Business Chief USA March 2019
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HHH <strong>USA</strong><br />
EDITION<br />
MARCH <strong>2019</strong><br />
www.businesschief.com<br />
Unlocking<br />
potential<br />
through data<br />
CUSTOMER-CENTRIC<br />
FINTECH<br />
DIGITAL<br />
TRANSFORMATION<br />
OF PROCUREMENT<br />
VP Global Procurement<br />
Nirav Mehta on the company’s<br />
journey to customer centricity<br />
TOP 10<br />
Smartest cities<br />
in the <strong>USA</strong><br />
City Focus<br />
CHARLOTTE<br />
Which companies are<br />
leading its technology<br />
transformation?
FOREWORD<br />
W<br />
elcome to the <strong>March</strong> issue of<br />
<strong>Business</strong> <strong>Chief</strong> <strong>USA</strong>.<br />
“What gives us an edge is our scale<br />
– we’re the number one in the industry<br />
and we have been at it the longest,”<br />
says Ben Hawksworth, <strong>Chief</strong> Technology<br />
Officer at Progressive<br />
Leasing. In our lead feature<br />
this month, Hawksworth<br />
explains how the company<br />
is helping creditchallenged<br />
customers<br />
with a disruptive digital<br />
transformation that harnesses<br />
agile methodology<br />
and applies it to fintech at scale.<br />
From its 27,000 retail locations and<br />
online, Progressive Leasing’s leaseto-purchase<br />
option has helped millions<br />
of customers and their families.<br />
Hawksworth insists that “we measure<br />
usability, we practice design-first<br />
thinking and, at the end of the day,<br />
we’re really passionate about taking<br />
the friction out of the process for our<br />
customers at every step”.<br />
Also highlighted this month is<br />
Edgewell Personal Care, whose<br />
motto of ‘challenge to win’ is taking<br />
the company on a journey to transform<br />
its procurement function,<br />
enabling a consumer-centric, sustainable<br />
future, and Infor <strong>USA</strong>, the<br />
industry-leading software<br />
company using cuttingedge<br />
analytics, data<br />
lake technology and its<br />
own artificial intelligence<br />
to unlock the human<br />
potential of its customers.<br />
This month’s City Focus<br />
takes a look at Charlotte, North<br />
Carolina, and three of the disruptive<br />
‘unicorns’ that call it home. You can<br />
also find Charlotte on our list of the<br />
top 10 smart cities in the country.<br />
Enjoy the issue!<br />
Harry Menear<br />
harry.menear@bizclikmedia.com<br />
03<br />
www.businesschief.com
<strong>USA</strong><br />
EDITION<br />
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05<br />
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CONTENTS<br />
10<br />
Procurement’s<br />
role in Edgewell’s<br />
transformation<br />
and digitization<br />
44<br />
Ahead of<br />
the curve<br />
SOFTWARE<br />
ENABLING<br />
5G<br />
30
REINVENTING<br />
UPSKILLING<br />
FOR THE FOURTH<br />
INDUSTRIAL<br />
REVOLUTION<br />
54<br />
64 76<br />
City Focus<br />
CHARLOTTE<br />
OPEN DATA ADDRESSING<br />
WORLD HUNGER —<br />
SOLVING THE<br />
AGRICULTURAL CRISIS<br />
FOR A MORE<br />
SUSTAINABLE FUTURE<br />
86<br />
TOP 10<br />
Smart cities<br />
in the <strong>USA</strong>
CONTENTS<br />
100 148<br />
Progressive Leasing<br />
Infor<br />
162<br />
116<br />
Choice<br />
Financial<br />
PAY-O-MATIC<br />
130<br />
Boise State<br />
University
214<br />
Traffix<br />
230<br />
176<br />
Calgary Drop-In<br />
Dimension Data<br />
186 248<br />
Hyster<br />
PBL Insurance<br />
198<br />
Emmerson<br />
Packaging
10<br />
MARCH <strong>2019</strong>
SUPPLY CHAIN<br />
Procurement’s<br />
role in Edgewell’s<br />
transformation<br />
and digitization<br />
11<br />
WRIT TEN BY<br />
CATHERINE STURMAN<br />
PRODUCED BY<br />
DENITRA PRICE<br />
www.businesschief.com
EDGEWELL PERSONAL CARE<br />
With the motto of ‘challenge to win’,<br />
Edgewell Personal Care has been<br />
on a journey to transform its<br />
procurement function to enable<br />
a consumer-centric, sustainable<br />
future. VP Global Procurement<br />
Nirav Mehta tells us more…<br />
12<br />
T<br />
he procurement function has evolved<br />
from purely transactional – such as<br />
managing purchase orders, payments<br />
and invoices – to a strategic role across<br />
organizations. Shifting its value proposition to<br />
become an integral part of a business, procurement<br />
is expected to deliver a significant impact<br />
on bottom line margins using innovative<br />
sourcing strategies and cost saving levers. The<br />
value proposition is evolving even further, where<br />
procurement has sought to impact the top line<br />
of an organization by delivering supplier-enabled<br />
innovations, forming an integral part of<br />
corporate social responsibility (CSR) and<br />
sustainability objectives, mitigating all kinds of<br />
external risk to supply continuity, finances or<br />
even brand equity.<br />
A clear example of that is how businesses,<br />
presently faced with political uncertainty,<br />
government regulations and ongoing trade<br />
MARCH <strong>2019</strong>
SUPPLY CHAIN<br />
wars on a global scale, are looking at the<br />
procurement function. Such volatility has put<br />
unprecedented financial and supply chain<br />
risks on businesses, which is where procurement<br />
needs to be in driver’s seat.<br />
On top of this, the ongoing digital disruptions<br />
impacting every industry, has resulted in<br />
increased pressure on businesses to transform<br />
their models. The procurement<br />
function must play a critical role in digital<br />
transformations of businesses, while<br />
also transforming itself.<br />
“I believe these are significant<br />
challenges, but it makes our role<br />
in procurement very exciting and<br />
valuable at the same time,” reflects<br />
Nirav Mehta, Vice President of<br />
Global Procurement at Edgewell<br />
Personal Care (EPC). Joining the<br />
business four years ago and<br />
appointed as Vice President in 2018,<br />
Mehta’s diverse background in the<br />
consumer goods industry made him<br />
the perfect choice to take the business<br />
on its next stage of growth. Working<br />
for Coty, Avon and L’Oréal amongst<br />
others, he reflects that he joined “this<br />
gem of a company” due to its “phenomenal<br />
culture” and its “collaborative and<br />
down-to-earth people.” With several<br />
13<br />
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EDGEWELL PERSONAL CARE<br />
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MARCH <strong>2019</strong>
SUPPLY CHAIN<br />
“We have deployed<br />
technology-enabled<br />
solutions at every stage<br />
of the procurement<br />
value stream, with<br />
the objective to<br />
reduce redundancies,<br />
and automate and<br />
streamline processes”<br />
—<br />
Nirav Mehta,<br />
Vice President of Global Procurement<br />
at Edgewell Personal Care (EPC)<br />
strong fundamentals in place for the<br />
business to succeed long-term, including<br />
strong personal care brands under its<br />
umbrella, Mehta is enthusiastic about<br />
the role procurement and supply chain<br />
is playing in its transformation.<br />
“We like to call ourselves a small big<br />
company. It also describes our culture<br />
and our entrepreneurial mindset to<br />
a great extent. Like a startup, perhaps,<br />
but with the resources of a large<br />
organization,” he says wistfully. “We<br />
are not so big that the bureaucracy and<br />
politics of decision making, or lack of<br />
empowerment can stifle our growth<br />
and innovation. I believe this is a great<br />
asset that we have, and we try to<br />
leverage it. Our company’s motto, in<br />
simple words, is ‘challenge to win’. We<br />
consider ourselves challengers to our<br />
competitors in the industry.”<br />
Technology continues to accelerate<br />
the transformation of every industry,<br />
and the consumer-packaged goods<br />
(CPG) and personal care sector is no<br />
exception. Whether it is e-commerce<br />
or direct-to-consumer type business<br />
models. EPC was previously geared<br />
15<br />
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EDGEWELL PERSONAL CARE<br />
16<br />
towards competing with larger CPG<br />
companies and serving large, brickand-mortar<br />
type retailers. As digitization<br />
continues to shift the goalposts,<br />
a significant number of niche brands<br />
are not only challenging market share<br />
and the price positioning of bigger<br />
players, but also the traditional business<br />
models which have remained relatively<br />
unchanged – until now.<br />
“I would say even consumer behaviors<br />
are changing,” observes Mehta.<br />
“In the past, consumers used to be<br />
a lot more loyal to big brand names,<br />
but nowadays are looking for more<br />
personalization and are more willing<br />
and open to try new brands and new<br />
products that appeal to their individuality,<br />
that the values of these brands<br />
align with the values of themselves.”<br />
“You see this huge influx of really<br />
small, niche piranha brands in every<br />
consumer goods sector. That niche<br />
value proposition is targeted to a very<br />
specific segment of consumers,<br />
appeals to them and is successful in<br />
grabbing pieces of market share. At<br />
the end of the day, when you add all<br />
that up, it becomes a challenging<br />
marketplace for incumbent players.”<br />
MARCH <strong>2019</strong>
SUPPLY CHAIN<br />
With shifts in consumer behavior, an<br />
evolving landscape from brick-and-mortar<br />
to e-commerce, as well as business<br />
models changing to direct-to-consumer<br />
and subscription-type models, these<br />
tensions, on top of such geopolitical<br />
uncertainties, has created a hotbed<br />
of challenges for companies like EPC.<br />
EPC is undergoing a journey to transform<br />
each area of the business. From taking<br />
a closer look at changing consumer<br />
behaviors and delivering agile innovation<br />
through simplified ways of working, the<br />
business is also deploying new digital<br />
tools to become increasingly proactive<br />
amidst changing market trends.<br />
The procurement team at EPC is<br />
at the front and center of navigating<br />
through these complex challenges.<br />
Recently, the business effectively<br />
managed an ongoing threat posed<br />
by the steel import tariffs by the US<br />
government. Due to its proactive<br />
approach, the business was one of<br />
the first to be granted exemptions by<br />
the US Department of Commerce.<br />
“When the US government announced<br />
the 25% tariff on imported<br />
steel, it was one of the key challenges<br />
we were facing in our shaving business<br />
17<br />
EXECUTIVE PROFILE<br />
Nirav Mehta<br />
Nirav is a veteran of CPG industry. In his 20 years of<br />
experience, he has worked across numerous leading<br />
global CPG companies like Coty, Avon, L’Oreal and<br />
Edgewell. He brings significant cross-functional leadership<br />
experience in Plant Engineering, Manufacturing,<br />
Package Engineering, Supply Chain, and Procurement.<br />
Nirav is passionate about Procurement, as it demands<br />
a combination of soft skills like Negotiations and<br />
relationship building, as well as sound business acumen,<br />
financial skills, macro-economics, and category expertise.<br />
www.businesschief.com
EDGEWELL PERSONAL CARE<br />
18<br />
because our razors are manufactured<br />
with imported blade steel. It was<br />
a challenging situation because<br />
something like that can immediately<br />
have a big impact on the margins of<br />
that line of business. We took a very<br />
systematic, and what I would consider<br />
a very organized approach towards<br />
managing that risk in a four-step<br />
approach,” he explains.<br />
“The first step was to really understand<br />
the policy, go down to the details<br />
and really understand what the tariff<br />
is being applied on. What categories<br />
of steel is the tariff being applied for?<br />
What countries are exempt? What<br />
countries are not exempt? What are the<br />
criteria for exemption? These tie back<br />
to our category expertise as well, where<br />
we had a very in-depth understanding<br />
of the macroeconomics, the cost<br />
drivers and the marketplace for blade<br />
steel. This really helped us to incorporate<br />
a sourcing strategy that would<br />
allow us to manage some of these risks.<br />
“The second step was assessing the<br />
risk exposure, understanding the full<br />
value stream within our supply chain<br />
“In the past, consumers<br />
used to be a lot more<br />
loyal to big brand names,<br />
but nowadays are looking<br />
for more personalization<br />
and are willing to try<br />
new brands that appeal<br />
to their individuality”<br />
—<br />
Nirav Mehta,<br />
Vice President of Global Procurement<br />
