Marrying the best of two worlds – German efficiency and Spanish sociability.

The “Together with VIAVI” blog series features some of the many talented, diverse, and often spirited people across the company, bringing their best to you – our customers and partners – every day. Your success is our success and we are delighted to be on this journey with you!

Name: Dr. Ana-Isabel Nölke

Title: Commercial Manager & CLSS Process Analyst

Location: Spain

What is your current role, and what brought you to work at VIAVI?

I am currently a Commercial Bid Manager, as well as a certified Lean Six Sigma Green Belt Process Analyst. My certification is put to the test every day where I break down complex subjects, effectively solve problems and provide useful recommendations. I have been with VIAVI, since September 2013. I previously worked at Vodafone Germany where I was already immersed in the telecom world at that time. What intrigued me about VIAVI was that it is the “other side” of telecommunication.

While telcos connect people, VIAVI keeps the world connected by revealing what is hidden in the complexity of the network. VIAVI is there every step of the way, from the lab, to the networks in the field, to assuring that networks are functioning around the clock. In addition, the Commercial Bid Manager role means that I have the chance to work with the entire company and be immersed in and connected to every part of the business. This has been an incredible learning experience and allowed me to move into something I am passionate about which is driving efficiency and process optimization. The fact that VIAVI is a global company that allows me to work from all over the world with people from every culture imaginable is of course a bonus.

How do you help customers, and what is your proudest moment?

As a Commercial Bid Manager it is my job to help our sales team focus 100% on the customer by managing the bureaucratic process in the background and ensure that we can deliver what we promise.

Each day I work with our sales team and liaise between the rest of the company. I liaise with the product teams for the product or solution description, our R&D teams for custom features, our professional services teams to deliver the project on time, our legal and finance departments to find a mutually acceptable agreement, our various departments dealing with CSR issues to respond to environmental, social, and governance requests.

My proudest moment is not when we win a RFP, but every time we successfully deliver a project to customer satisfaction and see all the hard work has paid off.

In addition, I am driven by efficiency – it must be the German in me. As such, I am proud to have brought this drive into the Commercial Engagement Team as a whole, placing increased value on using the insight we gain from our cross-functional work to identify areas in which we can drive process improvements and optimization. This allows us to help our customers indirectly, for example by reducing the response times for RFPs.

This drive also led us to build and manage a customer information tool, a single place for our sales team to submit customer questions and requests. My team works on these requests through our network of stakeholders, thus allowing us to coordinate responses across all product lines, locations, and departments. This tool has been invaluable in the current challenging environment as we were able to leverage it to immediately respond to customer concerns with accurate, coordinated information, tailored to their specific needs.

What would people be surprised to learn about VIAVI?

Apart from how global VIAVI is, likely the fact that we truly have solutions for the entire network lifecycle: from lab, to field, to assurance, which is an immense advantage in today’s complex networks, particularly with the advent of 5G.

We are right there in the lab, for example, with the new 5G network elements that need to be tested and verified. Then we are also always at field engineers´ side, with our field testing and deployment support tools, many of which are cloud-enabled, making centralized data management a breeze. We also have the only End to End 5G integrated assurance platform, leveraging our market leading geolocation, optimization, and assurance products.

The breadth of our solutions and ability to integrate crucial data across the phases can truly be quite surprising.

You can read more about VIAVI Customer and Partner Champions on the “Together with VIAVI” website.