Pex Network | Process Excellence Network

Reka Mishra is the managing director of the transformation office for the SVB Financial Group. She lays out the basics of mergers and acquisitions before diving in on operational excellence. For M&A, it is imperative to have a target operating model in place. That model must consist of four key elements: people, process, technology, and data. Change management, communication, and HR must also be involved from the onset in order to best address the concerns of the employees. When M&A happens for the sake of digital transformation, it is especially critical that the enterprise is sensitive to the human element. Reka explains how to strike the right balance in order to make the transition as smooth as possible. Mergers and acquisitions aren’t a one-and-done, and they must lead from the top. As Reka says, “It's absolutely critical to get all the executives aligned and in agreement because then you can have a very clear path forward, and then you know you're meeting everybody's expectation. And also it's h

Adrian Terry, VP of GM Financial’s OpEx function, discusses their unique approach to IT and RPA. Initially, IT had some processes they wanted to automate. From there, a pilot was developed. It soon became clear that the broader organization could benefit from similar processes, so GM onboarded their own RPA business automation talent. Now, IT and RPA have been conjoined. While each department still has their direct leadership, the “two headed monster” reports to a governance function. Next, Adrian details the execution and benefits of the pod model they’ve developed. After Adrian explains the structure, deployment, and communication aspects of the design, he talks scale. Finally, after briefly touching on some growing pains of the transformation, Adrian sums up the meticulous, thought-out execution of the pods and the future of the business. Adrian doesn’t do anything unless he does it well.

Joining us today is Kristen Workman, director of lean office transformation at Schneider Electric. While she has been with the company for over 20 years, she only recently entered her current role. In this conversation, she discusses the transition into a new department. Coming in as an outsider, Kristen has the advantage of looking at team projects through an objective lens while still maintaining the integrity of the company she knows so well. Kristen further discusses the advantages of “diversity of thought.” Next, Kristen stresses the importance of engagement across the enterprise, from the C-suite down. Without a general understanding of company processes, alignment is difficult. Kristen carried her “what works, what doesn’t” strategy into her new role, but that’s not to say she is bored with the same ol’. The continuous improvement journey never ends, as new technologies, and opportunities are ever present. Kristen shares more of her problem-solving strategies and opinions on the future of work, technol

Gary Pilacinski, director of business process improvement engineering with LA Care Health Plan, discusses the importance of cultural transformational change. From start-ups to legacy organizations, Gary stresses how critical culture is for the success of an enterprise. One common stumbling block to a successful culture change is a lack of buy-in from the C-suite. Conversely, if upper management sees a need for change but doesn’t effectively implement it, employees who have been with the organization for years—or decades, even—may get stuck in their ways. If that is the case, empowering frontline staff is key. Gary discusses ways to do just that. He also elaborates on how he is working to implement Lean and PI within his organization and how healthcare at large can approach the same issues. Hint: training the trainers is key. Change is uncomfortable. But with transparency, engagement, and most important, keeping the interests of the patient front and center, Gary believes Lean culture transformations are not o

Karen Tilstra is the co-founder of the Florida Hospital Innovation Lab. In this conversation, Karen emphasizes the intent of the Innovation Lab, which, not surprisingly, is innovation. However, the process to innovation is often overlooked. Karen describes it as a “multifaceted journey of learning, of discovery, of openness.” In other words, innovation isn’t instantaneous, nor does it happen in a silo. When a brand thinks they know what’s best for their customers—instead of interacting with those customers—it’s often the beginning of the end. Karen details Sears’ downward spiral as an example. Next, Karen questions the value of the typical enterprise growth mentality. Is “grow or die” a myth or a reality? True, meaningful innovation involves the application of certain soft skills that aren’t immediately apparent. Karen drives their importance home in this insightful, outside-of-the-box conversation.