at Edgewell Personal Care (EPC)<br />
MARCH <strong>2019</strong>
SUPPLY CHAIN<br />
CLICK TO WATCH: ‘EDGEWELL’<br />
19<br />
where there could be an impact. After that,<br />
step three was taking some immediate actions.<br />
We were very proactive in terms of filing<br />
a petition, we were in very close contact with<br />
our suppliers and made sure that we aggressively<br />
appealed and made our case with the<br />
US Department of Commerce. We also<br />
sought advice from experts within the trade<br />
field,” he continues.<br />
“As a result of all these efforts, we were one<br />
of the first to be granted an exemption for the<br />
blade steel category. As a final step, we are<br />
considering our long-term strategic decisions<br />
and how we can build more flexibility and<br />
agility within our supply chain and mitigate<br />
www.businesschief.com
EDGEWELL PERSONAL CARE<br />
20<br />
such impacts in the future. Whether it is<br />
alternative sourcing and manufacturing<br />
strategies, or changing up product strategies<br />
or our specifications. However, we are not<br />
done here, as there are still ongoing efforts<br />
to ensure we strategically manage impact<br />
of tariffs on various other categories, including<br />
imports from China.”<br />
EPC Procurement Managers are tasked<br />
with not only understanding EPC’s business<br />
needs, but also develop their expertise on<br />
macroeconomics, cost drivers, competitive<br />
benchmarking, external innovations and more.<br />
The procurement team is then able to utilize<br />
this insight and intelligence to implement<br />
multi-year sourcing strategies. These multiyear<br />
strategies will then define how to deliver<br />
further value within the different lines of<br />
businesses at EPC. The team is also driving<br />
value through commodity risk management<br />
across all lines of business. By implementing<br />
strategies for most of its commodities to share,<br />
transfer, operationalize, deflect or even hedge<br />
ongoing risks, EPC has different strategies<br />
dependent on each commodity and what is<br />
happening in the supply markets. Taking<br />
advantage of these levers has allowed the<br />
team to provide increased visibility to its<br />
business stakeholders.<br />
“It’s understanding where an impending<br />
MARCH <strong>2019</strong>
SUPPLY CHAIN<br />
$2.3bn<br />
Approximate<br />
revenue<br />
2015<br />
Year founded<br />
6,000<br />
Approximate number<br />
of employees<br />
21<br />
significant business risk is and being proactive<br />
about mitigating and managing such risk,”<br />
stresses Mehta. “It also helps us provide<br />
a more accurate and consistent picture to our<br />
shareholders and our investors in terms of<br />
what they can expect from our financials.<br />
I think that’s been a great value that the<br />
procurement team has been able to deliver.”<br />
To support this further, EPC has placed<br />
significant investment in new technologies<br />
to transform its procurement and supply<br />
chain capabilities. Focusing first and foremost<br />
on the basics, the business is presently<br />
upgrading its ERP systems and overhauling<br />
www.businesschief.com
EDGEWELL PERSONAL CARE<br />
22<br />
“We want to align with<br />
suppliers that really<br />
share our vision and<br />
values and to include<br />
more active<br />
participation from<br />
suppliers in terms<br />
of sustainability”<br />
—<br />
Nirav Mehta,<br />
Vice President of Global Procurement<br />
at Edgewell Personal Care (EPC)<br />
its digital foundations to provide the right<br />
level of data integrity and governance.<br />
“If you don’t have sound fundamentals<br />
to build upon, you can easily end up<br />
spending millions of dollars on some<br />
technology and spinning your wheels but<br />
not get the most out of it,” reflects Mehta.<br />
“We have deployed technology-enabled<br />
solutions at every stage of the procurement<br />
value stream, with the objective<br />
to reduce redundancies, automate where<br />
possible and streamline processes.”<br />
“We have digitized our sourcing<br />
capabilities to a great extent by implementing<br />
new technological solutions<br />
for Spend Analytics, eRFx, Contracting<br />
and Procure to Pay solutions. We are<br />
also looking to transform our vendor<br />
life cycle management,” says Mehta.<br />
“What constitutes the onboarding of<br />
new suppliers, vendor master automation<br />
and self-service, to performance<br />
MARCH <strong>2019</strong>
SUPPLY CHAIN<br />
23<br />
management of our suppliers, to<br />
offboarding and exiting suppliers upon<br />
the ending of a relationship. We are<br />
utilizing digital solutions not only to<br />
make the procurement function more<br />
efficient and streamlined, but also to<br />
develop and train our colleagues.”<br />
Introducing a web-based learning<br />
and training platform, EPC has sought<br />
to provide a personalized capability<br />
assessment and training plan for every<br />
individual within procurement. The<br />
technology will aim to develop a consistent<br />
level of competency across a number<br />
of important focal areas, where the<br />
existing skills and knowledge of every<br />
employee is assessed against the<br />
competencies and skills required for<br />
their position, Mehta explains. The<br />
technology will then illustrate a set of<br />
interactive courses each employee<br />
must take online to close any skills gap.<br />
www.businesschief.com
EDGEWELL PERSONAL CARE<br />
24<br />
“All in all, we’ve been utilizing technology<br />
solutions to a great extent. People, skill<br />
and capability development, while having<br />
streamlined, automated processes are<br />
enabling faster decisions,” he says.<br />
EPC’s technological focus has even<br />
extended to towards its supply relationship<br />
management (SRM). Developing<br />
sophisticated criteria around segmenting<br />
its supply base to gain a greater<br />
understanding of its strategic suppliers,<br />
as well as ones which are critical to the<br />
business, EPC has issued scorecards<br />
to measure supplier performance,<br />
drive collaboration and improve the<br />
overall performance and relationship<br />
with its key partners.<br />
EPC Procurement is also playing<br />
a critical role in adding value to EPC’s<br />
corporate social responsibility (CSR)<br />
and sustainability priorities.<br />
“We have a pretty strong supplier code<br />
of conduct but we have also developed<br />
a sustainable sourcing policy, where<br />
we’ve made sustainability and corporate<br />
social responsibility key factors in<br />
determining our supplier selection and<br />
onboarding criteria,” says Mehta. “We do<br />
evaluations of our key suppliers based<br />
on their commitment to their people, their<br />
MARCH <strong>2019</strong>
SUPPLY CHAIN<br />
25<br />
CSR, and how well they are managing<br />
their environmental footprint. We want<br />
to align with suppliers that really share<br />
our vision and values and to include more<br />
active participation from suppliers<br />
in terms of sustainability. We in EPC<br />
Procurement are in a unique position to<br />
influence our suppliers to do the right<br />
thing for the people and for the planet.”<br />
Through three main pillars: people,<br />
products and the planet, EPC has<br />
a number of success stories highlighting<br />
its commitment to ensuring a sustainable<br />
future. Its recent Banana Boat sun care<br />
line, Simply Perfect, now has 25% fewer<br />
ingredients. Its Bulldog skincare brand<br />
has also recently launched an original<br />
natural bamboo razor instead of using<br />
plastic, which has been met with<br />
applause. “For Bulldog, we have also<br />
www.businesschief.com
EDGEWELL PERSONAL CARE<br />
COMPANY FACTS<br />
• EPC adopted a hands-on<br />
mitigation and trade tariff<br />
management strategy,<br />
leading the business to be<br />
granted exemptions by the<br />
US Department of Commerce<br />
• EPC is upgrading its ERP<br />
systems and overhauling its<br />
digital foundations to provide<br />
the right level of data<br />
integrity and governance<br />
26<br />
• EPC is exploring innovative<br />
technologies, such as robotic<br />
process automation to automate<br />
manual and repetitive<br />
tasks, such as contract and<br />
shopping cart reviews<br />
MARCH <strong>2019</strong>
SUPPLY CHAIN<br />
moved from sourcing fossil fuel-based<br />
plastic to bio-based plastic. When you look at<br />
activities like the sourcing of our palm oil, we<br />
have also made a commitment to source<br />
100% of our palm oils from sustainable<br />
sources,” adds Mehta.<br />
By making a significant effort to transform<br />
the procurement function and working to<br />
ensure all its supply sources are fully<br />
accountable, EPC continues to do the right<br />
thing. Serving local communities and<br />
developing sustainable products and<br />
services which promote innovation, passion<br />
and creativity across all avenues,<br />
the company will continue to<br />
challenge convention to drive<br />
future growth, harness an agile<br />
mindset as the CPG industry<br />
continues to evolve, and deliver on<br />
its long-term vision, placing consumers<br />
at the core and supporting their<br />
overall wellbeing.<br />
27<br />
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LEADERSHIP<br />
30<br />
MARCH <strong>2019</strong>
Ahead of<br />
31<br />
the curve<br />
<strong>Business</strong> <strong>Chief</strong> sits down with technology industry<br />
veteran and entrepreneur Ravi Rishy-Maharaj<br />
to talk about his journey, the challenges of doing<br />
business 10 years ahead of the market, and how<br />
he arrived at his latest project: GigSky<br />
WRITTEN BY HARRY MENEAR<br />
www.businesschief.com
LEADERSHIP<br />
32<br />
A<br />
veteran of cutting-edge tech startups and<br />
software giants, Ravi Rishy-Maharaj can look<br />
back across a career spanning more than 30<br />
years spent pushing the outer reaches of innovation.<br />
“I’ve always had a drive for doing something new or<br />
interesting anyhow, but what I’m interested in all of<br />
the time it seems is solving a problem.” From electric<br />
vehicle batteries in 1984 to video conference calling<br />
in 1990, from Apple to his own startup Kinaare<br />
Networks, he has remained firmly ahead of the curve.<br />
This month, we talked to Rishy-Maharaj about his<br />
journey, the challenges of doing business 10 years<br />
ahead of the market, and how he arrived at his latest<br />
project: GigSky.<br />
Launched in 2010, GigSky provides users with<br />
international data services using eSIM technology.<br />
Today, GigSky is “on probably 100mn iPhones out<br />
there by now,” says Rishy-Maharaj, as well as “Google,<br />
which is supporting dual SIM Android coming up<br />
this year. All of the mobile platforms that matter,<br />
GigSky is integrated into them.” With his Palo Alto-<br />
headquartered venture at the forefront of the eSIM<br />
market, as well as delving into the applications of<br />
IoT and blockchain, we asked Rishy-Maharaj about<br />
a life led on the digital frontier. “My career, I think,<br />
most of the time has just been enjoying moving from<br />
one area of technology to another. I enjoy physics,<br />
I enjoy chemistry, I enjoy electronics and software<br />
programming and then system design and systems<br />
architecture and computing, et cetera. It’s just<br />
MARCH <strong>2019</strong>
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LEADERSHIP<br />
34<br />
moving on from one interest to the<br />
other and enjoying the ride.”<br />
In 1984, Rishy-Maharaj started<br />
working at PowerPlex, a four-person<br />
startup funded by Brown, Boveri & Cie<br />
and Magna International. “It was the<br />
first greenwave of electric vehicles.<br />
And we were working on bringing<br />
sodium sulfur batteries to market.”<br />
Laughing, he admits the market may<br />
not have been ready to embrace the<br />
technology in 1984. “The battery, it had<br />
a couple of hundred sodium sulfur cells<br />
in it. And the thing about sodium sulphur<br />
is that it has to operate at 300 degrees<br />
celcius for the charge to be created.<br />
It was actually quite safe but, well,” he<br />
laughs again, “it looked like a coffin.”<br />
Rishy-Maharaj explains that in 1984,<br />
“It turned out that the market wasn’t<br />
ready for sodium sulfur batteries. The<br />
electric vehicle then was a little ahead<br />
of its time, if you know what I mean.”<br />
Of course, half a decade later, in the<br />
early 1990’s, concern over air quality<br />
conditions lead to the beginning of<br />
green vehicle adoption, although sales<br />
of electric vehicles in the United States<br />
