Milpitas, CA—Northland Controls announces the promotion of Edward Wears to chief operating officer of the company. Wears was the managing director for Northland’s European division where he tripled operations and quadrupled revenue over the past 5 years.

“This transition is part of our long-term succession planning. Ed’s performance in EMEA and his passion for operations and seamless processes makes him the clear choice to lead our global operations going forward,” says CEO Pierre Trapanese. “He has streamlined operations in EMEA, built a customer-focused and high-performance culture based on our core values, and developed systems and processes that we can implement globally.”

Prior to Northland, Wears was at Sony Ericsson where he spent 3 years heading change management initiatives and helped reduce spending by €35 million, while increasing governance, internal communications and cost transparency. He also served as a Global Program Manager at Sony Ericsson where he was responsible for IT infrastructure and software projects across 30 countries while managing up to 40 resources within a mixed matrix organization.