Our People

DataCol has a track record of successful innovation which has lead to substantial growth over the past three years. This has been achieved through a strong management team, many with international experience. DataCol has also been placed on the New Zealand Government's NZTE Fast Forward program for High growth Companies.

Some of the key people are:

Bruce Franks Chief Executive Officer		Diane Rayner National Operations Manager
Chris Spanton Financial Controller		David Waldron Systems Delivery Manager

 

Bruce Franks

Chief Executive Officer 

Bruce has considerable Senior UK and European Field Operations leadership experience encompassing the Telecommunications and Electrical Utilities sectors primarily at NTL, whose Revenues exceeded $4Billion per annum and who are the UK’s largest competitor to British Telecom.

At NTL Bruce set up the field workforce operation from a start-up in 1993 and was a principle change agent throughout the hectic M&A period in the following 10 years, rationalising multiple Scheduling and Dispatch Call Centres down to two. Bruce led National efficiency initiatives particularly around CPE and Materials management systems along with Contractor negotiation and rationalisation.

As Director Bruce led the post takeover operational turnaround of their London Networks and Field Workforce Operation reducing overall OPEX by 40% at a time of exponential customer growth.

Prior to the 19 years spent overseas Bruce practised as an Electrical Engineer on many large projects around New Zealand – notably on the Marsden Point Oil Refinery and the Kinlieth Pulp and Paper Mill expansion Projects.

Bruce joined DataCol NZ in August 2006 and has bolstered his leadership team while also pursuing a diversification strategy into metering field service contracting. Bruce has achieved a 40% market share of the Orion Network AMR Deployment and looking to grow that share further as well as becoming a significant Deployment partner for other Electricity Retailers.

Diane Rayner

National Operations Manager 

Prior to joining DNZ, Diane managed projects for at least seven major companies in the New Zealand energy sector. She has successfully delivered solutions for change management, customer services billing, credit control, call centre, business management mentoring, and management of business transformation projects. The majority of these projects have arisen through the government's reform of the electricity industry, and have required close attention to regulatory compliance issues.

Diane's contracts have involved process review, analysis and recommendations for business improvement, establishment of key performance indicators and service level agreements for customer services and billing processes, and training needs analysis.  

Diane filled the role of Project Manager for four major projects for one of New Zealand 's major electricity retailers. These projects involved managing multi-disciplinary teams of seconded staff and contractors, participating in a Steering Committee comprising representatives from all electricity retailers, obtaining ISO accreditation for the company's business processes, and managing the identification, acquisition, and implementation of new software tools through formal RFI and RFP processes.

Subsequent to the successful completion of the project, Diane performed the ongoing ISO process quality audits as she is a qualified and experienced ISO Process Quality Auditor.  

Diane served as General Manager Customer Services for WEL Energy Ltd, where she was Executive Manager responsible for customer services billing, call centre operation, credit control, and revenue protection.

Most recently Diane spent 6 months in the Telecommunications industry in a Transition Management role. The objectives were to manage and transform an operational team in the Network Operations Centre. The key goal was to evolve and develop the business process and capability (people and systems) to ensure that service level agreements and associated performance levels were achieved.

Chris Spanton

Financial Controller

Chris has gained a large amount of experience as a Financial Controller primarily based in the UK working in both small and large organisations. Chris joined the group in October 2006 and brings experience covering:

• Process review and implementations
• Financial and Management Reporting
• Business Integration and streamlining
• Product Costing

David Waldron BSc

Systems Delivery Senior Developer

David’s experience covers the whole Software Delivery Life Cycle. In particular he brings skills in GIS and GPS. His work has included:

• Team leadership on mapping and GIS application projects
• Using GPS location data for asset management
• Developing applications to run on the desktop and Windows CE handheld devices
• Application architecture design
• Management of the software development and release cycles