didn’t exceed 500,000 until midway<br />
through 2016. In 2018, the global electric<br />
vehicle market reached over US$118bn<br />
MARCH <strong>2019</strong>
CLICK TO WATCH: ‘GETTING STARTED WITH GIGSKY SIM’<br />
35<br />
and in 2022, Bloomberg predicts<br />
that EV pricing will reach parity with<br />
gasoline-powered transportation.<br />
Following two-and-a-half years<br />
at PowerPlex, Rishy-Maharaj moved<br />
to Compressed Natural Gas Fuel<br />
Systems (CNG), where he worked<br />
on designing a computer system<br />
to augment gasoline fuel delivery<br />
systems in cars. “In one instance you’re<br />
running on gasoline, then you flick<br />
a switch, and now you’re running on<br />
compressed natural gas,” he says.<br />
“But when you did that, you actually<br />
switched over to a completely different<br />
engine control system. I was the guy<br />
designing that system.”<br />
Rishy-Maharaj stayed with CNG<br />
for two years before shifting industries<br />
entirely. He ended up at Nortel Networks<br />
in ‘88 as a switching engineer working<br />
on Customer Local Area Signaling<br />
System (CLASS), the precursor to<br />
caller ID, signalling and voicemail. “My<br />
career had been up to that point highly<br />
technical,” he explains. At Nortel<br />
Networks, Rishy-Maharaj seized the<br />
opportunity to combine his engineering<br />
expertise with a desire to explore more<br />
business-centric opportunities. “Nortel<br />
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LEADERSHIP<br />
36<br />
put together an exploratory marketing<br />
group in 1990,” he says. “At that time,<br />
we used to use dial up modems to<br />
connect to the internet, or to connect<br />
to the cloud, whatever the cloud was<br />
at that point in time. We said, ‘hey look,<br />
there’s this thing that’s happening.<br />
People want to communicate, they want<br />
to communicate better, et cetera.’ So<br />
in 1990 we came up with a multimedia<br />
communications concept.” Rishy-Maharaj<br />
excitedly lists the functions: “It<br />
was voice and video and file transfer<br />
and point-to-point screen share. In 1990!<br />
The video screen was only one inch and<br />
in black and white. It was just amazing.<br />
We launched the product, called Vivid,<br />
that ran on a video compressing card that<br />
had to go into Mac UCI because the<br />
only computer that you could do this<br />
on was an Apple computer. Windows<br />
95 wasn’t out yet. Obviously,” he laughs.<br />
“We kinda got in cahoots with Apple<br />
in 1990,” he adds. “In fact, I was working<br />
so closely with Apple out of Nortel in<br />
Canada, Apple offered me an opportu-<br />
MARCH <strong>2019</strong>
37<br />
nity to come down to California and<br />
work for the company in 1995 as the<br />
first telephony product manager they<br />
ever had.” Rishy-Maharaj moved to<br />
Cupertino, California that year from<br />
Toronto. Even though the company<br />
experienced challenges during the<br />
mid-nineties, he looks back on his<br />
tenure as an interesting and exciting<br />
time. “Apple was going through some<br />
very tough times in ‘95. Jobs was not<br />
back yet. People were leaving. I ended<br />
up running the whole networking and<br />
communications product management<br />
team for a while.” He chuckles and<br />
groans in quick succession. “It was just<br />
one thing after the other.”<br />
After leaving Apple a little over a year<br />
later, Rishy-Maharaj moved on to stints<br />
at Sun Micro and OpenTV, working on<br />
microelectronics implementation and<br />
interactive entertainment software until,<br />
in January 2000 he founded his own<br />
company, Kinaare Networks. After his<br />
experience with Universal Plug and<br />
Play (UPnP) at Open TV, Rishy-Maharaj<br />
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LEADERSHIP<br />
38<br />
wanted to explore new developments<br />
in microelectronics and the cloud. He<br />
reflects on that time in California with<br />
his family: “We were still isolated on the<br />
West Coast, 2,500 miles away from our<br />
closest relatives. I was also pursuing<br />
this idea that you could plug a device<br />
into the internet and it would connect<br />
to a cloud service and it would express<br />
its capabilities. That became a service<br />
discovery feature called : Kinaare Plug<br />
and Play (KP&P).” His family’s separation<br />
from their relatives in Toronto also<br />
became part of the inspiration for<br />
Kinaare’s first product. Combining the<br />
desire to connect over large distances<br />
with his new UPnP technology, the<br />
company’s first product became an<br />
intelligent picture frame. “You’d plug it<br />
in, it would connect to the internet, it<br />
would discover a server that it would<br />
connect to, and then people would<br />
subscribe to that service,” he explains.<br />
“I thought of my family initially. The idea<br />
was that people would publish, their<br />
pictures that could be dispersed all<br />
over the world and cycled through<br />
these digital picture frames that would<br />
be on your desk. People could share<br />
their photos with each other.” Among<br />
other products, Kinaare’s digital picture<br />
“I’ve always had<br />
a drive for doing<br />
something new<br />
or interesting<br />
anyhow, but what<br />
I’m interested<br />
in most of the<br />
time is solving<br />
a problem”<br />
—<br />
Ravi Rishy-Maharaj,<br />
Founder and <strong>Chief</strong> Executive<br />
Officer, Gigsky<br />
MARCH <strong>2019</strong>
frame was an early entrant into the<br />
Internet of Things (IoT) - a concept first<br />
linked to an internet-enabled Coke<br />
machine at Carnegie Mellon in 1982<br />
and officially named in 1999. “IoT, cloud<br />
services, services discovery, social by<br />
sharing photos with each other. That<br />
was the idea behind the company,”<br />
Rishy-Maharaj says.<br />
“But guess what? 2000, the whole<br />
market collapsed.” The dot-com crash<br />
caused over $5trn in damage to global<br />
markets between <strong>March</strong> 2000 and<br />
October 2002. Rishy Maharaj sighs.<br />
“The market timing was just deplorable.<br />
I put a lot of my money into that company.<br />
I wiped out all my resources. In fact,<br />
I had to declare bankruptcy at one<br />
point in time.”<br />
Although the market context<br />
proved infertile, the technology at the<br />
core of Kinaare has since become<br />
part of the digital landscape. Once<br />
again finding himself at the outer<br />
limits of business-technology<br />
innovation, Rishy-Maharaj took the<br />
collapse of his company as a lesson<br />
to be applied to the future. “Market<br />
timing is a huge part of being an<br />
entrepreneur,” he explains. “It didn’t<br />
matter if I had a lot of money; I was too<br />
39<br />
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LEADERSHIP<br />
40<br />
far ahead of the market.” This realization<br />
remained with him, and was central to<br />
the inception of GigSky in 2008.<br />
“When I started GigSky, I wanted to<br />
solve an immediate problem so that,<br />
once the product came to market,<br />
people would see it as a solution to<br />
a problem they had and buy it,” he<br />
explains. Unfortunately, old habits die<br />
hard. Rishy-Maharaj came up with the<br />
idea for GigSky in 2008 while working<br />
for a friend’s startup that required him<br />
to travel far and often. You’d go to a<br />
company and it would be like extracting<br />
teeth to find a connection within their<br />
network. There was no wifi. So some<br />
guy would come running with a big, long<br />
“The idea was that<br />
people would<br />
publish their pictures<br />
and they would be<br />
dispersed all over<br />
the world through<br />
these picture frames”<br />
—<br />
Ravi Rishy-Maharaj,<br />
Founder and <strong>Chief</strong> Executive Officer, Gigsky<br />
ethernet cable plugged into some<br />
connection point 100 meters down<br />
the hall - it was just really painful.”<br />
The frustrations of internet connection<br />
in a world without ubiquitous wifi<br />
prompted him to jury rig his own<br />
solution from a portable wifi box and<br />
a wifi dongle from a local carrier. “Local<br />
carriers were selling plastic SIMs at<br />
that point in time. The plastic sim would<br />
come with local data service. Not a lot,<br />
but I could still buy 250 megabytes of<br />
local conductivity for maybe $20,<br />
MARCH <strong>2019</strong>
41<br />
versus buying roaming service from<br />
AT&T for $2,000.”<br />
Even though GigSky passed on<br />
building its own personal wifi hotspot,<br />
the idea of switching between local<br />
carriers for cheap data became the<br />
core of the business. By sticking with<br />
a data-only service, GigSky kept costs<br />
low. “I really didn’t need to pay the telco<br />
some big fee for roaming for voice.<br />
Even though so many times people<br />
said to me, ‘you should deliver a voice<br />
service,’ I said, ‘No. It’s just about data.<br />
Data will grow. Let’s focus on doing<br />
that and doing it right.’ It was the right<br />
thing to do.”<br />
The first GigSky service launched in<br />
early 2013, “And here we are,” says<br />
Rishy-Maharaj. “We didn’t have to build<br />
hardware, the programmable SIM<br />
became eSIM, and the App ended up<br />
being integrated directly into iOS and<br />
Windows.” GigSky’s collaboration with<br />
Apple began in 2014. “Someone at Apple<br />
sent a message to our info email account<br />
saying ‘We’d love to meet with one of<br />
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LEADERSHIP<br />
42<br />
your directors. We’d like to talk to you<br />
about your business.’” He laughs, “we<br />
were wondering if it was junk mail or<br />
somebody pulling a fast one. But lo and<br />
behold it was Apple, and here we are on<br />
probably 100mn iPhones.”<br />
GigSky continues to grow each year,<br />
helping its growing user base stay<br />
connected, wherever they might be, for<br />
a fair price. Rishy-Maharaj admits there<br />
are challenges to finding competitive<br />
pricing across over 190 countries. “We<br />
try to ensure that, if you buy our five<br />
gigabyte plan, you’re basically spending<br />
$10 per gigabyte. Prices will get better<br />
as we go along.”<br />
He explains that “the idea behind the<br />
eSIM is the ultimate in convenience. It’s<br />
to provide the ultimate choice in terms<br />
of connectivity. This year GigSky is going<br />
to be integrated into dual eSIM android<br />
devices going forward.” Airlines are<br />
also using GigSky to collect data for<br />
post-flight analysis, and Rishy-Maharaj<br />
also hints at upcoming applications<br />
involving blockchain. It’s no surprise that,<br />
in the year the eSIM is predicted to<br />
become mainstream, Rishy-Maharaj is<br />
turning his eSIM company to explore<br />
new technological frontiers. “How else<br />
can the e-sim be leveraged with other<br />
MARCH <strong>2019</strong>
“We were wondering<br />
if it was junk mail<br />
or somebody pulling<br />
a fast one. But lo and<br />
behold it was Apple,<br />
and here we are<br />
on probably 100mn<br />
iPhones”<br />
—<br />
Ravi Rishy-Maharaj,<br />
Founder and <strong>Chief</strong> Executive Officer, Gigsky<br />
43<br />
non-obvious technologies to deliver an<br />
even better user experience? That’s<br />
what we’re after at GigSky.” He laughs,<br />
acknowledging his signature move as<br />
he signs off. “I wish I had another 20<br />
years to see what this thing turns into.<br />
But the next few years at least are going<br />
to be a very exciting time.”<br />
www.businesschief.com
TECHNOLOGY<br />
44<br />
SOFTWARE<br />
ENABLING 5G<br />
Folke Rosengard, Head of <strong>Business</strong><br />
Development, Nokia Software,<br />
explores how 5G serves as more than<br />
just an answer to the burgeoning<br />
IoT and digitalisation landscape<br />
WRITTEN BY FOLKE ROSENGARD<br />
MARCH <strong>2019</strong>
www.businesschief.com<br />
45
TECHNOLOGY<br />
46<br />
W<br />
e at Nokia believe that we are in<br />
front of one of the biggest upsides<br />
in the whole telco industry in a<br />
long time, thanks to the digitalization trend<br />
and IOT. IOT will add a massive amount of<br />
new connections; and the digitalization trend<br />
creates a growing demand for a multitude of<br />
diverse connections including use cases with<br />
high bandwidth, low latency and ultrahigh<br />
reliability. 5G is the ideal solution to respond<br />
to this demand, however 5G is much more<br />
than simply a new Radio Access Network<br />
(RAN) generation. It comes with sophisticated<br />
software that affects all parts of the<br />
network, including how service providers<br />
operate the network and how they offer<br />
