish a delivery framework that is structured enough to make the customers safe and ensure we have some common guiding principles but also gives enough flexibility to ensure it’s not an overhead constraint on delivering value. I hope I can contribute to steady growth within the Nordic CE domain. I have previously been mentoring several new colleagues, and this is really something I enjoy. I would also be very thrilled if we could have more joint CE-ERP projects where we can supplement each other, especially because DYN365 is technologically moving closer towards being a fully merged business platform.  

What challenges are you looking forward to solving with the CE & Power Platform team?

I hope to ensure that our Nordic CE business is growing, and we are delivering happy customers, who are prepared to continue the partnership with us. There is a lot of potential in the CE market, also for customers who have already implemented i.e. CRM before but have now matured into relaunching better solutions, based on previous experiences.

Regarding CE as a product, can you explain the value it brings to companies?

CE covers a wide array of business processes, from Sales, Marketing, and Customer service to more ‘ERP’ like modules such as Field Service and Project Operations. Both from a data perspective and due to license costs, it makes a lot of sense to use CE across the business, where it can become a combined strategic platform, which is supplementing and integrated with the customer's ERP. CE has really evolved far beyond the ‘old’ CRM days and has matured into a much more business-critical platform. The advantage of CE is how easy and fast it is to configure it to match the customer's different processes, without using code. Furthermore, CE is really evolving fast and Microsoft is constantly pushing new standard functionality.

What is your favorite quote?

"Things ain’t what they used to be – And they never were!"

Do you have any finishing points you want to add?

I’m always open to giving some travel advice, from the mystique journeys of Thor.