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Meet the team:
Simon Thompson, OxTS Senior Business Manager

Blogs May 3, 2021

Simon Thompson OxTS Senior Business ManagerAt OxTS, we’re always searching for the next solution. We will never allow ourselves to be left behind. OxTS was founded on a desire to challenge technical boundaries and achieve “the unachievable” and being driven is therefore a core value of OxTS. Driving ourselves forward enables us to drive our customers forward too. Here OxTS Senior Business Manager, Simon Thompson, tells us about his own drive to deliver, in a typical ‘day in his life’:

 

 

1. How long have you worked at OxTS, and what do you like most about the Company?

I joined OxTS in October 2016, so this is my fifth year. The company has changed a lot since I joined, and I’ve loved being able to play a leading role in shaping our strategy. That is the part I like the most about the company, there is always an opportunity to be hands-on with the business plan – it is not a passive environment. At OxTS we’re passionate about inertial navigation and how we can help our customers with our technology.

 

2. What are your key responsibilities in your role as an OxTS Senior Business Manager?

My role is pretty wide-reaching. My team and I are responsible for sales, marketing campaigns and product development for customers in our established markets: Automotive Testing, and Survey and Mapping. We design and develop the value propositions to address customer needs and we work with a network of global channel partners to take them to market. A recent example of this work was our launch of a new navigation solution for indoor vehicle testing. We work hard to understand what our customers are trying to achieve, and we run projects to bring new technical solutions to market which support them.

I am responsible for decisions on product strategy, pricing, and customer support, and in a typical month my team and I are often travelling to meet with our customers and partners. During the Covid pandemic we have followed Government advice and moved many meetings online.

 

3. What’s a work-related accomplishment that you’re really proud of?

Launching the RT3000 v3 back in 2019 was very challenging, and I am proud that we were able to do it well. There are several thousand RT3000s being used around world for critical vehicle test and development projects every day. It was important that the new generation product was able to meet our own high standards – those we have set and maintained over many years, that are a key reason customers trust OxTS. I am pleased now to look back two years later at a successful product launch which delivered what we had wanted – something which has the high-quality standards people expect from an RT3000, but with new and interesting capabilities on top and, to further support our customers, there are new features coming all the time.

 

4. What’s the most challenging thing about being an OxTS Senior Business Manager and how do you manage this?

As we grow and challenge ourselves, I am often asked to make big decisions, with significant consequences, but without perfect data. That is the case in any company and OxTS is no exception. In the past five years we have entered new markets to provide more customers with INS precision measurement solutions; managed a constantly evolving product roadmap in order to remain at the leading edge of technology and provide customers with innovative products and services, and handled the export implications that have come with Brexit, to ensure customers receive their goods with minimal delay. Though each of these challenges have been different, we have dealt with them well because we have built strong teams of experts, and made decisions confidently as one team.

 

5. What’s the best thing about being part of the OxTS team?

We have fun at work because we work very well together most of the time, not in isolation, and we get involved in some interesting customer projects. Projects are varied, and the added element of speaking with people across many countries means you are always switching the approach and the context to best suit the audience.

 

6. What are your goals for the next 12 months at OxTS?

I want to get back out and meet our partners and our customers. Despite remaining in close contact, regularly holding virtual meetings, I’ve really missed our face-to-face interactions during the global pandemic, and it’s part of what makes us good at what we do – the opportunity to have conversations about product ideas, run demonstrations and get hands-on. We’ve got some ambitious growth targets, especially in the Survey market, where we’ve recently launched our smallest and lightest INS solution yet. So I’m expecting to see lots of new customers taking up the new xNAV650.

 

 

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