profitable and compelling services. It is a<br />
whole new business system that enables service<br />
providers to respond to the massive<br />
demand fueled by the Internet of Things (IoT)<br />
and digitalization trend in a profitable way.<br />
5G requires a tight connection between<br />
network, operations and business with all the<br />
systems and processes working together to<br />
deliver and monetize the 5G use cases for<br />
consumers and enterprises. Software is the<br />
key for realizing 5G capabilities in an efficient<br />
way. Technical capabilities such as dynamic<br />
slicing of mobile networks and a servicebased<br />
architecture to enable multiple and<br />
MARCH <strong>2019</strong>
47<br />
“5G is the ideal solution<br />
to respond to this demand,<br />
however 5G is much more than<br />
simply a new Radio Access<br />
Network (RAN) generation”<br />
—<br />
Folke Rosengard,<br />
Head of <strong>Business</strong> Development,<br />
Nokia Software<br />
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TECHNOLOGY<br />
48<br />
“We believe ‘Cloud<br />
Native software’<br />
is a fundamental<br />
principle for<br />
software of the<br />
5G era”<br />
—<br />
Folke Rosengard,<br />
Head of <strong>Business</strong> Development,<br />
Nokia Software<br />
diverse use case requirements based<br />
on agile, flexible and real-time digital<br />
fabric are critical for telcos to maximize<br />
and exploit 5G capabilities.<br />
Network providers must have a strong<br />
digital fabric that’s built on applications<br />
with five key characteristics:<br />
01. INTELLIGENT<br />
Analytics and machine learning in<br />
everything are critical to manage an<br />
ever-growing volume of data. Great<br />
experiences are the ones that are<br />
personal, contextual and fast. These<br />
rely on the ability to augment human<br />
intelligence with machine learning and<br />
analytics. They use the data to provide<br />
a 360-degree view of the experience<br />
and decide what actions will produce<br />
the best outcomes.<br />
02. AUTOMATED<br />
Manual processes are too slow to<br />
handle the big data explosion. As such,<br />
intelligence workflows and bots should<br />
push automation to extremes to ensure<br />
we can drive insights to action with<br />
efficiency and speed using closedloop<br />
fundamentals.<br />
MARCH <strong>2019</strong>
CLICK TO WATCH: ‘5G IN ACTION’<br />
49<br />
03. SECURE<br />
With more of our lives online, customers<br />
must know they can trust their providers<br />
to handle their data. The new digital<br />
fabric must include security in its<br />
foundation to provide customers with the<br />
highest level of protection in the digital<br />
world.<br />
04. CLOUD-NATIVE<br />
To respond with agility at a better cost<br />
point, software needs to be built for the<br />
cloud, from both the technological and<br />
consumption-model perspectives.<br />
05. OPEN<br />
It’s unlikely that service providers will<br />
rely solely on one infrastructure vendor<br />
or partner, one revenue-sharing<br />
relationship or service. Applications<br />
must be multi-vendor, open and<br />
lightweight - and the complexity of the<br />
network must be removed or abstracted.<br />
5G will enable a range of new use<br />
cases with a variety of specific requirements.<br />
To support each use case in an<br />
optimal way, security capabilities will<br />
need to be more flexible. For example,<br />
security mechanisms used for ultra-low<br />
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TECHNOLOGY<br />
50<br />
latency, mission-critical applications may<br />
not be suitable for massive IoT deployments<br />
where devices are inexpensive<br />
sensors that have a very limited energy<br />
budget and transmit data only occasionally.<br />
Another driver for 5G security is the<br />
changing ecosystem. Long-Term<br />
Evolution (LTE) networks are dominated<br />
by large monolithic deployments―each<br />
controlled by a single network operator<br />
that owns the network infrastructure<br />
while also providing all network services.<br />
In contrast, 5G networks may be<br />
deployed by a number of specialized<br />
stakeholders providing end-user 5G<br />
network services.<br />
We believe “Cloud Native software”<br />
is a fundamental principle for software<br />
for the 5G era. There are many<br />
benefits of cloud native software for<br />
telcos, including more efficient use of<br />
cloud resources, operational simplicity<br />
and horizontal scalability. Proven by<br />
massive scale companies such as<br />
Google, Twitter and Netflix over years<br />
of use, horizontal scaling or adding<br />
more containerized applications within<br />
a cluster, enables providers to provision<br />
the processing capacity they<br />
need to process data quickly.<br />
Managing and reducing the complexity,<br />
while keeping operation costs under<br />
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51<br />
control, can only be achieved through<br />
injecting intelligence and automation into<br />
the transformation process. As 5G<br />
extends beyond radio technologies,<br />
deep into the cloud, across mobile and<br />
transport layers, it will be paramount to<br />
combine data from RAN and non-RAN<br />
sources and introduce machine<br />
learning-enabled automation to create<br />
algorithms for use cases that operate<br />
across all these data sources.<br />
Today, automation is popping up<br />
almost everywhere in the network, and<br />
“closed loops” are considered silver<br />
bullets for killing complexity. A recent<br />
study by Nokia Bell Labs concluded<br />
that closed-loop automation can only<br />
work in combination with a new<br />
architecture and – even more important<br />
– an implementation master plan.<br />
The full benefit of automation can only<br />
be realized if it’s done in concert. Small<br />
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TECHNOLOGY<br />
52<br />
benefits can be – and are being – realized<br />
with tactical, domain-specific<br />
automations, but those benefits can<br />
only be maximized if harmonized and<br />
orchestrated across all domains.<br />
As non-telco companies digitalize<br />
their own product offerings, new<br />
opportunities will emerge for telcos<br />
and service providers. With the new<br />
network characteristics of 5G and<br />
cloud resources sitting close to<br />
customers, these companies will be in<br />
a position to offer capabilities no IT<br />
cloud service provider can match.<br />
Software helps communication<br />
service providers to reinvent themselves<br />
as digital service providers. A<br />
key in this transformation is to recognize<br />
the need for far greater agility with<br />
frictionless business and operational<br />
“With the new network characteristics of<br />
5G and cloud resources sitting close<br />
to customers, these companies will be in<br />
a position to offer capabilities no IT<br />
cloud service provider can match”<br />
—<br />
Folke Rosengard, Head of <strong>Business</strong> Development, Nokia Software<br />
MARCH <strong>2019</strong>
53<br />
adaptability. In other words, digital<br />
service providers need to act in and<br />
capitalize on windows of digital time.<br />
To operate in digital time, service<br />
providers need a holistic and real-time<br />
view of what’s happening with business<br />
and operations to determine the next<br />
best action to take – this applies for all<br />
areas of operations from marketing to<br />
product management, customer experience<br />
management, network and service<br />
operations, care and monetization.<br />
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PEOPLE<br />
54<br />
REINVENTING<br />
UPSKILLING<br />
FOR THE FOURTH<br />
INDUSTRIAL<br />
REVOLUTION<br />
With Industry 4.0 underway, Nick Lazaridis,<br />
President of EMEA for HP Inc., explains<br />
how ultimately, it’s the people behind the<br />
screens and machines who enable digital<br />
transformation<br />
WRITTEN BY NICK LAZARIDIS,<br />
PRESIDENT OF EMEA FOR HP INC<br />
MARCH <strong>2019</strong>
www.businesschief.com<br />
55
PEOPLE<br />
56<br />
Today’s world moves at a<br />
mind-blowing rate, and it’s only<br />
going to get faster. Emerging<br />
technologies like IoT, 5G, artificial<br />
intelligence and 3D printing have<br />
heralded the fourth industrial revolution<br />
and proven their potential to<br />
change the status quo. But it’s down to<br />
us as business leaders to transform<br />
our workforces and equip them to<br />
make the most of this opportunity.<br />
There is a need for real innovation and<br />
change across every market and sector.<br />
It’s no longer just about gaining a<br />
competitive advantage, but taking steps<br />
to build the organization of the future.<br />
More than any that have come before,<br />
the fourth Industrial Revolution holds<br />
the opportunity for businesses<br />
everywhere to transform their impact<br />
on employees and, by extension,<br />
society.<br />
Looking back, the advent of new<br />
technologies has often been associated<br />
with resistance and fear because<br />
of the impact it might have on workforces<br />
and ‘business as usual’. The<br />
reality is that these new technologies<br />
MARCH <strong>2019</strong>
57<br />
are not a threat to work, but an<br />
opportunity to automate the routine,<br />
repetitive or low value tasks and apply<br />
valuable human resources to more<br />
creative and complex challenges.<br />
Just as the PC changed the way we<br />
work, as well as the skills needed to get<br />
the job done, we are entering a new<br />
chapter of change that will surpass<br />
those before it in size, scale and scope.<br />
The fourth Industrial Revolution has<br />
the potential to create new, technologically-driven<br />
value en masse - but<br />
getting there calls for a human-centric<br />
“The fourth Industrial<br />
Revolution has the<br />
potential to create new,<br />
technologically-driven<br />
value en masse – but<br />
getting there calls<br />
for a human-centric<br />
approach and<br />
investment in people”<br />
—<br />
Nick Lazaridis,<br />
President of EMEA for HP Inc<br />
www.businesschief.com
PEOPLE<br />
58<br />
“A truly diverse<br />
representation of<br />
backgrounds,<br />
experiences and<br />
opinions helps<br />
challenge the status<br />
quo and allow new<br />
ways of thinking”<br />
—<br />
Nick Lazaridis,<br />
President of EMEA for HP Inc<br />
approach and investment in people.<br />
It will look different to every business<br />
and the extent of reinvention will vary,<br />
but there are some commonalities as<br />
to how we can build the skills of our<br />
organizations for the future.<br />
MANY HANDS MAKE BRIGHT WORK<br />
The obvious business case for<br />
diversity is that it is key to attracting<br />
the best talent and engaging employees.<br />
But it goes further than equal<br />
representation and fair opportunities.<br />
A truly diverse representation of<br />
backgrounds, experiences and<br />
opinions helps challenge the status<br />
quo and allow new ways of thinking.<br />
Real diversity of thought is becoming<br />
essential in the global economy,<br />
not just to attract the best talent but<br />
to integrate broader cultural understandings<br />
and add fresh perspectives<br />
and processes. When you pair this<br />
with inclusive workplace culture,<br />
people feel more comfortable in<br />
bringing their true selves to work and<br />
their ideas to the table.<br />
LEARN AS IF YOU WILL WORK FOREVER<br />
A real investment in learning and<br />
MARCH <strong>2019</strong>
CLICK TO WATCH: ‘HP DEVICE AS A SERVICE (DAAS)<br />
PROACTIVE MANAGEMENT’<br />
59<br />
development is crucial to recruiting<br />
and developing a highly-skilled,<br />
future-ready workforce. Within the<br />
technology sector, there’s an urgent<br />
need to diversify the STEM talent<br />
pipeline and bring new thinking to the<br />
fields of science that will shape our<br />
tomorrow. They are crucial cornerstones<br />
of the fourth Industrial Revolution<br />
– and it’s only by ensuring fair<br />
opportunities and representation that<br />
we can consider them to be truly<br />
innovative.<br />
The opposite is also true, however.<br />
Across all industries, there is a growing<br />
www.businesschief.com
PEOPLE<br />
60<br />
focus on ‘soft’ and social skills,<br />
particularly around communication<br />
and emotional intelligence. These are<br />
the skills that bolster creative thinking<br />
and complex problem-solving – the<br />
concepts that translate into a blueprint<br />
for services and solutions of the future.<br />
eLearning platforms and self-paced<br />
programmes have changed the way we<br />
can acquire and develop skills at work,<br />