Peter Van Den Heuval, product manager with Shell, is better known internally as Peter PI. In this conversation, he explains the origin story of his nickname, a nod to Shell’s use of OSIsoft’s PI System data infrastructure. Shell has been ahead of the data game since 1996, as they understood the long-term implications of real-time data and looked for a platform to store and analyze that data. PI fit the bill. Now, as technology and processing power has bumped data into the next frontier, Shell applies advanced analytics to the massive amount of data they’ve collected. Peter shares examples of complicated calculations they benefit from due to big data and real-time process analytics. Next, Peter explains how Shell plans to implement IoT in order to collect meaningful data for predictive analytics that leads to actionable change. Peter also explores the soft skills involved in staying passionate about data and its power. He enables Shell’s workflow the ability to take action on data by simplifying the data proce

Intel’s Steven Remsen made the cross-country trip from Portland, OR to Orlando for OPEX Week 2020. We caught up with him to discuss process mining. Steven starts out with a quick history of a few special algorithms before noting the strengths of traditional mapping methods. As a practitioner, he understands the three basic steps of process mining from the academic space: discovery, conformance, and enhancement. Steve’s science background sets him apart from some other data scientists who see the black boxes of AI as collateral. Steven looks under the hood. After all, he notes, finding an AI solution to a business problem isn’t enough—it must be the correct solution. Next, Stephen shares a multi-million-dollar solution to a bottleneck in Intel’s fabrication process that was achieved through a quick and easy process mining activity. Next, Steven drives home the backbone of any successful AI implementation: people. In order to process mine in a holistic way, as Steven says, “It’s always people, process, technolo

Joe Jordan joins us from OPEX Week in Orlando. As the director of operational excellence for Edward Jones, Joe sought inspiration from the hit TV show Shark Tank to give a platform to the innovative minds of Edward Jones. If anyone across the firm’s workflow has an idea about how to transform their part of the business, they are given the opportunity to present it to the C-suite. If the idea ultimately increases Edward Jones’s ROI, the C-suite signs of on funding the technology that bring the idea to fruition. It’s an exciting opportunity for voices across the company to be heard and is a win/win for morale and profit. Over the last year, they’ve held about 15 of these Shark Tank sessions and have signed off on 100% of them. Joe explains exactly how the process works and provides a few simple yet powerful examples, from automatic signature verification to RPA processes. Finally, Joe explains what they look for in an employee with the acronym BLT: that is, business acumen, leadership, and technology. Ultimatel

Angie Fearn comes to us from OPEX Orlando to discuss diversity of thought and its importance for enterprise. While diversity has become a loaded buzzword, Angie refocuses its compass around the way different people come with their own set of skills and capabilities. As a leader—and a human—it is natural to want to hire people who look and think like you. It takes an insightful leader to actively diversify their talent in order to fill in the gaps that exist within the leadership team and the enterprise at large. Angie explores the differences between subject matter experts and soft skill experts. Balancing the two in a way that makes sense ensures that employees are ready for the future of work, while still bringing their current expertise into the role. Angie offers several in-depth examples of transformation done right, what the future of the workforce looks like, and the role AI plays in it all.

Dmitri Popov, global service management lead for Mann + Hummel Group, joins us today to discuss scaling RPA. Dmitri himself admits that such a process is painful, in part because of the few successful enterprise examples for which to model after. Dmitri points to IBM as a company who has done it well. Next, Dmitri discusses how to leverage shared services in the most efficient way, exemplifying R&D and certain purchasing aspects. One of the most difficult components of implementing RPA across the workflow is acceptance and adherence. Dmitri doesn’t mince words when it comes to what it takes in a person—not just an enterprise—to accept change, no matter how positive that change may ultimately be.

In this episode, Kai-Eberhard Lueg, Global Business Solutions expert with Siemens, discusses the future of automation. Specifically, commerce is experiencing a new type of customer expectation that involves an increase in personalization and speed. While these two concepts seem counterintuitive, digitalization and shared services make it possible. Digitization is only as effective as the foundation it was built on, however, so Mr. Lueg details the best way to move forward on firm ground. Finally, Mr. Lueg emphasizes the importance of human talent. By building a culture of curiosity and innovation, both employees and enterprise benefit from the expectation and execution of upskilling and reskilling with an emphasis on technical skills.

Dr. Ayanna Howard is a chair of the School of Interactive computing at Georgia Tech, an academic, and a startup founder. While her talents are as vast as her pursuits, she sums up their relation as interactive computing. In her words, “Interactive computing is really this theme that the human is center to everything that we do when we think about computing and artificial intelligence.” Dr. Howard pursues interactive computing for the greater good, including robotics in healthcare and education. She also discusses ethics in computing, including privacy and security.

