At the 2022 edition of the North American Manufacturing Excellence Summit series held April 25-27 in Chicago, we spoke with René Buck, the Founder and CEO of BCI Global. While supply chain disruptions are nothing new, the frequency and scale of supply chain disruptions has accelerated in recent years, and there is no sign of things slowing down. How should supply chain executives rethink their existing systems? What does risk management look like in a world with so many risks? How should people make informed decisions in a timely manner? Is there a way to simulate different options to find the optimal solution without trial and error?

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BCI Global is a specialized consultancy and leader in developing comprehensive, practical manufacturing and supply chain footprint strategies as well as selecting sites worldwide for new operations in the US; in Europe, Middle East and Africa; and in the Asia Pacific region (including China and India). In the last 36+ years BCI has supported more than 1,000 clients. Our location strategy work combines proven frameworks with in-depth global knowledge of manufacturing hotspots, detailed labor analytics, cost factors, qualitative factors, incentives and risks. Supply chain advice ranges from transformation of supply chains, network design, COEs, Control Towers, procurement of logistics services, to location strategy for warehousing, go-to-market strategies into new markets, risk & resilience assessment. BCI Global is ISO-9001 certified, Llamasoft certified partner and recognized on Forbes Best Management Consultants list for the third year in a row.

www.bciglobal.com

At the 2022 edition of the North American Manufacturing Excellence Summit series held April 25-27 in Chicago, we spoke with Willem Sundblad of Oden Technologies. We have had the pleasure of interviewing Willem before for this podcast, and in this interview we return to the challenges companies face as they try to find success in their Digital Transformations. Why do so many organizations struggle to find ROI? What do the companies that are finding success have in common?

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Oden is a manufacturing analytics platform that helps manufacturers find the best actions to take and enables them to take those actions faster to improve operations. Oden leverages existing automation, quality, and business data to highlight areas for process improvement and recommends changes to process settings to improve performance and quality. Utilizing predictive analytics, Oden helps operations maintain ideal performance and avoid producing scrap. With a pre-built platform and machine learning models, Oden provides ROI to customers in under 60 days and can be scaled across a global enterprise in 12 months.

oden.io

In this episode we discuss DEIB in the workforce. Where are we? Where should we be? How is Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging evolving in corporate culture, and what are some of the tools and tactics leaders can use to drive positive change?

Helping us have that conversation are Chris Studer and Marley Bowen, the executive directors of the Get REAL Movement, a Canadian non-profit focused on combatting 2SLGBTQ+ discrimination, racism, and bullying that offer a variety of different educational Workshop modules, and provide leadership development that aims to break down prejudice, promote unity, and foster compassion in our world.

www.thegetrealmovement.com

At the 2022 edition of the Pharma Manufacturing World Summit series held March 29-30 in Boston, MA, we spoke with Jack Garvey, the CEO of Compliance Architects. Jack is a long-time supporter of Executive Platforms' pharmaceutical manufacturing series who has co-chaired many of our events on content related to Quality and Risk, and in this interview we explored in detail three top-of-mind challenges and opportunities the industry is facing today: Talent and the future of Talent; the FDA's return to pre-pandemic practices, and developing best practices as part of the growing necessity of working with CMOs and CDMOs.

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Jack Garvey is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Compliance Architects, a leading consulting and advisory firm specializing in innovative quality and compliance solutions for FDA-regulated manufacturers. Jack possesses over 30 years of hands-on technical, operational, quality, regulatory and legal experience at top-performing life science companies including Johnson & Johnson, C.R. Bard, Ciba-Geigy, BASF Corporation and Ayerst Laboratories. As both a chemical engineer and practicing attorney, Jack possesses the legal, regulatory, quality and compliance expertise that allows him to excel at the complex interplay of science, law and business.

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Compliance Architects LLC delivers high-value compliance, quality, and regulatory consulting services to companies directly regulated by the U.S. FDA and other global regulatory authorities. With capabilities ranging from quality systems implementations to audits, inspection readiness, enforcement remediation, and outsourced compliance services, Compliance Architects LLC has the experience, expertise, and delivery capability to significantly improve your company’s business outcomes. Jack Garvey is CA’s founder and CEO, a chemical engineer and a practicing regulatory attorney, and has spent his entire career helping companies navigate the challenges at the intersections of science, engineering, business, and law.

www.compliancearchitects.com

At the 2021 edition of the North American HR Executive Summit series held December 6-8 in Orlando, FL, we spoke with Karlo Bustos of Board about how HR professionals can apply technology to help them better address the challenges of workforce planning. The interview took place shortly after Karlo gave a workshop presentation on the topic where he made extensive reference to H&M's experience applying new tools to...

• Enabling better business decisions with real-time visibility into headcount, salaries, and compensation
• Using modeling to decrease attrition, improve retention, identify gaps, and test the impact of workforce changes
• Integrating finance, operations, and sales planning to accelerate HR decision-making
• Increasing agility in the office of HR while controlling headcount and spending

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Karlo Bustos
VP, Professional Services
Board Americas, Inc.