but in order to engage employees in a<br />
shared mission those competencies<br />
must be underpinned by a culture of<br />
collaboration, knowledge and growth.<br />
LEADING THE WAY<br />
So how do you lead an organization<br />
to transformation? Transform the<br />
leadership of the organization. Put<br />
simply, business leaders must embody<br />
the values of the change they want to<br />
make. HP itself was reinvented as a<br />
multi-billion-dollar start-up, and we’re<br />
seeing our strategy pay off – but<br />
would be nothing without the strong<br />
and motivated teams behind the<br />
business. I’ve always tried to stick to<br />
my leadership principles to help<br />
create and foster that culture.<br />
Managing cycles of innovation and<br />
MARCH <strong>2019</strong>
61<br />
regular organizational change are part<br />
of the job, but more substantial transformation<br />
and reinvention need vision, role<br />
models and commitment to successfully<br />
bring a workforce on the journey.<br />
Transforming an organization and<br />
building skills requires everyone to be<br />
open to change. Leadership teams<br />
need to lead the charge with wholehearted<br />
commitment and investment<br />
in their development, to set the best<br />
example for their organization.<br />
If we are to believe that the only<br />
constant is change, then there will<br />
www.businesschief.com
PEOPLE<br />
62<br />
“This may well be<br />
a technologydriven<br />
revolution,<br />
but ultimately it is<br />
the people behind<br />
the screens and<br />
machines who<br />
make the change”<br />
—<br />
Nick Lazaridis,<br />
President of EMEA for HP Inc<br />
MARCH <strong>2019</strong>
always be a new skills gap to tackle.<br />
Build a foundation for an organization<br />
that’s open to change, committed to<br />
learning and continuously improving,<br />
and not afraid to fail along the way,<br />
and you will build the basis for<br />
tomorrow’s industry.<br />
This may well be a technology-driven<br />
revolution, but ultimately it is the people<br />
behind the screens and machines who<br />
make the change. As someone who<br />
has spent their career reinventing in a<br />
rapidly changing world, I’ve seen how<br />
it’s possible to transform an organization<br />
with positive impact for people and<br />
planet. Technology might change the<br />
way things are done, but it is squarely<br />
within our power as the leaders of<br />
industry to think creatively and solve<br />
the challenges of tomorrow.<br />
63<br />
www.businesschief.com
SUSTAINABILITY<br />
64<br />
OPEN DATA ADDRESSING<br />
WORLD HUNGER —<br />
SOLVING THE<br />
AGRICULTURAL CRISIS<br />
FOR A MORE<br />
SUSTAINABLE FUTURE<br />
WRITTEN BY<br />
ANDRÉ LAPERRIÈRE,<br />
EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, GODAN<br />
MARCH <strong>2019</strong>
www.businesschief.com<br />
65
SUSTAINABILITY<br />
66<br />
Today, hunger is bringing suffering<br />
to over 795mn people across the<br />
globe. Those affected currently do<br />
not have access to enough food to live<br />
sustainably. Although a majority of this<br />
population are based in the world’s<br />
most vulnerable regions, this does not<br />
contain the issue within borders as<br />
food security issues are also residing<br />
in some of the most developed nations.<br />
The UK is reportedly one of the most<br />
food insecure nations in the European<br />
Union, and it is by no means an<br />
economically undeveloped nation.<br />
The threat of an agricultural crisis is<br />
very much a reality across the globe.<br />
Crippling costs, poor weather conditions<br />
and disease outbreaks have hit<br />
landscapes, farmers and businesses<br />
hard over the years and the potential<br />
impacts can be tenfold. The UK for<br />
example, has suffered from record<br />
high temperatures, reported outbreaks<br />
of foot and mouth disease and is also<br />
in the midst of an uncertain trading<br />
future as Brexit looms. In Africa, where<br />
MARCH <strong>2019</strong>
“OPEN DATA CAN<br />
PLAY A CRITICAL<br />
ROLE IN HELPING<br />
TO ACHIEVE THE<br />
SUSTAINABLE<br />
DEVELOPMENT<br />
GOALS PROPOSED<br />
BY THE UNITED<br />
NATIONS”<br />
—<br />
André Laperrière,<br />
Executive Director, GODAN 67<br />
water conservation issues, malnutrition<br />
and hunger are still pertinent, climate<br />
and weather are one of the principal<br />
causes. The agricultural industry is a<br />
volatile one, from either ends of the<br />
globe. We are continuing to experience<br />
the struggle to meet the growing<br />
demands of the consumer, to combat<br />
the fluctuation in supply, the instability<br />
of markets and the lack of investment<br />
in the agriculture industry in many<br />
nations.<br />
The agricultural crises in countries<br />
across Africa present a notable<br />
example of these issues. The continent’s<br />
farming industries have been<br />
suffering due to the lack of shared<br />
information and data, most small-scale<br />
isolated farmers in rural African<br />
communities are missing out on new<br />
and improved methods and best<br />
practices of farming and agricultural<br />
processes. This issue, married with the<br />
water contamination crisis affecting<br />
sub-Saharan Africa - where only 16%<br />
of the population have access to clean<br />
www.businesschief.com
SUSTAINABILITY<br />
68<br />
water and have no access to critical<br />
information relating to water quality or<br />
weather data -demonstrates how there<br />
is the significant need for access to<br />
Open Data to help bring about an end<br />
to the crisis, save lives and create a<br />
more sustainable future.<br />
Open Data has developed alongside<br />
technological advancements throughout<br />
the years. However, its potential<br />
impact on the agricultural space has<br />
rarely been considered a key solution<br />
to solving the food crisis. The potential<br />
for the use of Open Data to combat<br />
food issues can and should no longer<br />
be ignored; not only because of the<br />
relevant historical data and the<br />
potential to increase production it can<br />
provide, but its usefulness in monitoring<br />
water supplies, anticipating<br />
changes in the weather and also<br />
sharing crucial information across<br />
borders so that nations can learn best<br />
practices from each other and prosper.<br />
Through the use of satellite data,<br />
remote sensing and mapping, farmers,<br />
businesses and consumers in the<br />
agricultural industry can harness the<br />
most relevant and useful information to<br />
improve and adapt practices, make<br />
MARCH <strong>2019</strong>
CLICK TO WATCH: ‘ANDRÉ LAPERRIERE AT SWAT4HCLS CONFERENCE,<br />
ANTWERP, 3-6 DECEMBER 2018’<br />
69<br />
“THERE IS STILL A LONG WAY TO GO<br />
BEFORE OPEN DATA ACCESS IS<br />
GLOBALLY ACCEPTED AND UTILISED”<br />
—<br />
André Laperrière,<br />
Executive Director, GODAN<br />
better decisions and ensure sustainability.<br />
Increasing access will trigger<br />
innovations that will bring both<br />
agriculture and nutrition to the next,<br />
higher level of impact, improving<br />
efficiency, yields, competitiveness and<br />
ultimately increasing food security<br />
across the world.<br />
The Ghana-based organisation,<br />
Esoko, presents a prime example of<br />
the benefits of Open-Data access to<br />
the industry by illustrating how mobile<br />
phone technology can be integral to<br />
allowing farmers and their buyers to<br />
access Open Data to obtain information<br />
to improve access to markets and<br />
www.businesschief.com
SUSTAINABILITY<br />
70<br />
encourage fairer pricing based on<br />
shared feedback. By utilising Open Data<br />
to collect data on a national scale, the<br />
technology solution TradeNet was born,<br />
enabling farmers to share and access<br />
data through SMS with customers and<br />
other farmers. This data is obtained<br />
through existing channels such as<br />
weather data channels and other basic<br />
technology, to enable a self-sustainable<br />
business model combining data,<br />
farmers, customers, markets/ dealers<br />
and phone companies on an open<br />
system to benefit the livelihoods of<br />
hundreds and thousands of families.<br />
Those using the technology can both<br />
collect and input data regarding the<br />
selling price of basic commodities, such<br />
as the prices of seeds and fertilizers and<br />
send daily updates to farmers through<br />
SMS. Thus, the farmers can determine<br />
their input costs, increasing their selling<br />
profit by utilizing the information made<br />
available to them. Now, more than<br />
350,000 farmers have joined the Esoko<br />
platform in 10 countries in Africa and it<br />
continues to expand.<br />
In the West, countries such as The<br />
MARCH <strong>2019</strong>
“FOOD SECURITY ISSUES<br />
ARE ALSO RESIDING<br />
IN SOME OF THE MOST<br />
DEVELOPED NATIONS”<br />
—<br />
André Laperrière,<br />
Executive Director, GODAN<br />
71<br />
Netherlands are also benefitting from<br />
the offerings of Open Data as more web<br />
applications aiming to improve accessibility<br />
to Open Data are unlocking<br />
valuable data related to historical<br />
weather patterns and food consumption<br />
data, accessible to those involved in<br />
agriculture and the environment. Similar<br />
to the organisation in Ghana, these<br />
applications are also user-generated,<br />
allowing farmers and those in the<br />
agricultural sector to input data for all<br />
participants to see, allowing best<br />
practices to be shared and adapted.<br />
In the south, the ‘digital divide’ has<br />
played a huge role in agricultural crises,<br />
as large industrialized farms are<br />
becoming more cost efficient and<br />
competitive, while the small traditional<br />
farmers are gradually bringing<br />
themselves out of the markets. This is<br />
due to the large industrial farms/<br />
wealthy countries and businesses that<br />
already make efficient use of data to<br />
improve techniques, products, market<br />
access, rapidly increasing their<br />
competitiveness in the world markets.<br />
Open Data can play a critical role in<br />
www.businesschief.com
SUSTAINABILITY<br />
72<br />
helping to achieve the Sustainable<br />
Development Goals proposed by the<br />
United Nations. Open Data can help<br />
foster economic growth and job<br />
creation, improve efficiency and<br />
effectiveness of public services by<br />
allowing the cross fertilization and<br />
synergy of different industries, sectors<br />
and governments leading to new<br />
practices, new equipment and new<br />
technologies that in turn, lead to better<br />
yields and the stimulation of private<br />
and public economies. This will in turn,<br />
improve government transparency,<br />
citizen participation and accountability<br />
through the sharing of data across<br />
communities and borders.<br />
However, there is still a long way to<br />
go before Open Data access is globally<br />
accepted and utilised. This drive and<br />
determination for it to be a success<br />
needs to be welcomed by respective<br />
governments and organisations across<br />
the globe and pushed to the top of the<br />
agenda. With the correct approach<br />
and implementation methods in place,<br />
Open Data can have a high economic<br />
and social return on investment for<br />
countries all over the globe and in all<br />
stages of development. Areas in Africa,<br />
MARCH <strong>2019</strong>
“NOW, MORE THAN<br />
350,000 FARMERS<br />
HAVE JOINED THE<br />
ESOKO PLATFORM<br />
IN 10 COUNTRIES<br />
IN AFRICA”<br />
—<br />
André Laperrière,<br />
Executive Director, GODAN<br />
73<br />
Latin America, Asia and Europe have<br />
already demonstrated how increased<br />
access to data can help develop<br />
economies and farming practices,<br />
taking a significant step forward to<br />
achieving sustainability and solving the<br />
hunger crisis.<br />
www.businesschief.com
April 29-30, <strong>2019</strong><br />
The Ritz Carlton, Atlan
ta | Atlanta, GA
CITY FOCUS<br />
76<br />
City Focus<br />
CHARL<br />
<strong>Business</strong> <strong>Chief</strong> takes a look at Charlotte,<br />
North Carolina, and some of the companies<br />
that are leading its smart city mission<br />
WRITTEN BY HARRY MENEAR<br />
MARCH <strong>2019</strong>
OTTE 77<br />
www.businesschief.com
CITY FOCUS | CHARLOTTE<br />
78<br />
Officially founded in 1768 and named<br />
Charlotte Town as a tribute to Queen<br />
Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz,<br />
the wife of King George III, Charlotte is a city of<br />
both tradition and revolution. Home to 860,000<br />
people, NBA team the Carolina Hornets as<br />
well as the NFL’s Carolina Panthers, Charlotte<br />
is also, according to Mental Floss, the Pimento<br />
