eric lauwers

In November 2011, Eric was engaged by a small logistics company during its WCO (Chapter 11) procedure to turn the company around. In a first step, he was able to cut the fixed costs with 80% into variable costs by replacing a fixed warehouse with a custom storage solution with another logistics providers. Secondly, he cut the employment cost and cut the workforce with 2/3 of the entire workforce. Thirdly, he was able to agree with cut the debt with 60% through negotiations with various suppliers. Due to the loss of the trust of major key accounts, the company could not generate new sales to turn the company around. Eric assisted in the closure and bankruptcy procedures of the company.

In August 2003, he started with 3 partners a treasury implementation company, based on Trema’s treasury management system. He build the sales, consultancy and customer services division in APAC and resulted in acquiring Bank of Thailand, Ericson and Travelex as customers. In 2004, he came back to Europe to continue to expand the business in Europe with customers as European Central Bank, Henkel, ING Asset Management, Aegon, TetraPack, etc. He was responsible for the development of the company’s strategy, marketing and professional services. The company grew from 3 FTEs to 20 consultants, revenue from 250K to 5M USD with a profit margin of 25%. The company was sold at the end of 2006 to a Scandinavian consultancy company and Eric remained responsible for the field account management until 2007. Eric had P&L responsibility and introduced an investment process to allow the company’s board of directors to decide on value driven investment proposals.

After his employment with Sybase, Eric was recruited as a self-employed DBA with ING Investment Banking. He also played an active role in the design of the service catalog in the ITIL program.

Eric was engaged to set-up the community team in the new division of the BNP Paribas Group: the Corporate Real Estate Steering center (CREST). Together with the heads of the other teams and the manager, Eric was responsible for the strategy of the startup of the expert and consultancy activities in the field of branch concepts, cost analysis of real estate activities and engineering best practices. The group had to “sell” its services to internal customers through the BNP Paribas group. The community team was responsible for the day-to-day operations with the various user and customer communities. Eric left the group after transferring the position to an internal manager and after budget cuts for the division.

Eric was engaged by Daiwa Securities as Senior DBA and Project Manager during the Y2K-project. He led a group of 5 project members to build an exact copy of the production environment as a testing environment to execute the various Y2K-projects. Next to this activity, Eric was also responsible for the day-to-day support and maintenance of the bank’s trading platform: Fidessa.

He was Sybase DBA in the DBA team of one of the largest financial institutes in Belgium, now known as ING Belgium.

During his first job, Eric was a member of a 4 persons DBA team, responsible for the day-to-day management of various development databases of a 100-man development team.

During his engagement, he was responsible for 6 projects in parallel for a total budget of over 10M EUR and indirectly managing over 200 project members. One of the major projects was the consolidation of three workforce management systems of 3 independent call centers into a single workforce management system for 3 call centers. The project was responsible for the design of a single set of management processes, stakeholder management, technology and vendor management. He was also responsible for the vendor negotiations. A second portfolio of projects was related to the company’s changing commissioning domain, introducing new functionality and upgrading the existing software platform. In these projects, Eric was responsible for the budgeting, resource management, vendor and stakeholder management.

Eric was hired by Trema as a member of the technical support team of a 2-man support team. After a few months, Eric became responsible for the set-up and management of a professional customer service organization to resolve all technical issues of the customer’s treasury system. He was also responsible for the development of a quality management system for the support environment and customer reporting. He grew the team from 2 FTEs to a team of about 20 permanent support engineers.

During this assignment, Eric was responsible for the design, development and deployment of a real-time messaging and event management system for the Belgian Federal Police, including risk and mitigation management. Eric managed the development team and day-to-day interactions with the representatives of the customer.

With the introduction of the EURO, Eric was responsible for the identification of all applications, running on Sybase, and became project manager of the migration project to migrate to a newer database version.

During his engagement with Commerzbank, Eric led a 5-man DBA team to overview the bank’s +200 Sybase servers. As project manager, he became responsible for the implementation and deployment of a new trading platform: ORC software on an exotic technology platform. He was responsible for the scheduling and management of the project, set-up of the support schedule, stakeholder management, risk and issue management, change management and test supervision.