Karlo is a seasoned strategy, finance and consulting leader bringing a combination of professional services and industry experience across finance, business analytics, product management, and regulatory/strategic transformation. Karlo’s core expertise lies in large scale transformation projects delivering successful change and improved enterprise value to global organizations through; strategic planning and execution, financial planning and analysis, process re-engineering, and market/competitive analysis. These capabilities have been accumulated by supporting his teams successfully delivering change to companies through various business contexts including mergers, acquisitions, divestitures, start-up, evolution and other organic/inorganic cycles and events.

He has successfully deployed large scale technology implementations both as a customer and as a consultant. In addition, Karlo spent 7+ years leading his own management consulting firm partnering with large financial services firms at the senior leader/executive level to develop and deliver transformational and analytical solutions.

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Board is the #1 decision-making platform.

Founded in 1994, Board International has enabled people from more than 3,000 companies worldwide to have a transformative impact on their business by rapidly deploy Business Intelligence, Corporate Performance Management, and Predictive Analytics applications on a single unified platform. Board allows companies to intuitively play and create with data to produce a single, accurate, and complete view of business information, gain actionable insights, and achieve full control of performance across the entire organization. Thanks to the Board platform, global enterprises such as Coca-Cola, DHL, KPMG, Puma, Siemens, and ZF Group have deployed end-to-end decision-making applications at a fraction of the time and cost associated with traditional solutions.

Board International has 26 offices around the world and a global reseller network and has been implemented in over 100 countries.

www.board.com/en

At the 2021 edition of the the North American HR Executive Summit series held December 6-8 in Orlando, FL, we spoke with John Thomas, Chief Data Officer of Benefitfocus, about how Data Analytics can be brought to bear on any number of tasks, processes, and challenges HR professionals deal with on a daily basis. How will these new tools change the way Human Resources works? What should senior leaders be thinking about as they examine their options and get up to speed on these new capabilities.

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John leads Benefitfocus’ data strategy, ensuring that data is used to make products smarter and more predictive and to help employees, brokers and carriers in the benefits ecosystem make more informed, data-based decisions. He works closely with Benefitfocus’ technology organization to define and deliver new data-driven applications. He and his team of data scientists and business intelligence analysts are evolving the way Benefitfocus uses data to delight customers and strengthen the benefits technology platform. Before joining Benefitfocus, John was executive vice president of data science at Red Ventures and launched their data practice.   John earned his BS in Mathematics and Computer at Gettysburg College and his MS and PhD in Computer Science from Dartmouth College.  He currently serves as president of the Analytics & Big Data Society and has been recorgnized as one of Charlotte Business Journal’s 40 Under 40. 

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Benefitfocus (NASDAQ: BNFT) unifies the entire benefits industry through innovative technology solutions that bring efficiency, cost savings and simplicity to employee benefits administration. Our powerful cloud-based software, data-driven insights and thoughtfully designed services help employers, insurance brokers, health plans and suppliers address the complexity of benefits enrollment and engagement, while bringing easier access to health, wealth and lifestyle products through a world-class benefits experience. Our mission is simple: to improve lives with benefits.

www.benefitfocus.com

At the 2021 edition of the the North American HR Executive Summit series held December 6-8 in Orlando, FL, we spoke with Julie LaRuffa, a Senior Enterprise Account Executive with SmartRecruiters, about how organizations are addressing the challenges of the Great Recession through a range of HR technologies to help them hold onto the talent they have, and also attract the people they need to grow and succeed in both a tough labor market and an evolving business landscape.

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Julie LaRuffa, MBA, is a 24-year HR Technology veteran with a passion for uncovering ways to help her clients solve problems in an ever-changing world. She lives with her husband and golden retriever in Newburyport MA.

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SmartRecruiters

Today, we provide financial education and personal financial coaching as an employee benefit to over half a million employees. Employees engage with our certified coaches through live weekly workshops and 1:1 coaching sessions, provided 7 days a week. Employees engage with our platform by using financial planning tools, quizzes, short videos and plain language articles.

Organizations like Home Depot, GoDaddy, and Crocs choose SmartPath to help attract and retain talent, address 401(k) loans, inform how employees could retire earlier, bolster their DE&I initiative, and reduce the financial stress of their employee population.

As a global leader in enterprise recruitment software, SmartRecruiters offers a cloud-based global Talent Acquisition Suite that allows teams to attract, select, and hire the best talent. 4,000 companies worldwide rely on SmartRecruiters to achieve hiring success—including brands like Bosch, LinkedIn, Skechers, and Visa—using recruitment marketing, CRM, AI, ATS, and a marketplace of 600+ connected vendors all within one scalable platform.

