Pex Network | Process Excellence Network

Howard Blackith lays out the transformation process in improving patient care. "You have to build levers to make change. And if you're talking about change across the health system, you're talking about change across a very large number of elements with a lot of stakeholders. It's about ultimately liberating an awful lot of cash in the system to put towards front-line patient care, so everybody gets why we're doing it. But nevertheless, everybody's got their own view on life, they've got their own pressures. So we want to make kind of large-scale change, you have to find the thing that appeals to the vast majority and then find the right levers to do it."

Marie Helen joins us and shares distinctions within her industry: "In an airline you have two major indicators of success. One is about customer satisfaction and we are using the Net Promoters Score. The other one is about operational excellence and it is punctuality, basically. Punctuality is something quite difficult to achieve because there are lots of different actors that contribute to having a plane depart on time. You should really be at the gate before departure hour minus twenty minutes. Otherwise it might not be possible really to let you in. Okay. Why is that? It's each of the actors along the line have specific targets to meet. If one delays the whole process by let's say two minutes, it may not sound like a lot, but of course the plane may be delayed a lot more because it has missed its slot." 

Fabrice Etcheverry joins us and takes us through how GBS is set at Solvay. They call it "Solvay Business Services. Which is a platform that we group in the center of expertise. All the transactional and administrative activities for which the GBUs, global business units have no added value to perform. They rely on this platform, this internal platform."

The inimitable Tony Saldanha who might be best known as Procter & Gamble’s VP of IT & Global Business Services joins us and shares that his job title means that he’s the leader of next generation services. His goal is to come up with disruptive information technology products that will be used by global GBS units beyond P&G. He works with large IT companies, venture capitalists and startups. Tony notes that we’re in the midst of the fourth industrial revolution and that digital transformation should be your business strategy.

Naked Wines' @LauraEvans on the organization's take on process excellence and how she fits, "my role was doing financial planning and analysis. So that means being involved in budgeting, forecasting, measuring the performance, and Help setting the strategy. So it was a really nice way to end up getting into the nitty-gritty of how a business actually works as opposed to viewing it from the outside."

On "modernizing all of our customer service operations in stations particularly, looking at our train service, looking at maintenance, looking at a lot of our employment practices, looking at centralizing some of our facilities, looking at how technology applies to all of that," Simon Williams

Martin Van Leeuwan joins us and shares his thoughts on how IT can best work with business. "As a dispassionate IT guy, how do you get everybody's mind back onto the uniform goal that we both have? How do you work through that, I guess? Well, transparency is normally what is the key, because you need to open up the reasons why you do things, and you need to understand why it is."

Nigel Leppitt joins us and shares that it's tough to ensure process excellence during traditional cycles. But Nigel has been tasked with doing so in a completely new business model and returning the business to profit. With cost considerations being hyper-sensitive, Nigel and the team needed to decide whether to buy platforms or build their own. They decided to build which meant two years of design and development which Nigel preferred to building his organization around the platform.

With a rich history in corporate enterprise that stretches back to when managing memory was the key issue of the day, Vijay Bhuavanagiri joins us and shares historically "problems that we were trying to solve in the engineering world were numerical analysis problems, so we had to solve them through the metrics analysis. That required a lot of managing the memory type of thing.” It continued through building “management systems to manage all devices, or IP, voice and  video streaming.” And right up to chjinging business models. “ Our enterprise architecture practice survives module integration because of maturity.” Which leads to his current philosophy and key questions he asks, "you need to have an architecture that can be deployed globally. And also take care of the local constraints like the regulations and other compliance things. And do the customer-centric things. So how do you put that together? What is the architecture? How do you make it happen? What are the shared services that need to be there?"

Ken Goldman joins us and puts on a clinic for business, life, geopolitics and more. He discusses his time as CFO for Yahoo during the Marissa Mayer years. He shares his thoughts on why things were the way they were - and turned out the way they did. When the team had to fix everything from product to Board composition- the first thing they looked at was culture. In the grand scheme of things, he discusses AI and the evolution of technology and it's affect on the future of work. He discusses a pillar of each enterprise being good citizenship to a community. He discusses the evolution of balance sheets for global corporations over the past 40 years. And Ken shares his evolution perception of economics- "unfortunately economics is not perfect." 

Six Sigma Black Belt, Vice President at Aetna, Diane Lopes joins us and shares that she and her team are pivoting from an initiatives-focused program to a holistic system of lean management. They're calling it a business system to ensure that up and down the organization, each aspect of the enterprise feels accountable. Diane and her team want for everyone, everyday to be engaged in problem solving. It represents a cultural change to each person feeling that they must deliver value to the customer.

