Darrell Smithson

Vice President, Global Services Compac

Darrell Smithson, born and raised in the UK, joined Merlin Gerin Uninterruptable Power Supplies (UPS), a division of Schneider Electric, in 1989. He started his career as a Field Service Engineer after earning his degree in Electrical Engineering. Following four years of learning the UPS business as an Field Service Engineer, he moved into several different managerial roles within the business as his career progressed. These included Field Service Director, Operations and Customer Service Director and Director for Sales UK and Ireland

On the back of American Power Corp (APC) being acquired by Schneider, Darrell was presented the opportunity to move to the United States to set up the Field Service Sales team in North America for the new merged teams. After 3 years of establishing this business Darrell then took on the additional responsibilities of looking after the NAM Business Operations and Strategy Development, building a Team that focuses on the future direction throughout the Americas region for Schneider’s IT Business Unit. The team looked at market trends to ensure that the approach and offers remain very relevant in the markets served plus provide Sales Operations support to Americas region.

In June 2014 – Darrell joined Schneider’s Global Solutions team as VP Strategy. The team were responsible for building out the strategy for this newly formed Business Unit of Schneider, that focused in on Field Services, Digital Service, Software and Strategic Accounts globally

After more than 2 years in global strategy Darrell returned to a more Operations role, heading up the newly developed business area of Managed Service for Schneider North America. This team was responsible of the layer about the standard Field Service and provided Schneider’s top customers with an end to end Service solution. The business areas that was mainly targeted for this style of Service was in the mission critical environments like Data Centers, Healthcare and Oil & Gas facilities.

Most recently in mid-2016, Darrell joined Compac Sorting equipment to head up their Global Service Division. As part of the Executive team in Compac one of the first tasks was to help guide the business through a recent acquisition by Tomra, the world leaders in sorting technology. As the head of Global Solution Darrell is responsible for a team of +200 people supporting Compac’s customers from the design of their systems right through to the full after care of the of the solutions they deliver.

Outside of work Darrell lives in Southern California with his wife and three grown up children.  During the 25 years journey with Schneider Darrell was able to continually grow his experiences in all areas of customer service. Today at Compac he is putting this knowledge to good use as they rapidly expand in emerging the fast-growing fresh food sorting business. He remains excited by new technology that is starting to emerge in this area, that allows Compac customers to enhance the performance of their plant and factories in terms of uptime, productivity and quality.