Cheese Capital of the world. The North Carolina<br />
city may have a rich connection with its<br />
past (including a local belief that the town<br />
issued its own declaration of independence<br />
from British rule a full year before the rest of<br />
the thirteen colonies) but the government<br />
and people of Charlotte have eyes firmly<br />
fixed on the future.<br />
NORTH END SMART DISTRICT<br />
Starting in 2010, Charlotte has undergone<br />
a transformative journey into one of the world’s<br />
smartest cities. Ranked 20th on the global<br />
smart city rankings in 2018 by the Eden Strategy<br />
Institute, Charlotte places ahead of modern<br />
MARCH <strong>2019</strong>
metropolises like Copenhagen, Washington<br />
DC and Vancouver with a successful clean<br />
energy program that achieved a 19% reduction<br />
in energy consumption. Also, according<br />
to the report, “the city designated the North<br />
End Smart District (NESD) as a comprehensive<br />
first step to piloting smart city initiatives<br />
on a large scale, engaging and partnering with<br />
community leaders and residents, companies<br />
and entrepreneurs, non-profits, and<br />
City departments.”<br />
Situated between North Davidson Street<br />
and Atando Avenue, the North End Smart<br />
District is made up of eight neighborhoods<br />
to the north of the city’s uptown. According<br />
to the City of Charlotte, the District aims to<br />
be “a community that uses data and technology<br />
to make decisions that impact mobility,<br />
safety, energy, public services, education<br />
and environmental health”. Supported by<br />
governmental initiatives, Charlotte’s startup<br />
scene has grown into one of the most vibrant<br />
entrepreneurial ecosystems in the country.<br />
As of October 2018, the city is home to three<br />
unicorns - startup companies with a market<br />
valuation of over $1bn. <strong>Business</strong> <strong>Chief</strong> takes<br />
a look at three of the Queen City’s greatest<br />
success stories.<br />
79<br />
www.businesschief.com
CITY FOCUS | CHARLOTTE<br />
80<br />
AVIDXCHANGE<br />
Founded in 2000, AvidXchange is an<br />
industry leader in automating invoice<br />
and payment processes in the real<br />
estate, financial services, energy, and<br />
construction sectors, according to<br />
Bloomberg. The company became<br />
a unicorn in July 2017, making it the<br />
second-oldest of the three.<br />
In January <strong>2019</strong>, Extent Research<br />
named AvidXchange as one of the top<br />
players in the Global Check Printing<br />
Software Market. In the same month,<br />
the company announced plans to<br />
invest $41mn in Mecklenburg County,<br />
expanding their Charlotte Headquarters<br />
to create at least 1,200 new tech<br />
jobs on the periphery of the North End<br />
Smart District, according to the North<br />
Carolina 100.<br />
“We launched AvidXchange 18 years<br />
ago in a coffee shop in Charlotte with<br />
five employees. Since then, we’ve grown<br />
to 1,200 employees and we’re proud<br />
to call North Carolina home,” AvidXchange<br />
CEO Michael Praeger said.<br />
“I’m thrilled to have the State’s continued<br />
support as we look to double our<br />
employee base in the next five years.”<br />
www.avidxchange.com<br />
MARCH <strong>2019</strong>
81<br />
RED VENTURES<br />
Also founded in 2000, Red Ventures<br />
was the first Charlotte startup to attain<br />
unicorn status in 2015. The company<br />
operates a portfolio of technologies,<br />
digital assets, and strategic partnerships<br />
that connect consumers across<br />
three continents to brands like Bankrate,<br />
creditcards.com, the Points Guy<br />
and NextAdvisor.<br />
In January 2009, Ric Elias, co-founder<br />
and CEO of Red Ventures, was on board<br />
the infamous crash landing of US Airways<br />
Flight 1549 on the Hudson river. On the<br />
10th anniversary of the crash, Elias talked<br />
with Forbes magazine about the ways<br />
in which the event changed both his life<br />
and the future of Red Ventures.<br />
“For starters, the plan for Red Ventures<br />
completely changed after the<br />
incident,” Elias said. “We went from<br />
wanting to build a company that we<br />
could sell to deciding that Red Ventures<br />
will never be for sale. We turned<br />
the company into a perch from where<br />
to live a life. This freed us from outside<br />
www.businesschief.com
CITY FOCUS | CHARLOTTE<br />
82<br />
expectations. It gave us the freedom<br />
and creativity to explore all sorts of<br />
new ways to build a company.”<br />
Currently, Red Ventures employs<br />
3,600 people across 13 offices worldwide.<br />
Although the official<br />
headquarters has since been moved<br />
to South Carolina, Charlotte remains<br />
the company’s spiritual home and second-largest<br />
base, with a large hand in<br />
the local community and Charlotte’s<br />
smart city mission. In an effort to<br />
focus on the social component of its<br />
tech transformation, the Charlotte<br />
Government runs a number of programs,<br />
including TechCharlotte: a<br />
housing and neighborhood services<br />
initiative that not only creates a new,<br />
free community technology access<br />
space, but also partners with Red<br />
Ventures Road to Hire and others to<br />
provide training and access to jobs.<br />
www.redventures.com<br />
TRESATA INC<br />
After acquiring a further $50mn in<br />
funding in October 2018, predictive<br />
analytics company Tresata became<br />
Charlotte’s third unicorn, with a total<br />
valuation of $1bn. Based in the South<br />
End of the city, the company develops<br />
software platforms for real-time customer<br />
intelligence management. Its<br />
software enables businesses to monetize<br />
customer data by collecting,<br />
curating, computing, and converting it<br />
to customer intelligence across all<br />
existing and growing data assets,<br />
according to Bloomberg.<br />
“Our software is uniquely able to<br />
automate data analysis to solve for<br />
complex business problems, allowing<br />
MARCH <strong>2019</strong>
83<br />
decision-makers to address industry’s<br />
and society’s biggest challenges,”<br />
Tresata co-founder and CEO<br />
Abhishek Mehta said in a statement.<br />
According to a report by SiliconAN-<br />
GLE, the $50mn represented the first<br />
outside funding accepted by the company.<br />
Founder and <strong>Chief</strong> Executive<br />
Officer Abhishek Mehta explained in<br />
the report that he always saw revenue<br />
as the cheapest source of funding.<br />
“We have had tremendous interest<br />
from investors ever since we started<br />
the company and never found the<br />
right partner,” Mehta said in an interview.<br />
“This time, with GCP, we found<br />
that partner. With GCP, we have someone<br />
on our side who believes strongly<br />
in our vision — that in data lies the<br />
power to enrich life. We are excited<br />
about this investment, as it is a validation<br />
of the confidence our clients have<br />
placed in us from the beginning.”<br />
tresata.com<br />
www.businesschief.com
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TOP 10<br />
86<br />
MARCH <strong>2019</strong>
TOP 10<br />
Smart Cities<br />
in the <strong>USA</strong><br />
By 2050, over two-thirds of the world’s population<br />
will live in cities. As urban populations soar and<br />
technology becomes more ingrained in our<br />
day-to-day lives, smart cities are becoming an<br />
increasingly common reality. <strong>Business</strong> <strong>Chief</strong> takes<br />
a look at the top 10 Smart City Governments in<br />
the US, according to the Eden Strategy Institute’s<br />
2018 ranking.<br />
87<br />
WRITTEN BY HARRY MENEAR<br />
www.businesschief.com
TOP 10<br />
10<br />
88<br />
Atlanta<br />
GEORGIA<br />
With a population of 490,000, Atlanta is the most heavily forested<br />
urban area in the United States, with 47.9% of the city covered by<br />
trees, according to the National Forest Service. SmartATL, the city’s<br />
forward-looking mission plan began with the creation of a smart district<br />
in its North Avenue Smart Corridor. Since then, Atlanta’s public<br />
and private sectors have been experimenting with IoT sensors for<br />
data collection, video surveillance to assist with traffic management,<br />
interactive LED street lights, and autonomous vehicles. According to<br />
the Eden Strategy Institute (ESI), what sets the Georgia state capitol<br />
apart from other smart cities is it’s drive to transform at scale.<br />
www.atlantaga.org<br />
MARCH <strong>2019</strong>
09<br />
89<br />
Los Angeles<br />
CALIFORNIA<br />
The second-largest city in the US by population, Los Angeles, California,<br />
is home to over 4mn people. Coupled with the geological challenges<br />
of a municipality built on the earthquake-prone San Andreas Fault,<br />
the landscape of Los Angeles is characterized by its sprawl. According<br />
to the ESI, the city prizes resilience and sustainability through open<br />
data in the pursuit of its smart city goals. Los Angeles has an online<br />
portal for the distribution of large datasets and statistics on traffic,<br />
pollution, infrastructure, demographics, economic, health, climate,<br />
and cultural activities.<br />
www.lacity.org<br />
www.businesschief.com
TOP 10<br />
08<br />
90<br />
Columbus<br />
OHIO<br />
The state capital of Ohio, Columbus is home to approximately 900,000<br />
people. In 2015, the US Department of Transportation held a Smart<br />
City Challenge for cities to submit proposals for smart transportation<br />
systems that improved urban mobility. Named the winner of the challenge<br />
in 2016, Columbus received $40mn in funding to support the<br />
revolutionizing of its transportation network. Last year, the city launched<br />
its proprietary operating system for a citywide campaign of data gathering.<br />
Columbus Mayor, Andrew Ginther, said in a press release:<br />
“Fundamental to ‘becoming smart’ as a city is discovering how to use<br />
data to improve city services and quality of life for residents.<br />
www.columbus.gov<br />
MARCH <strong>2019</strong>
07<br />
91<br />
Washington<br />
DC<br />
Situated on the Potomac river between Maryland and Virginia, the<br />
District of Columbia is home to the city of Washington, the federal capital<br />
of the US, and has a population of approximately 700,000. The city’s<br />
smart city initiatives are overseen by Lab@DC. According to the ESI,<br />
Lab@DC uses scientific research methods to test and improve municipal<br />
policies. The organization is composed of a team of social scientists,<br />
data scientists, operation experts, and policymakers who collectively<br />
experiment with new policy ideas, evaluate policy outcomes, and distil<br />
insights. The organization has been responsible for the introduction of<br />
body cameras to the DC police force, flexible rent programs to combat<br />
homelessness, and litter reduction initiatives.<br />
smarter.dc.gov<br />
www.businesschief.com
TOP 10<br />
06<br />
Photo © City of Charlotte on Facebook<br />
92<br />
Charlotte<br />
NORTH CAROLINA<br />
Founded in 1768, Charlotte, North Carolina, is a city with a rebellious<br />
and forward-looking spirit, even claiming to have submitted its own<br />
declaration of independence from British rule a year before the rest<br />
of the thirteen colonies. Now, the city is embracing its own smart city<br />
vision, with the creation of the North End Smart District, “a community<br />
that uses data and technology to make decisions that impact mobility,<br />
safety, energy, public services, education and environmental health.”<br />
The city itself is home to three unicorn startups: AvidXchange, Red<br />
Ventures, and Tresata.<br />
www.charlottenc.gov<br />
MARCH <strong>2019</strong>
05<br />
93<br />
Seattle<br />
WASHINGTON<br />
Home to tech giants like Microsoft, Amazon and Valve, Seattle,<br />
Washington, has a history of leadership in the digital age. Microsoft<br />
announced in January its commitment to invest $500mn in affordable<br />
housing to offset the income inequality caused by the area’s<br />
saturation with high-pay, high-skill tech jobs. The city also values its<br />
partnerships with academic institutions like the University of Washington.<br />
In a GeekWire report, Bill Howe, AD of the eScience Institute<br />
at the UW said: “We have the right folks at the University of Washington<br />
studying research issues; we have the right mindset in the city to<br />
treat this as a priority. Data is in the water here.”<br />
www.seattle.gov<br />
www.businesschief.com
TOP 10<br />
04<br />
94<br />
Chicago<br />
ILLINOIS<br />
Chicago, Illinois is the third-largest city in the United States, with<br />
