SSONext

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.

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 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?

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 SSOW Manchester, Lars Hölzer joins us as the Head of Global Shared Services at thyssenkrup. 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 thyssenkrup.

John Dickens joins us and shares his history- joining the Barclay’s management program out of school which led to five years at the Soho Square training branch where he was involved with Channel 4 in the UK in it’s first year of license. Joining banking was more of a round-about for John. He noticed that the banking model was changing so he moved on to the music industry to differentiate himself which allowed him to use banking management techniques at a company that really needed it. He focused on how the organization could be effective and efficient and drive cost out while adding value. He then joined a fast growth company where he re-engineered everything soup to nuts and found an initial shared services operation. And from there he’s had twenty years in the space.

Recorded at SSOW Manchester, Wojciech Wieronski joins us with over a decade of experience as a CFO. When asked how shared services executives should approach a CFO, he suggests to begin with a basic business principle. For instance, he feels that business transformation isn’t the goal. Making business simpler is the goal. Because simpler is more effective. More effective business means that you can focus on what really matters. And what really matters is your customers. The goal as Voichek sees it is to track back from the customer to the employee and then to the business. He’s saying start with the end in mind not the other way around.

Celebrated Author, Paco Underhill joins us to share that when he was doing research for commercial zoning issues for cities on the roof of the SeaFirst Bank building in Seattle he had an epiphany. He would do for merchants of any kind what he was doing for cities- helping them understand what customers were doing in their respective establishments and sharing what the merchants could do to improve their customer's experience. He literally wrote the book on it- “Why We Buy,” which came from an article that Malcolm Gladwell wrote about Paco for the New Yorker. Paco discusses how he goes about helping merchants with Envirosell, providing some insight on what drives customers and how that’s changed over the years. He also provides a few international case studies. And finally, we discuss his passion which is helping with homelessness through Urban Pathways.