True to its mission of connecting people to jobs at scale, SmartRecruiters was recognized by Forbes as one of the Best Employers in 2020. For more information, visit www.smartrecruiters.com or follow @SmartRecruiters on Twitter or LinkedIn.

At the 2021 edition of the the North American HR Executive Summit series held December 6-8 in Orlando, FL, we spoke with Emily Wilson of Qualtrics about the results of a recent survey of 14,000 HR professionals about how their organizations' employee experience has changed during the global pandemic. Based on the data, Emily has identified a number of trends and can make informed recommendations on the still forming 'New Normal of Work,' and the challenges and opportunities of the Great Resignation. 

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Emily Wilson
Product Marketing Director
Qualtrics

Emily Wilson leads the Product Marketing team at Qualtrics, where she and her talented team focus on solutions that help organizations to identify and close experience gaps so they can retain happy customers and ensure their employees are engaged and motivated.

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Qualtrics

Qualtrics, the leader in customer experience and creator of the Experience Management (XM) category, is changing the way organizations manage and improve the four core experiences of business– customer, employee, product, and brand. Over 11,000 organizations around the world are using Qualtrics to listen, understand, and take action on experience data (X-data™)–the beliefs, emotions, and intentions that tell you why things are happening, and what to do about it. The Qualtrics XM Platform™ is a system of action that helps businesses attract customers who stay longer and buy more, engage employees who build a positive culture, develop breakthrough products people love, and build a brand people are passionate about. To learn more, please visit qualtrics.com or chat live with us during the event.

www.qualtrics.com

At the 2021 edition of the the North American HR Executive Summit series held December 6-8 in Orlando, FL, we spoke with Larry Gioia and Laura Skladzinski of PwC about how the global pandemic has changed the way people work and come together. Which of these trends are short-term adjustments, and which are going to become part of the 'New Normal of Work'? How is technology enabling organizations to communicate, collaborate, and coordinate effectively and safely?

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Larry Gioia
Director, PwC Digital, Product & Service Innovation
Market Leader at PwC

For the past 12 months, Larry has been focused on the commercialization of PwC’s Check-In product offering and advising institutional leaders on their return to work/campus efforts and the value that can be realized through automatic contact tracing technology. Prior to PwC, Larry held numerous executive and founder roles as a technology entrepreneur and business advisor. Most recently, while at Diamond Management and Technology Consultants, Larry served as an advisor and strategic thinking partner to business and technology leaders across the Fortune 1000.

Laura Skladzinski
Director, PwC Digital, Product & Service Innovation
Go-To-Market Leader at PwC

Laura has been a management consultant at PwC for 10+ years, helping her clients design and lead transformational programs using digital technology. Laura’s focus is always on the customer and how to drive the best possible outcome for their wants / needs. In the last fifteen months, she has pivoted to help her clients think about how to have an exceptional employee experience - leveraging digital products to ensure that workers can feel safe, productive, and confident as they return to the workplace post-COVID19.

Laura is the Product and Innovation Market Leader for the PwC Check-In product, and has spoken with hundreds of clients about their return to workplace plans and workforce of the future strategy. Laura leads strategy and sales for Check-In for Events, helping venues and event organizers with getting back to a “new normal”. By leveraging automatic contact tracing technology, organizers can give individuals the confidence to return not just to the office but also to large in-person gatherings.

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PwC US

Check-In is a privacy-first platform used by organizations to make critical workforce decisions and bring people back together based on risk exposure. With Check-In, you can take preventative action to safeguard your people, mitigate infection risks, and manage capacity. Check-In helps organizations collect vaccine status information, use daily health screens to reduce the chance of infection, and run proximity-based automatic contact tracing to lessen the impact of a reported illness. Build trust. Protect your workforce. Alert your people. Close the information gap. Because the best trace is no trace at all.

www.pwc.com

At the 2021 edition of the the North American HR Executive Summit series held December 6-8 in Orlando, FL, we spoke with Bree Davis of Beekeeper about the importance of communicating with Top Talent to make sure they feel heard and appreciated during a tumultuous time. The Great Resignation is being driven by people reevaluating their personal and professional goals, but many of the things the want can be found in the positions they already have if employers and employees can communicate and understand one another more clearly. How should HR professionals work to better understand their workforce and improve talent retention?

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Bree Davis is an Enterprise Account Executive at Beekeeper. Her career in SaaS focuses on leveraging tools for improved workforce management and internal collaboration to positively impact the organizational performance and productivity of large companies.

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Beekeeper

Beekeeper’s mobile platform is the single point of contact for your frontline workforce. With all communications and tools in one place, Beekeeper empowers frontline employees to be more agile, more productive, and create a safer workplace.

Deskless workers can check resources and share best practices in real time. Managers can resolve issues quickly, handle non-routine work efficiently, and track team performance. Executives can increase business resilience and agility in uncertain times.

Our secure platform offers a consumer-grade employee experience at the scale you need. Integrate seamlessly with your existing systems to create the future, now.

beekeeper.io