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Nathalie FREGER
French citizen
Marketing Europe, Refining & Marketing,
Paris, France. Program Controller.
BTS (two-year diploma) from secretarial
school, returned to school at the age of
38 to obtain a Maîtrise des Sciences
de Gestion (Master’s in Management
Science) from the Sorbonne in Paris.
Seniority in the Group: 22 years. Refining
& Marketing, in Paris and other regions
of France.
On completing my BTS, I did an internship
as a secretary at Elf. I had several temporary
contracts and was finally hired on a permanent
basis a year later.
Career divided
into three parts.
Looking back, I’d say that my career
has been divided into three main parts.
I started out in secretarial jobs for various
departments, primarily within Retail. Later
on, I served as an administrative assistant
in the Human Resources Department and as
a sales assistant to Retail sales delegates,
notably outside the Paris area. The Company
demonstrated its confidence in my skills
by giving me a front-line position as Retail
sales delegate for three years.
The third part corresponds to my decision
to go back to school. Total approved and
financed my Master’s in Management
training, which lasted two years. I took
two and a half days of courses every other
week, on Thursday, Friday and Saturday morning.
At the same time, I had an office-based
sales job with the North East Regional Division’s
Total payment card telesales team.
Training support.
When I completed my Master’s in 2003,
I looked for a position that would use my
new competencies within the Group. A year
and a half later, I was offered my current
position as program controller. I began
in December 2004 and, later on, was given
manager-level status, in January 2006.
A training course on cross-functional management
was suggested following my annual performance
review to support me in my new function
and new responsibilities. The three-day
session, based on role playing, was designed
to make us familiar with techniques for
managing skills and getting a team to buy
into a goal, without going through hierarchical
channels. We learned a lot during those
three days, during which we were filmed.
The advantage for me was that I could apply
the lessons I learned immediately in my
daily project-based work.
The European ATLAS
e-money project.
I’m currently controller of the ATLAS
program, which is designed to revamp the
e-money IT system for the payment card business
in Europe and support the European subsidiaries
in marketing new services. The project comprises
four main areas: the Card Processor, the
core of the card management and billing
system; Electronic Publishing, which allows
us to compose documents and produce electronic
invoices; Authorization, with the construction
and commissioning of a single authorization
server for Europe, and CRM, with the goal
of internationalizing our current system.
Some 20 people are working on this project,
which is scheduled for completion at the
end of 2007.
I handle the budget, scheduling and documentation
aspects. This involves commitment and expense
tracking, budget control, deployment of
reporting and analysis systems, critical
path tracking and database management. It’s
rewarding to contribute to this project
and very educational to work in a team combining
both project owners and contractors.
However, all projects end one day. I’m
already looking ahead, and I’d really
like to move towards management functions.
The training I’ve had has prepared
me for this eventuality.
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