Nordic Female Career Summit 2022 by Egon Zehnder

Vestas Executive Leadership Programme 

Aalborg University

Engineering College of Copenhagen

Head of Vestas R&D

Head of Vestas global R&D activities with the ambition to bring the best product solution to the renewable market

Vestas

Board Member

Drive the product development of new Wind Turbines and Plant Products to support Vestas in delivering our ambition to be a global leader in sustainable energy solutions. 
I oversee the creation of our product architecture, product road maps and the execution of our product development programmes across the organization. In addition I also lead the deployment of our products in the market by developing go-to-market strategies, value engineering levers, wind & site and grid modeling analysis for individual sites. 
Being a newly established organization I have shaped the organizational setup consisting of 10 VP areas and 500 motivated employees across Portugal, India and Denmark.

Senior Vice President Product Solutions & Integration, Vestas R&D

The organization consisted of Market Intelligence & Strategy and Commercial Operations. I steered the process for laying out the market analysis to identify the best sales and product roadmap strategies. I facilitated the management of the sales pipeline, value engineering and managed the contracting team. Due the COVID pandemic and subsequent supply challenges I organized a daily War Room to monitor, mitigate and optimize the impact to our active wind turbine construction projects to mitigate the execution risk for our customers and Vestas.

VP Market Development & Sales Operations, Vestas Americas

As a Co-Lead for Sales Business Unit (SBU) China I had a joint P&L responsibility of the SBU which covered everything from Sales, Construction and Service with the following functions reporting to me directly: Commercial Sales Operations, Business Development, Public Affair, Strategy, Market Intelligence, Marketing, Communication and Technical Sales Management. 
I brought stability and focus to the SBU, delivered on budget the first year together with building the organization and business model to secure future growth in the region, at a time where the organization had undergone a lot of changes and operating in an extremely competitive Chinese market. I was a high intensity role with monthly financial reporting and Steering Committee meetings with Vestas Executive Management to create the changes necessary. Biggest achievements were getting buy-in and commitment to the SBU China growth strategy proposal, which among others included new products to better suit the Chinese market this resulted in the following year bringing in the highest order intake and revenue reported to date.

Co-Lead Sales Business Unit China, Vestas China

Based on my successful track record in mature markets I was assigned to build a high performing Technical Sales Management function in the newly established China Sales Business Unit. 
I established, developed and empowered the departments and individuals to be capable of successfully managing the Chinese technical sales activities. Having young and newly formed teams the focus was on building capabilities, hiring the right people, building processes for efficient execution and increasing the commercial understanding to better create value for our customers.

VP Technical Sales Management, Vestas China 

The Technical Sales Management function consisted of 3 engineering departments being Technical Bid Management, Electrical & SCADA Design and Wind & Site Resource Assessment and through these team we identified the ideal Wind Turbine selection based on technical performance and cost of energy, did technical contract tendering, negotiations and secured the electrical design, wind farm regulation and grid code compliance testing during wind farm construction.
Being a newly established function with a very broad engineering scope, over 10 nationalities in 6 different locations under the same leadership I succeeded in creating one function following the same goals and capable of working smoothly together across departments to increase efficiency. By being able to leverage the different engineering capabilities we could bring the value engineered and optimized project solutions to a new level together with better risk management to fit the new customer types moving into the wind industry.

Director Technical Sales Management, Northern Europe

Promoted to manage the team I was previously part of. I mobilized the team to push the technology application, product performance and risk position together with being more creative in finding solutions for mutual benefit for our customers and Vestas. One key element of achieving this was to drive a move from standard equipment sales to highly value engineered project optimized solutions and being able to do so in an efficient manner. The added value generated through these initiatives enabled Vestas to grow market share and revenue in an increasingly competetive environment.

Manager, Technical Bid Management Northern Europe 

Besides continuing the role as Senior Technical Bid Manager, as Deputy Manager of my team I managed resource allocation and prioritization of sales support activities and facilitated the development of templates and prosses for efficient execution of sales projects throughout the Northern European region. As a member of the European Technical Bid Management team my main contribution was designing a people development program and roll out our processes to the boarder European Technical Bid Management organization

Deputy Manager Technical Bid Management NEU

Managed the technical sales agenda for our largest customers across the sales region. This included tendering, technical due diligence, risk management, value engineering and sales contract negotiation to ensure a successful sale of our Wind Power Plants. 
Successfully transformed customer relationships from a transactional to a partnership approach. Especially motivated and attracted to sales projects and customer relationships that required to overcome complex contract commitments or new solution development giving me the opportunity to take advantage of my ability to work across different technical disciplines and transfer those into a commercial context and competitive advantage. This resulted in successfully enabling and closing the, at the time, largest wind power plants in UK and Sweden.

Senior Technical Bid Manager

Worked in the Technology Transfer organisation. Supported the transfer of production technology from a Danish tower factory to a Chinese sub supplier. Mapped the process in Denmark and China, conducted workshops with stakeholders; identified areas of improvement and suggested implementation method of those improvements.

Vestas Towers A/S

Internship, Technology Transfer

Assisting project managers in technology transfer to Vestas global subsidiaries and sub suppliers. Responsible for developing and executing training programmes for employees in newly established blade factories in Germany and Spain

Anne Vedel