SSONext

SSONext

By SSONBusiness
Download on the App Store

SSONext episodes

  • Ep.59: Chris Bevacqua, GE

    The GM of Commercial GE Operations, Chris Bevacqua joins us and shares that originally he was a sales guy who was asking a lot of questions about shared services. So many in fact, that he was put in charge. From there he dove in on intelligent automation. Realizing that a client was on-boarded over 400 times, he and the team chose on-boarding for a first project. They automated 80% of process saving FTE’s who have been up-skilled to high-end triage. Mark him down for not only cutting cost but adding value to the organization as well as the customer. As a thank you for sponsoring the SSON Onsite Podcast Studio, Ian Barkin & AJ Hanna from Symphony join us to kick off the episode. 

    31 min
  • Ep.58: Sreeharsha Upadhyayula

    Recorded at Intelligent Automation with clicking and clacking behind us, Sree harsha Upa dhyay yula begins by quoting William Gibson, the science fiction writer, with “the future is here, it’s just that it’s not evenly distributed." As the world wide web and new media went from being bright shiny objects to simply part of the way we do business, Sree notes that, that’s precisely where we are with intelligent automation. Rather than a bright shiny object, businesses are now asking how does this make me smarter about my business, how does this get me closer to the customer, how does this truly help me solve a customers problem? These next few years as Sree sees it are about test and learn.

    45 min
  • Ep.57: Richie Daigle, Coca-Cola Refreshments
    From Coca Cola Refreshments Richie Dangle joins us and shares how the organizations business transformation has led to the opportunity for intelligent automation. He notes that “you need the process subject matter experts to help you define the processes, help you test the processes once they've been developed. This re-franchising effort has really consumed a lot of that critical resource.” Understanding their mainframe application Richie and his team had to take into account some of what the target systems were automating and which software vendors could accommodate those target systems and that were good at automation. Moving forward the team wanted to maintain tight control over the development standards, and the delivery methodology. "We wanted to get that done right, stood upright to begin with before we started to federate."
    27 min
  • Ep.56: Lee Coulter
    Lee Coulter returns to provide an update. He discusses anthropomorphization which he calls human bot harmony. He shares his thoughts on the fact that folks are beginning to understand that intelligent automation is really just business process transformation 101 and change management. And he notes that the leaders will separate themselves by where they target their change management. And recently he shares that he's been hearing about hours of capacity returning to the business. And finally Lee shares somewhat ominously one way or another we're going to find out whether we've created utopia or dystopia.
    45 min
  • Ep.55: Brandon Halbert, Campbell Soup Co.
    The Director Operations & Continuous Improvement at Campbell Soup Company, Brandon Halbert joins us and shares that he always knew that he had a process mindset. He was very interested in Six Sigma and Lean and he found the points on his career trajectory showcasing process improvement. He found himself consistently asking what are we doing, how are we doing it and what are the processes needed to get it done. Due to that, he notes that most of his jobs have been colleagues saying “let’s get Brandon to do this” which has served him well over his 18 year career at Campbell’s. On top of all this, with a computer science focus in college, technology makes sense to him which combined with process improvement has him perfectly suited for Intelligent Automation.
    27 min
  • Ep.54: Philip Woodburn, Schneider Electric
    Philip Woodburn joins us and starts off by providing an overview of the structure of the team: "Four or five years ago we started moving the basic transactional finance, payment of vendors, cash application for customers, down to Monterey but we kept what called the competency centerpiece all around financial reporting and  financial closing. We've kept that team. It's not a big team, about 30 people. So it's a small portion of what we do globally, but very close to our business leaders up in North America so that we can keep the engagement with the business. We are a French group, but US actually is our biggest country globally. The Philippines was a base for us actually, both for manufacturing as well as services over the last eight years. Actually it's a very large call center particularly for our US market because Filipinos speak a lot of English. We built on that and we expanded that as a finance hub for the Eastern part of Asia and for the Pacific to give a little bit of proximity to the customers in that region. We're now starting to see a little bit more synergy between what we do in the Philippines and India on an Asia-Pacific basis, and we're clubbing together more of those operations in that particular geography today. But that's also, as you imagine, a long way away from Europe on the East side of the world. Malaysia is more of a hub for HR for Southeast Asia. But China definitely is an important base for us. China is our second largest country globally. We have a very large operation both in terms of industry, in terms of what we produce, as well as what we sell to the Chinese market and it's probably our fastest growing global market today, and we have a big team in China for Chinese speaking part of the world."
    36 min
  • Ep.53: Maria Grocz, BT

    BT’s Head of HR CEE & Russia, Maria Grocz joins us and shares the history of the shared services center in Hungary. "10 years ago we started with a finance shared service center. It was a top down decision to set up a center in Hungary. We started in Budapest because this is the capital. It's relatively easy to find people. But due to the other reason we wanted to have a second office in Hungary in a countryside. Just to have two locations in Hungary to find candidates from other countries as well like Romania, Ukraine, because we're close to the border. First we had to prove that the Hungarian employees are not only talented but good ones as well. They can perform and they can serve the customers as well as any other countries. So when we proved that then other business units moved to Hungary. Now we have about 20 different business units in the shared service center."

    29 min
  • Ep.52: Luis Suarez, UNICEF

    UNICEF’s Budapest Global Shared Service Center's Chief Service Quality Management Luis Suarez joins us. He notes that he and the organization benchmark against the private sector. Luis shares that’s the comparison, the organization is still unique: "I remember one time, out of all the events, we had a group of nationals that went to accompany a convoy that was delivering supplies for children. The convoy was stopped by IS and they were taken, the national staff. They were taken, kept for about eight hours or so. One of the guys, when he came back, they asked him, "How was your experience?" He said, "It was very difficult but I'm happy I'm doing it, and I'll do it again, because if I don't do it, who else will?" So that was his spirit."

    35 min
  • Ep.51: Herve Hachet, Amer Sports

    From Amer Sports, Herve Hachet joins us, shares his background and how he’s changed since coming to Krakow. His first three years was focused mainly on managing a team and setting up the capabilities to build up the retention ground and operational pillars. Now the center, after five years, is stabilized. He’s now focused on process, continuous improvement and recently, automation. He also takes us through the Amer Sports change committee. It's a body who  meets every month with 80 people from around the world where the shared services team proposes changes, specifically process changes and organization changes. Generally, there are two or three changes per month. 

    26 min
  • Ep.50: Stephen Caufield, Dell Bratislava
    From Dell Bratislava, Stephen Cauflield joins us and shares the 15 year journey growing from one basic service for one country to over a thousand people servicing Europe. He shares that the Eastern European work ethic is a very strong with very strong technical skills, especially in finance which it lends itself very well to process. Stephen shares that "there's a very high premium placed on getting the best results you can get. And that's one of the great things about kind of hiring people in this part of Europe. They bring that into the work place. There's a huge pride in being successful, and I don't think they need a manager to tell them they need to be successful for us to feel good. They need it themselves for themselves to feel good."
    29 min

About SSONext

From the publisher's feed

Examining simplification, standardization & centralization to create value.