a population of over 2.7 M people. ESI highlights the emphasis placed<br />
on using technology to engage with societal problems. “Chicago<br />
launched “Smart Chicago” in partnership with a local foundation and<br />
fund, to co-create smart city solutions with residents through civic<br />
participation, functioning alongside the government’s own systematic<br />
application of smart city solutions.” Chicago, like Los Angeles, is<br />
utilizing open data practices to engage the community in information<br />
and knowledge exchange in order to create a more livable city.<br />
www.citytechcollaborative.org<br />
MARCH <strong>2019</strong>
03<br />
95<br />
San Francisco<br />
CALIFORNIA<br />
Home to over 880,000 people, San Francisco, California is also home<br />
to some of the United States’ most successful tech startups: Uber,<br />
Lyft, Airbnb, Twitter and Dropbox to name a few. The city was a finalist<br />
in the 2016 Smart City Challenge, receiving $11mn which has been<br />
divided between six initiatives to reduce transit problems. According<br />
to the Bipartisan Policy Center, the SFpark project uses wireless<br />
sensors to create smarter parking management through demand-<br />
responsive pricing. Like Los Angeles and Chicago, San Francisco has<br />
also taken steps to review the way the city handles data. The city<br />
appointed its first <strong>Chief</strong> Data Officer, Joy Bonaguro as a result.<br />
sfgov.org<br />
www.businesschief.com
TOP 10<br />
02<br />
96<br />
Boston<br />
MASSACHUSETTS<br />
Boston, which is home to over 685,000 people, as well<br />
as some of the most prestigious academic institutions in<br />
the world, has adopted a citizen-centric approach to its<br />
smart city policies. “Boston believes that a truly smart<br />
city should allow its residents to define what exactly “smart”<br />
means to them,” writes the ESI. This idea is expressed by<br />
the city’s civic experiments known as the Beta Blocks which<br />
attempt to build more meaningful relationships between<br />
communities, companies, researchers, and designers.<br />
The first event in this program was the “Robot Block Party<br />
for 4,500 participants to discuss artificial intelligence,<br />
autonomous vehicles, and robotics.”.<br />
wwwwww.boston.gov/departments/new-urbanmechanics/beta-blocks<br />
MARCH <strong>2019</strong>
Photos © City of Boston [Top Left & Right]<br />
97<br />
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TOP 10<br />
01<br />
98<br />
New York<br />
NEW YORK<br />
Over 8.6mn people live in New York City. With a population<br />
more than double the size of the country’s second<br />
largest city, NYC faces a unique set of challenges.<br />
To cope with the complexities of scale, the New York<br />
government has taken steps to decentralize its leadership,<br />
splitting its smart city initiatives between the<br />
Mayor’s Office of Sustainability, the Mayor’s Office of<br />
Recovery and Resiliency and the Mayor’s Office of the<br />
<strong>Chief</strong> Technology Officer. Together these offices implement<br />
their portfolio of projects with flexibility, involving<br />
other departments and agencies as required. Collectively<br />
they are focusing on smart water, waste and electric<br />
lighting management to reduce environmental impact<br />
while coping with the city’s ever-growing population.<br />
www1.nyc.gov<br />
MARCH <strong>2019</strong>
www.businesschief.com<br />
99
100<br />
MARCH <strong>2019</strong>
FINTECH<br />
Agility and customercentricity:<br />
Progressive<br />
Leasing’s recipe<br />
for fintech success<br />
WRIT TEN BY<br />
LAURA MULLAN<br />
PRODUCED BY<br />
ANDY TURNER<br />
101<br />
www.businesschief.com
PROGRESSIVE LEASING<br />
Harnessing agile methodology<br />
and a customer-centric<br />
approach, Progressive Leasing<br />
provides simple and affordable<br />
purchase options for creditchallenged<br />
consumers<br />
102<br />
Y<br />
ou could argue that in no sector is disruption<br />
more palpable than in finance. For<br />
a long time, new entrants found it difficult<br />
to break into the market – but the rise of fintech<br />
companies has quickly changed that. These<br />
disruptors have helped to usher in a new era where<br />
technological prowess and a customer-centric<br />
approach have loosened the grasp of incumbents<br />
on the market. It’s also provided greater choice for<br />
customers, allowing them to select the business<br />
which best caters to their needs. But what about<br />
the rising number of consumers who are being<br />
turned down by primary and secondary financing?<br />
Where do those with less-than-perfect credit fit<br />
into the equation?<br />
Respecting that these customers were underserved<br />
and appreciating this was an untapped<br />
market, Progressive Leasing, a wholly-owned<br />
subsidiary of Aaron’s Inc., has made its mark. For<br />
over 19 years, the firm has provided simple and<br />
affordable purchase options for credit-challenged<br />
consumers and it now stands as the largest and<br />
longest-tenured virtual lease-to-own provider in the<br />
MARCH <strong>2019</strong>
FINTECH<br />
103<br />
www.businesschief.com
PROGRESSIVE LEASING<br />
104<br />
“The culture<br />
is really one<br />
of the main<br />
reasons<br />
I joined the<br />
company”<br />
—<br />
Ben Hawksworth,<br />
<strong>Chief</strong> Technology Officer,<br />
Progressive Leasing<br />
US. Ben Hawksworth, <strong>Chief</strong> Technology<br />
Officer (CTO), says the firm ultimately<br />
owes its success to two things: its deep<br />
customer focus and its significant scale.<br />
“What gives us an edge is our scale<br />
– we’re the number one in the industry<br />
and we have been at it the longest,” he<br />
observes. “With US$2bn in revenue,<br />
thousands of retail partners and a very<br />
loyal customer base, this scale has<br />
proven to be a real competitive advantage<br />
for us and it’s one we hope to<br />
leverage as we move forward.” Indeed,<br />
today Progressive Leasing’s lease-toown<br />
option has helped millions of<br />
customers and their families, meaning<br />
that they can buy the goods they need<br />
(whether it’s a mattress or a mobile<br />
phone), even if they have imperfect<br />
credit or an inability to pay for their<br />
purchase upfront. Looking<br />
forward, Hawksworth is wellequipped<br />
to steer the firm as<br />
it grows in size. A seasoned<br />
business and technology leader,<br />
Hawksworth spent almost two<br />
decades at the two largest payment<br />
providers in the US. As such, he has<br />
first-hand experience of how to scale<br />
technology. “When you’re dealing with<br />
thousands of transactions a second,<br />
MARCH <strong>2019</strong>
FINTECH<br />
CLICK TO WATCH: ‘CUSTOMER STORY’<br />
105<br />
you have to design your systems and<br />
think about your products and processes<br />
a little bit differently,” he says. “You<br />
have to ensure that they’re hardened,<br />
that they can withstand the forces of<br />
uptime, reliability and accuracy.”<br />
Hawksworth and his team have<br />
worked diligently to ensure that the<br />
customer remains front and center<br />
of the firm’s vision. As a digitally-focused<br />
business, this journey starts<br />
with software development and, more<br />
specifically, product development. “We<br />
have an intense focus on our products<br />
and solutions and how they meet our<br />
customers’ needs,” Hawksworth<br />
explains. “From our Quality Engineers<br />
to our CEO, everyone is involved in<br />
the product experience creation. We<br />
measure usability, practice design-first<br />
thinking and, at the end of the day,<br />
we’re really passionate about taking<br />
the friction out of the process for our<br />
customers at every step.” To sum this<br />
up, one of the firm’s core values is to<br />
‘innovate and simplify’. This simple<br />
mantra, Hawksworth believes, is one<br />
which is central to Progressive Leasing’s<br />
way of thinking.<br />
To put this vision into motion, the<br />
www.businesschief.com
PROGRESSIVE LEASING<br />
106<br />
business has turned its attention to agile<br />
methodology, a software development<br />
practice which helps teams respond<br />
to the unpredictability of constructing<br />
software. Hawksworth and his<br />
colleagues have practiced an agile<br />
approach at a team level for quite some<br />
time but the real challenge was how to<br />
scale this as teams naturally became<br />
more interdependent on each other and<br />
as products became more complex in<br />
a rapidly growing organization.<br />
This is where Progressive Leasing<br />
first had the idea for an Agile Portfolio<br />
Office (APO). Hawksworth describes<br />
this as a place which “brings a center<br />
of gravity to our software development<br />
lifecycle and adds central accountability<br />
to the process of development”.<br />
Essentially, this helped to put a structure<br />
in place which enabled collaboration,<br />
allowed the firm to scale and to promote<br />
visibility into the product development<br />
lifecycle. Progressive Leasing then<br />
decided to take this one step further<br />
by exploring a dual track, agile product<br />
development methodology where<br />
discovering what to build is just as<br />
important as the building process.<br />
“Our analysis showed that we spent too<br />
much time figuring out the feasibility<br />
$2bn<br />
Approximate<br />
revenue<br />
1999<br />
Year founded<br />
1,600<br />
Approximate number<br />
of employees<br />
of a product or a feature during the actual<br />
execution of the sprint work itself,”<br />
explains Hawksworth. “Dual-track puts<br />
accountability on three people – the<br />
product manager, the UX designer and<br />
the tech lead – to assess the feasibility,<br />
effort and scope of an idea. It allows us to<br />
truly determine whether or not an idea is<br />
worth building before we start the work.”<br />
MARCH <strong>2019</strong>
FINTECH<br />
107<br />
Successful ideas from the discovery<br />
track are then followed up through<br />
a so-called delivery track. This allows<br />
Progressive Leasing to concentrate its<br />
energy and efforts on projects which will<br />
deliver value. “By spending a little more<br />
time upfront, it makes for a much more<br />
rewarding experience for our engineers<br />
and product managers,” he adds.<br />
Hawksworth has only just scratched<br />
the surface of Progressive Leasing’s<br />
journey. The business is also implementing<br />
an API management platform from<br />
Google which he says will “give the<br />
business the ability to innovate on the<br />
edge” allowing it to innovate more quickly,<br />
consistently and securely. In line with<br />
its customer focus, Progressive Leasing<br />
www.businesschief.com
Tekmark delivers<br />
innovative, cost-effective,<br />
and results driven<br />
solutions.<br />
Established. Experienced. Entrepreneurial.<br />
By having a thorough understanding of our clients’ needs,<br />
combined with our in-house technical expertise, Tekmark is<br />
adept at assembling teams and delivering services that<br />
contribute to all facets of your business growth.<br />
• Application Development & Agile Transformation<br />
• <strong>Business</strong> Intelligence & Data Analytics<br />
• Cybersecurity<br />
• Managed IT & Network Services<br />
• Software Quality Management<br />
• Technology Staffing<br />
• Telecommunications Engineering<br />
Proud Technology Staffing & Solutions Partner of Progressive Leasing.<br />
Congratulations to Ben Hawksworth and the<br />
team at Progressive Leasing for their<br />
innovative technology and industry leading<br />
product innovation!<br />
To learn more visit: www.tekmark.com
FINTECH<br />
“We measure<br />
usability, we<br />
practice designfirst<br />
thinking and,<br />
at the end of the<br />
day, we’re really<br />
passionate about<br />
taking the friction<br />
out of the process<br />
for our customers<br />
at every step”<br />
—<br />
Ben Hawksworth,<br />
<strong>Chief</strong> Technology Officer,<br />
Progressive Leasing<br />
is also exploring new ways to reach and<br />
interact with its customers. This often<br />
involves tailoring the customer journey<br />
to the type of device they’re using. “It<br />
means that we’re increasingly putting<br />
more and more of the process into our<br />
customers’ devices whether that’s a<br />
mobile phone or a tablet,” he says. “That’s<br />
really where we can take technology<br />
and deliver a better experience for<br />
our customers and retail partners.”<br />
Additionally, Hawksworth highlights<br />
how the firm is also striving to make its<br />
workflow more “content driven” using<br />
a content management platform to<br />
deliver real-time, uniquely customizable<br />
workflows for its retail partners.<br />