NASA’s Pam Wolfe joins us to discuss their RPA journey, which started over two years ago in their Shared Services Center. Establishing RPA governance across NASA has taken time, strategy, and strong support across the agency. In many ways, NASA’s move to RPA is very similar to the typical enterprise, but let’s not forget—NASA sends people to space. In fact, a recent decision was made to send astronauts to the moon and Mars by 2024. In order to reach their goals, NASA went through a cultural and digital transformation shift that received a high level of support from the top—which Pam defines as a necessity. Naturally, governance and security is of the utmost importance during this transformation. Pam shares some astonishing numbers in regard to their progress while laying out a path for the lay-enterprise, if you will, to accomplish similar workflow evolutions.

Robert Welborn joins us again for the second part of autonomous vehicle myths. During this discussion, Robert compares the vast and critical differences between the capabilities of today’s math and the necessity of developing tomorrow’s math before fully autonomous vehicles are a safe, mainstream option. He parses out the weakness in today’s autonomous vehicles. For example, converting visual information into digital information and then trying to extract features from that before making a decision off of those inputs. As one could imagine, and as Robert so vividly depicts, there are issues—namely safety—in expecting a computing system to respond quickly and correctly to the infinite numbers of inputs it may receive. Robert closes the discussion with a few viable ways of progressing the technology.

Deepak Subbarao joins us again, this time, to discuss unstructured data.  The recent explosion in technology inputs has raised the bar for customer expectations. They want more, and they want it now. Requests are coming via phone calls, social media, emails, etc. The product of this feedback is unstructured data. Deepak goes in depth on three actionable steps to take in order to leverage the power of unstructured data: know your data, know the sources of your data, and prepare your data. Next, Deepak discusses the importance of defining outcomes for your data, as opposed to cramming data into an algorithm and receiving an output that has no use case. As Deepak reiterates throughout the conversation, context is key.

Hendrik Boehmer is the People Experience & Operations Lead for Unilever. While such a title is a few syllables longer than its counterpart, Hendrik explains that Unilever’s HR transformation involved a complete reimagination of the role. First, hand-picked roles that were once outsourced were brought back in house in order to achieve HR’s new goal: more simple, more impact, and more human. What this entails is increasing automation and the role of human talent simultaneously. While it sounds contradictive, Hendrik details the logistics and execution in full. As with any digital transformation, reskilling and security must be addressed. Unilever has a system in place for both, which Hendrik describes next. Finally, Hendrik mulls over this universal truth and what it’s meant for his career and enterprise at large: the only constant is change.

Martin Felder is the head process automation center at Linde Global Services. He discusses his role with Linde as well as their journey into RPA. Instead of taking the typical low-hanging-fruit approach, Martin tackled Linde’s impending future when deciding where to implement RPA first. He explains the whys and hows of this, including how he got the C-suite to sign off—and fund—such a huge initiative. As Linde is a global enterprise, Michael next discusses the pain points, mistakes, and happy accidents that occurred during the pilot and roll-out of RPA solutions. Perhaps most important, Martin wraps up with his thoughts on human talent, relationships, and how to move into the future of automation by appreciating the people side of things.

AI strategist for the Volvo Group, Jair Riberio, discusses Volvo’s decision to develop the AI and machine learning Center of Excellence. His interest in AI stems from his time at IBM, which he sentimentally outlines before moving on. Next, Jair talks about the difference between a company who is solely IT-based and a company like Volvo who is implementing those technologies into a product that isn’t inherently tech. As reliability and safety is and has always been Volvo’s number one concern, Jair explains how technology and regulations play into the modern innovations at Volvo. Finally, Jair closes with his thoughts on fully autonomous vehicles and what it means for our future.

Joining us again is Tony Saldanha, president of Transformant, to discuss the role of the CIO and IT in organization transformation. Tony first talks about the legacy role of the CIO and whether or not it’s still relevant. Traditionally, CIOs have excelled at their number one task: scaling. However, with Industry 4.0 on the horizon, scaling is replaced by transformation. Next, Tony outlines the ideal mentality and vision of a CIO for today’s enterprise landscape. Tony’s solution for IT’s new place in enterprise involves injecting some creativity and business savviness into the department. He then explains the hows and whys.

Ravi Rao defines “emotional business” and why the analytical, numbers-based approach to running an enterprise just isn’t enough. In this episode, he specifically addresses nonverbal communication. “As we roll out operational improvement programs in a lot of organizations, people are paying attention to what's being written in the email. People are paying attention to what's happening on a stage coming from the manager or executive. But the things that most executives and managers and program managers fail to think about is even their body language is sending messages.” Ravi wraps up with some advice from the trenches.