By James Wells in Melbourne

MELBOURNE: BSH Appliances managing director, Paul Ravlich, will be succeeded by the current managing director of BSH South Africa, Mark Saunders on 26 June.

Born in England, Saunders has lived in South Africa for over 30 years. Prior to joining BSH Appliances in South Africa seven years ago, Saunders worked for AEG.

Ravlich, who has announced he will be returning to his home country of New Zealand on 31 July for person reasons, will conduct a short handover period before leaving the business.

“During the transition, we will be traveling to New South Wales, Queensland and New Zealand to meet staff and customers," ravlich told current.com.au.

BSH has also recently appointed Nick Ruffell to the position of business development manager managing the Bosch and Siemens major accounts after a five month break from the company.

Ruffell, who will manage the key accounts Narta, Harvey Norman and The Good Guys, was previously product manager – laundry and dishwashers.

“I decided after (national sales manager) Simon Taylor left BSH to join Harvey Norman, that our state managers would report to me,” Ravlich said.

“After five months, we realised that there was no issue with the state managers reporting to me, but we realised that we needed contact with our national key accounts as we found it compromised the state managers who are paid to run their staff and look after their territories. When the state managers put on a different hat and started to look after Harvey Norman and Narta in Sydney for example, it was apparent very quickly that it was not an easy task to do both,” Ravlich said.

“It was then that I gave Nick a call to see if he would like to take on a role to maintain relationships at the head office and support centre level.

“Nick does not have the day to day responsibilities relating to a specific customer of a buying group which is managed by our state managers and their support team. Nick’s responsibilities are to bed down relationships at the support centre and the head offices of key accounts," Ravlich said.

“As a former product manager, Nick brings longevity, product knowledge and has an immense amount of respect from the retailers. This made him an ideal candidate and we were extremely pleased for him to take on that role. He has slotted straight into the role even though it is a completely different job description to a product or marketing manager’s role. It has been a good move for us,” Ravlich said.

“We are fortunate to get the right person, the company culture is already engrained. How well he is respected in the industry was apparent when we announced it. We are very happy we have put Nick into that position within our organisation."