Ken Telfort joins us and shares that success and results open peoples eyes to the truth. He further shares that transformation is led by results and success of continuous improvement. Finding the problems and solutions to match and showcasing that problems are being solved through visual management is key. Involving front line employees in the transformation process is key. And understanding that all problems aren’t born equal is key. Those keys lead Ken to the Rule of Three which is- “let’s focus on only three key metrics and deliver."

Joining us from PEX Europe in the Netherlands, Trasavia COO Petra De Ruiter joins us and shares that the company has been in business for 50 years due to their focus on customer experience and operational excellence. They understand that no matter what price the consumer pays, they want a seamless travel experience. While Petra and her team have utilized traditional process excellence methodologies, they were interested in structural improvements which would bring the enterprise into the world of tomorrow. And so while looking at the people, the culture and the structure, Petra set a north star for her vision, but left it somewhat opaque to ensure that it was Agile. 

An Lommers joins us and shares that the ASML business strategy is geometric in nature. “We set this pyramid as our strategy, and we divided our pyramid in three layers. And the lower layer is our highway, so we say we have to make an automated platform, being our highway, which can be complicated, but that highway is needed to go to the second layer. And the second layer is the layer of strong analytical people. And the third layer on top are their business partners, so basically the business partners are finance people that are business partners to the business. And that's how we drive the organization, so it doesn't matter where you were, you always have to adhere to the pyramid.” An notes that the organization is in the midst of a shift from a start-up culture which brought the enterprise to world leadership to a process organization, which is a culture shock. They have a lot of innovative engineers in that, so you need to move the organization. So we have them as integrated system and we also said, 'If yo

Global Head of Process Excellence at Uber, Martin Rowlson joins us from PEX Europe where he shares that the region comprises 20% of the volume for the organization but 70% of the complexity. Based on the pace of change within the industry and the rate of growth at his organization, Martin's goal is to identify best practice, align best practice and build on best practices. Defining processes can’t take two weeks because "that process may have gone…literally gone."

From Allied Irish Banks, Head of Process Improvement and Customer Services Lorraine Duffy joins us to take us through the two-and-a-half year brand reinvention of everything from the operations manufacturing side through customer services with an ambition to support and serve customers digitally. The output was going from having 90 different ways to measure work, settling on one language. From there Lorraine and the team set sights on buckets of processes for automation. She shares that heavy training and development, a lean network and a reliance on change agents were the keys to success.

In-house adidas group continuous improvement expert Jitesh Ramachandran joins us and shares that he’s got 20 years of experience in manufacturing. His original job was to go to each and every supplier to train them and coach them on lean methodology principals with the motive of improving the quality cost and delivery of those suppliers. He worked his way up at his initial company and over to adidas and then worked his way up in adidas and over the HQ in Germany where he was told by the CFO to improve engagement and effectiveness and efficiency will follow. Jitesh brings us through his entire process of making adidas process excellent. 

Recorded at PEX Europe, the Director of Spark (lean transformation and Sustainability at BBC, Adrian Ruth joins us to share that four years on the organization’s transformation program called Spark program is going strong. His remit is to ensure that the “phenomenal” and “very, very successful” organization meets the challenges coming at them on every front- changing audience demands, exponentially multiplying competition, etc. Adrian notes that most folks at the BBC are like him- they joined the organization because they’re passionate about the organization and they really want to delivery the best possible output on every platform and every genre to the audience.

Shell’s Global Head of CI Downstream, Michael Van Noort joins us and shares that his key focuses are the overall business goals and determining if his team is connected to those priorities. He ensures his team is helping the business better meet the consumer’s needs in a safe way while ensuring that CI is streamlined to those goals as opposed to being a goal in and of itself. That approach has “cemented” credibility with senior leaders because CI and Excellence are tied to efforts around what matters most to the organization, KPIs, etc. And so, Michiel has embedded operational excellence into the culture, with an 'everybody, every day’ focus. CI is informing the organization of opportunities while maintaining critical mass ensuring a 'continuity of the journey.'

Sebastian Antony joins us and shares that he and the organization look at process through a customer lens. He notes that if you say you’re customer-centric, that’s all well and good, but you’ve got to prove it in your actions. Way back when he started in six sigma for Barclay’s he was a team of one. He realized that there was a desire in the company to do something about efficiency and continuous improvement and he ran with it. He began by simply observing processes, creating relationships and in four to six months he knew the business operations and how to build operational excellence within the inherent structure.