B2BiQ

Theo Rose joins us and shares his thought that the rhetoric around the retail apocalypse is overblown. Rather than having a sense of doom and gloom he’s leaning in to this time of massive transformation. Recorded at OPEX Summit in San Diego, Theo notes that a question being asked was how did we get to where we are today? The response was a recognition that the industry has moved away from the centrifugal force of understanding what the customer wants and finding a way to deliver it to them. That fundamental truth dovetails with the fact that retailers have not delivered on delighting customers. And so ease of shop has become the definitive delightful customer experience. Which means that internal process needs to be rebuilt to ensure behavior is aligned to optimizing the customer experience.

Recorded at SSOW Canada, Vineet Guliani joins us and shares he wanted to be a mechanical engineer because he could look at machines and know inherently what was ‘going on’ in his words. Flash forward to 2014, Vineet was brought in to D+H to build a global capability and ultimately to build the global shared services organization. And now with the merger of Misys and D+H, newly minted Finastra has become the third largest financial services technology company in the world. Vineet draws on his experience working globally with Tata Consultancy as well as his time at Citi managing large teams. His job as he sees it is to understand if the team is thinking right. Are they following design principles? Is the design thinking in the right place? Is the business getting the value that’s meant to be delivered?

Recorded at Intelligent Automation Chicago which is his hometown.  Henry Lyles joins us as the Director of Global Business Services in Continuous Improvement, Data Excellence & Automation for McDonald’s. He was originally an accountant by trade but based on the monotony, Henry found a new love in programming. Recognizing his accounting mind and technical acumen, he’s been and still is a liaison between the business and IT. Which is of course a perfect background for intelligent automation. On RPA, a little while back his boss asked him to figure out how the technology could work for shared services. And he’s been working on it ever since with results and benefit to the enterprise. 

Peter Guber joins us and shares his experience being a film producer with the credits of Rainman, Batman, Five Easy Pieces, Easy Rider & Midnight Express among many others...as well as a professional sports team owner of the Golden State Warriors and Los Angeles Dodgers among others. He notes the difference of a passenger customer vs. a participant customer. For a passenger customer- you have knowledge of the rules and context. For a participant customer the content is different because that customer makes a difference in the outcome. He notes that no matter what your function in an organization, you’re building a relationship with the the customer, not a transaction. As far as serendipity, any company that was there on the Wednesday that Peter interviewed could have had him and it just so happened to be Columbia Pictures. 

Recorded at Intelligent Automation Chicago, the Director of Royalties and content operations for Microsoft, Rohit Amberker joins us and shares that it’s his team that pays the royalties on any intellectual property that’s licensed or sold by the company which is about $4B per year. He came to royalties from cloud and before that he was in the online services business. Based on his 10 years of experience at the organization, he notes that the focus of the company is productivity which allows for the aperture of the mission to be wide. It’s that mindset he brings to automation. And so he shares the happy path which he’s discovering.

Susanne Skaarup joins and and shares that she got the title as Head of robotics at Danske Bank when the company established a center of excellence in February of 2016. The bank realized that they needed to invest in RPA in autumn of 2015. They could see huge potential in the new technology and that they could do process improvements in areas where normally one would say that there was no business case to do traditional IT. Whereas six weeks is the going prognostication for bot implementation, Susanne and her team are seeing that adoption more at 10 to 12 weeks which is still far faster of course than past projects. Regarding program governance, Susanne discusses the benefits of a centralized model versus decentralized model vs. something in between…which is what she’s got.

Recorded at SSOW Manchester, Lars Hölzer joins us as the Head of Global Shared Services at thyssenkrupp. The organization started with Shared services three and a half years ago and now have four functions finance, HR, IT and real estate. There’s a clear distinction of course between what process is kept in the businesses vs. what goes to the shared service organization. Globally they’ve got four centers- one in Germany for dedicated German HR services, one in Poland for Finance, HR, IT and Real Estate for Germany and the US, one in India for IT processes and IT services. And one in Brazil to meet language requirements in the local market. And they’re looking to place a center in China. Lars takes us through his background and further detail on how it all works at thyssenkrupp.

Recorded at Intelligent Automation in Chicago, Kelly Switt joins us as a native Chicagoan who was always a bit of an activist. She’s been told that her nickname is Mako Shark due to the fact that she’s always moving. Kelly was running the six sigma lean group for Citi of course consistently looking at how to improve operations. She had done some automation work at both Bank of America and HSBC and she's spent the past 4 years selling automation as a concept internally. The team began by focusing on data quality and analytics in order to drive more process improvement. That gave the team runway for management to have buy in. And finally last year, with no stones left unturned, Kelly and the team dove in on true intelligent automation.