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The Global Financial Operations Lead for Monsanto joins us from SSOW Latin America where he shares that in order to ensure customer satisfaction and drive the ability to deliver the services that the organization provides the company had to expand the organizational structure. Formerly leading all of shared services for the global enterprise, David has taken strategy while handing off day to day which means he can now focus on what’s being delivered from a data analytics perspective, reporting, customer service, additional services, training, etc. He’s focused on bringing in work from various hubs around the world to one of two shared services organizations in either Bangalore, India or St. Louis, Missouri.

Finance Delivery Lead for Latin America at ABB, Arturo Castillo joins us from SSOW Latin America where he shares that his group delivers services for all ABB companies from Mexico to Argentina including Brazil, Chile, Peru, Colombia, Ecuador and other Central American and Caribbean countries. The GBS unit is only a year and a half old. The goal is to create six GBS centers around the world servicing 110 countries. Arturo notes that top management had a clear vision of what needed to be done. They created a base team of key leaders and managers throughout Latin America to roll out GBS. It’s a mixed team with different backgrounds a different styles of management. And that team has been delivering ever since.

Rob Phillips joins us from SSOW Canada where he shares what he’s doing in Shared Services for Canadian Blood Services. The focus is on improving the customer experience, improving efficiencies and standardizing processes to deliver services. The solution has been to have a continuous improvement function as part of shared service- a distinct group with an objective of truly improving process as opposed to simply sourcing new technologies. Rob and the team looked under every rock to ensure that small details were refined into operational excellence. The bigger difference that their working towards is a cultural change in each employee feeling that they’re a part of the solution.

The Director of Business Processing Services BPO & Category Management for Manulife Dhruv Devnani joins us and shares that he sees his role as guiding the process along while supporting and getting the most value for the organization. He understands that outsourcing can be viewed as controversial especially during a moment in history where many countries across the world are engaging in protectionist rhetoric. Regarding the US, he’s watching for potential action specifically on skilled worker or H1B visas...or potentially any “Buy American” regulations. But again, Dhruv remains focused, as an outsourcing professional on getting the most value for his global organization. So it make sense to explore what makes sense from a sourcing perspective or location perspective for the organization globally.

Celestica’s Vice President of Global Business Services, Manny Paneser joins us from SSOW Canada where he shares that he truly believes in the discipline of Global Business Services. He’s trying to look at the cause and effect of processes. The traditional silos are great for creating subject matter experts within each function, but cause and effect of a many processes run across functions. So for connected processes a horizontal structure is more appropriate. Again, the definition of GBS. But what’s interesting in Manny’s case is that when GBS took over certain processes for the organization, he added humans yet saved cost. Which means that today’s world can still feature non-automated continuous improvement to achieve process excellence.

John Hopkins joins us and discusses global services process ownership. He’s decidedly from the centralized point of view. John notes that if he were starting a multi-national, global entity today, he would start by defining and assigning global services process roles and make it universally unilateral across all countries, business segments, etc. He would execute that way based on his thought that as long as you have a centralized approach to a services process you can design it and adapt to the marketplace quickly and deliver efficiencies quickly as the market or environment changes. He notes that those that aren’t with his line of thinking are seeing centralized services models going after the quick wins- which is great, but not his complete view of what should happen in centralized services.

Just under two years into automation, Jon Theuerkauf 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 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.

Race car driver, six sigma black belt and near scrum master Max Just joins us from SSOW Latin America where he shares that he quit Ford to work as a contractor for Lotus in the engineering department working with suppliers for Proton in Malaysia. He moved on to becoming the quality department for trucks in China. He began to realize that he was a fit in consultancy. He got an MBA and started as a management consultant for Warner Bros. home video in DVDs. He and the company realized the industry was dying. But it was there that he learned the importance of data integrity. He then moved to a smaller consultancy working with Coca-Cola. He was evaluating what HR processes were doing right after transformation. And from there, he took the next step directly into Coca-Cola proper.

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.