B2BiQ

Recorded at the OPEX Summit in San Diego, Russell Ollie joins us with global career experience working for eBay, Microsoft and GM among others - and shares lessons learned along the way. He contends that there’s no true difference between the terms Operational Excellence or Business Transformation. In terms of context- in the programs which Russell’s managed or rebuilt the goal has been continuous improvement with an innovation component which used to be designed for six sigma, but now is seen as design thinking. Add that all up and add strategy execution- which involves deployment of strategy in a way that is meaningful for all levels of the enterprise - and right there you’ve got a good idea of what he’s been up to for the past couple of decades.

Recorded at SSOW Canada, Mathieu Rebeiro joins us and shares that as a six sigma black belt, he’s often asked- isn’t lean six sigma old or something that’s passed? He’ll be presented with the fact that the new methodology is Agile or Waterfall or Design Thinking or RPA. He offers it’s not wrong to think that way…but it’s not right either. All of those are complimentary methodologies. And the challenge to the executive in question is are you ready willing and or able to explain how they all compliment each other? Rather than find what divides us Mathew contents, find the commonalities and work together on the job at hand. He tries very hard to ensure that everyone understands that it’s not an "either or"…it’s an "and" conversation.

Just under two years into automation, Jon Theurekauf joins us from Intelligent Automation Chicago 2017 to take us through the persona around the initiative which as you might guess is Alex- a tip of the hat to BNY founder Alexander Hamilton- meaning all of the bots are called Alex with their own subsequent bot id code. The institution is a large global enterprise and searched for a partner that would suit an intelligent automation ecosystem of that size and scope. Jon says that the enterprise doesn’t really have processes running on a desktop by desktop basis and while he and the team continue to re-enineer and standardize processes, they know what’s what within each process... Which is why when they dove into automation, they did so at the enterprise level.

Recorded at CCW, Tim Fischer joins us as the director of contact center and order processing at Colony Brands and shares that every morning he zeros in on what today’s going to look like based on how yesterday went and what to expect for the rest of the week. Tim’s job is to maintain the strong employee focused culture and to execute on the organization’s roadmap. The culture has been recognized by Forbes as one of the best companies to work for based on the fact that Tim looks for hard working people in small towns across the midwest and so he says, they’ve got a lot of folks who can naturally treat people well. Regarding the roadmap, Tim says it’s all about preparedness and knowing your numbers and how you’re performing so you can justify how you’re going to pay for what’s on the roadmap…which sometimes pay for themselves

Recorded at the OPEX Summit in San Diego, The Senior Director of Operational Excellence in Global Shared Services, Ted Revilock joins us and shares that whenever you initiate a operational excellence program, it’s very important that people believe that it’s driving value. He continues that there are innumerable ways to look at value including P&L savings which is easiest to calculate and the one on which everyone agrees. Others are more difficult to calculate but certainly add value to the organization such as eliminating or mitigating risk…which is much more difficult to quantify. And so you need to find an antidote such as potential penalties. Which leads to a balanced scorecard showing hard cost savings, eliminating risks and a third…increasingly important value point- improving customer experience.

Recorded at Intelligent Automation 2017, Julie Lotzer joins us as a team lead in RPA for a large enterprise. As the team makes their way into scaling RPA Julie shares that on the way in to automation, it was a top down initiative, but as they move across the organization, education needs to occur to ensure that stakeholders are comfortable with what’s happening.  Julie has done IT audit work in the past with Deloitte so she’s able to marry her business mind and IT understanding in her RPA role. And with Deloitte she learned how to sell, skills on which she’s drawing to draw the enterprise together through automation.

Recorded at CCW, Suzanne Henricksen joins us and shares that although she’s been on the west coast for quite some time, she’s an east coaster at heart. Early on in her career she focused on earning respect through actions. After an early job in debt collections and an internship in Napa Valley, a former classmate came back and recruited her to Clorox. While the company was an explicit cultural fit, Suzanne began with the brands Armor All and STP- which were not personal fits...but by working wiht them she learned that she loved market research. Along the way she realized that she loved managing people too. Which led to an opportunity to run customer service; the CEO wanted to know how the company could get value out of the call center and Suzanne obliged.

Irena Stropnik Director and Team Lead for Optimization for Scotia Bank joins and shares that Her primary focus is around Lean. When she thinks about optimization she says it’s focusing on sizing the organization correctly, ensuring that the enterprise is working efficiently, delivering value to customers and of course constantly thinking about continuous improvement. While Irena says that Lean isn’t about technology, she and the team work closely with internal and external technology partners as digitalization and robotics are big parts of the efficiency solution. She did initially need to turn things upside down, a role for which she was well suited as she was coming from shared services. And she was perfectly suited for shared services as she was displaced from her very first position shortly after her start.

Recorded at Intelligent Automation 2017, Seth Fargen joins us and shares that directly after 9/11, the TSA was created from scratch and Seth and his team, as an existing shared service center, were asked to come in and set up TSA's financial systems and processes. And now his Coast Guard team is on an automation journey to optimize their 1,300 internal processes that make up a day’s work. Seth feels that simply through efficiencies, the US government spending deficit could be totally eliminated. His commercial colleagues tell him they're seeing 30-70% savings through automation. So in 2016 the Federal government brought in 3.3T but spent 3.9- a difference of $587B. Apply the automation audit to spending and you’ve got yourself a surplus.

Recorded at CCW, Hui Wu-Curtis joins us and shares that while she grew up in Phoenix, she and her family came to the US from Taiwan when she was 5 and at the time she didn’t know any english. She changed that in under two years and was good to go in 2nd grade. Her parents were completely focused on education so if she didn’t have homework, she was expected to create homework. After college she took an early part time job at a call center. Left and came back a few years later as a supervisor at a different contact center. Having experienced the front lines she let folks know that she understood that the work was incredibly challenging. Her initial advice was to be dependable and stay enthusiastic. And based on her experience over the years she says managing a contact center is like changing a tire on a moving car. It’s not gonna to stop.