As a digitally-driven firm, product<br />
development isn’t just a technology<br />
issue at Progressive Leasing: it’s<br />
company wide. As the company rapidly<br />
grows, constraints and bottlenecks are<br />
something that every department faces.<br />
Hawksworth says: “I have the ability and<br />
the pleasure to be able to sit down with<br />
our CEO and talk about how maybe<br />
a legacy design or a legacy constraint<br />
creates friction or slows down our<br />
delivery process. We can easily talk<br />
about investing in the foundation as<br />
much as in new features and products,”<br />
reflects Hawksworth. “We really try<br />
to balance staying focused on product<br />
innovation and eliminating legacy<br />
constraints.” Another challenge with<br />
software development undoubtedly<br />
lies in customer transparency. It’s<br />
a core value for Progressive Leasing<br />
which the company won’t concede on.<br />
“That’s really the key quest for us,”<br />
Hawksworth admits. “We never want to<br />
109<br />
www.businesschief.com
PROGRESSIVE LEASING<br />
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MARCH <strong>2019</strong>
FINTECH<br />
111<br />
compromise on customer transparency<br />
and, simultaneously, we want to deliver<br />
the best user experience that we possibly<br />
can. Those two things can naturally be<br />
at odds with one another and so it’s up<br />
to us to find that perfect harmony.”<br />
This is a delicate balancing act that<br />
is undoubtedly paying off. Progressive<br />
Leasing has grown nearly 10 times in<br />
size over the past six years, with its<br />
success culminating in a bumper Black<br />
Friday holiday. “We had the single most<br />
successful day in the company’s history<br />
which was a testament to the hard work<br />
that our product, engineering, sales and<br />
operations teams put into the business,”<br />
says Hawksworth proudly. “It<br />
demonstrated that we met our own<br />
expectations of flawless execution on<br />
our most successful day.” However,<br />
such growth brings along its own<br />
challenges and opportunities – one of<br />
which involves attracting and retaining<br />
key talent. Today, the business has<br />
several hundred people working in its<br />
technology and product department<br />
with more being added every day.<br />
Headquartered in Salt Lake City, a<br />
region which has been dubbed ‘Silicon<br />
Slopes’ for its buzzing tech scene,<br />
www.businesschief.com
PROGRESSIVE LEASING<br />
112<br />
MARCH <strong>2019</strong>
FINTECH<br />
Progressive Leasing has to work hard<br />
to ensure it not only gets the best talent,<br />
but that these individuals also work<br />
well within the firm’s culture. Progressive’s<br />
innovative recruitment team has<br />
turned to firms like Tekmark Global<br />
Solutions to find unique skills and the<br />
best talent – but for Hawksworth, it’s<br />
not about skills alone. “In this competitive<br />
market, we have to move quickly but<br />
we also feel very strongly about spending<br />
quality time with candidates to make<br />
sure they are going to be a good cultural<br />
fit,” says Hawksworth. “The culture is<br />
really one of the main reasons I joined<br />
the company. It’s second to none. It’s<br />
great to see Progressive Leasing has<br />
managed to maintain this culture even<br />
though we’ve grown to be a two-billiondollar<br />
company and my job is to make<br />
sure we keep it strong and vibrant. Firms<br />
like Tekmark understand how important<br />
culture is for us and they speak the<br />
Progressive story innately with candidates<br />
to attract the right talent required<br />
to sustain our growth.”<br />
Progressive Leasing owes a lot to its<br />
team, and it also relies on key partners,<br />
both externally and internally, to maintain<br />
113<br />
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PROGRESSIVE LEASING<br />
114<br />
its rapid momentum. “Internally, my<br />
biggest partner is our <strong>Chief</strong> Product<br />
Officer and our VP of Product. We<br />
simply can’t afford to be misaligned.<br />
If we aren’t running in the exact same<br />
direction, at the exact same target,<br />
we will not be able to deliver our vision.<br />
Meanwhile, externally, we’ve leveraged<br />
a firm called Silicon Valley Product<br />
Group (SVPG) to help us to fine-tune<br />
our process and ensure that we’re all<br />
on the same page.” With this support,<br />
Progressive Leasing is set to continue<br />
on its upward trajectory and whilst no<br />
one can predict where the finance<br />
sector will head in the future, one thing<br />
“We have an<br />
intense focus<br />
on our products<br />
and solutions<br />
and how they<br />
meet our customers’<br />
needs”<br />
—<br />
Ben Hawksworth,<br />
<strong>Chief</strong> Technology Officer,<br />
Progressive Leasing<br />
MARCH <strong>2019</strong>
FINTECH<br />
115<br />
is for certain – Progressive Leasing will<br />
remain laser-focused on the customer<br />
experience. “We believe that really<br />
listening to our customers will give us<br />
the best roadmap to our ongoing<br />
success,” Hawksworth affirms.<br />
www.businesschief.com
116<br />
PAYOMATIC:<br />
DIGITAL<br />
TRANSFORMATION<br />
TOWARDS MOBILE<br />
ENABLEMENT<br />
WRIT TEN BY<br />
JOHN O’HANLON<br />
PRODUCED BY<br />
ANDY TURNER<br />
MARCH <strong>2019</strong>
TECHNOLOGY<br />
117<br />
www.businesschief.com
PAYOMATIC<br />
For more than 60 years, Payomatic<br />
Corporation has filled the<br />
space between the formal banking<br />
system and the cash economy<br />
for millions of New Yorkers. Today<br />
money works differently than<br />
it used to, catalyzing a new<br />
digitally enabled customer focus<br />
118<br />
T<br />
he blue and yellow PAYOMATIC banner<br />
is a familiar sight in and around New York,<br />
standing above almost 150 stores or<br />
Money Centers. Nearly half of these are open 24<br />
hours a day. Since its origins in the 1950s, the<br />
company has provided an essential alternative to<br />
the formal banking system, providing the ‘underbanked<br />
and unbanked’ population with the facility<br />
to cash checks, pay bills and remit money overseas,<br />
among other services. The New York metropolitan<br />
area has always attracted a huge population of<br />
migrant and immigrant workers, and though these<br />
are by no means the only group to benefit from<br />
such services, they typically work irregular hours,<br />
maybe in multiple employments and get paid in<br />
cash or by check. Not infrequently they are<br />
supporting dependents overseas, necessitating<br />
a reliable and quick way to remit funds.<br />
For these customers, the bureaucracy of the<br />
traditional banking route is not easily accessible.<br />
However, at PAYOMATIC, they can take care of all<br />
MARCH <strong>2019</strong>
TECHNOLOGY<br />
119<br />
www.businesschief.com
PAYOMATIC<br />
120<br />
“We endeavored<br />
to build a<br />
single source<br />
of truth for<br />
the customer”<br />
—<br />
Steve Mayotte<br />
<strong>Chief</strong> Information Officer,<br />
PAYOMATIC<br />
of their business in one place. At the<br />
same time as cashing a check, they<br />
are able to pay utility bills, buy money<br />
orders, and even try their luck with the<br />
NY Lottery. The ability to walk in off<br />
the street into a welcoming store environment<br />
is important to them, and for<br />
the many shift workers whose labor<br />
keeps the city humming, the latenight<br />
availability of so many stores is<br />
a boon. PAYOMATIC is the largest<br />
financial services provider and<br />
Western Union’s biggest reseller in<br />
the New York area.<br />
FROM CONSULTANT TO CIO<br />
Like everyone else PAYOMATIC<br />
customers are busy people who want<br />
to take full advantage of the tools<br />
technology affords them. As a<br />
retail-type business with a large high<br />
street presence and the overhead<br />
costs that go with that, PAYOMATIC<br />
decided some eight years ago that it<br />
needed to bring all of its systems up<br />
to date and take advantage of the<br />
technology that had infiltrated<br />
the traditional banks. It partnered<br />
with Modus Agency, an<br />
MARCH <strong>2019</strong>
TECHNOLOGY<br />
award-winning digital innovation<br />
consultancy, to develop a multiyear<br />
plan focused on modernizing<br />
PAYOMATIC’s legacy software<br />
platforms. Modus’s Steven Mayotte<br />
and his team worked on this plan and<br />
developed a roadmap, working closely<br />
with PAYOMATIC’s CIO and COO.<br />
In 2013 Mayotte transitioned from<br />
Modus to become Vice President for<br />
IT at PAYOMATIC, and in 2015 he was<br />
appointed CIO. It was a seamless<br />
progression, he explains. “When I first<br />
engaged with PAYOMATIC the company<br />
faced problems that are familiar in the<br />
retail and financial service space. With<br />
150 locations, each one had a disparate<br />
view of the customer and each<br />
transaction was a function of that store.”<br />
Each time a customer came in with<br />
a check to cash, the customer service<br />
representative (CSR), or teller at the<br />
counter, had to take a risk on behalf of<br />
the company, making decisions about<br />
that customer and the issuer (‘maker’)<br />
of the check – and underwrite that risk.<br />
“If someone hit one location with a fraudulent<br />
check they’d probably move on to<br />
hit ten or 15 other stores because the<br />
systems did not talk to one another.”<br />
Another issue was that the stores<br />
leverage distribution of around 15<br />
121<br />
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FinTech. MarTech. HealthTech.<br />
Whatever your tech, it’s all really HumanTech.<br />
Driven by innovation, design thinking, and a deep<br />
understanding of human behavior, we create digital products<br />
and experiences that businesses—and humans—love.<br />
The HumanTech Company<br />
modus-made.com
TECHNOLOGY<br />
partner products. Each of these, like<br />
PAYOMATIC’s largest partner for<br />
remittances and international payments,<br />
Western Union, has proprietary<br />
procedures. “There were disparate<br />
systems that tellers were expected to<br />
know how to use, then enter back into<br />
the main transactional systems, mostly<br />
in real time. Losses from fraud and<br />
teller error were high. The company<br />
had not really evolved to make use of<br />
the more modern technologies<br />
available. We endeavored to build<br />
a single source of truth for the customer,<br />
as well as an online transactional<br />
system that could integrate with every<br />
third party in real time through application<br />
programming interfaces (APIs).”<br />
DIRECTED TO DIGITAL<br />
This was an ambitious goal but an<br />
essential first step in the digital journey,<br />
he says – to consolidate data from the<br />
customer, the maker, and all other<br />
sources, create better analytics to<br />
understand customer behavior, achieve<br />
123<br />
EXECUTIVE PROFILE<br />
Steven Mayotte<br />
Steve Mayotte is responsible for building and<br />
developing technology systems and<br />
infrastructure for all the PAYOMATIC<br />
businesses and for leading the company’s<br />
digital transformation. He is responsible for<br />
developing and implementing PAYOMATIC’s<br />
information security strategy and data<br />
engineering, analytics, and machine learning<br />
strategy. Mayotte has more than 12 years of<br />
experience in financial services and hightech<br />
consulting. Prior to joining<br />
PAYOMATIC, he served as Service<br />
Delivery Manager for Modus Agency.<br />
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PAYOMATIC<br />
124<br />
transparency into fraud patterns as<br />
well as underwriting models, and align<br />
these within the business so that<br />
accurate information would be available<br />
to its leadership for better decision<br />
making. It had been tackled before in<br />
the financial space, he acknowledges,<br />
but having looked at existing platforms,<br />
his team found that none of them<br />
would fit PAYOMATIC’s unique hybrid<br />
business model in the space between<br />
retail and financial services.<br />
Partnering with Modus Agency for<br />
software development, a custom-written<br />
platform known as TL2 was created that<br />
can not only encompass the inventory<br />
management and tracking of the product<br />
(cash) but also recognize all of the<br />
treasury functions required by the<br />
Federal Reserve and the banking<br />
system as well as multiple partner<br />
systems. The new platform removed the<br />
burden from 800 CSRs of working with<br />
multiple platforms when completing<br />
customer transactions, dramatically<br />
reduced fraud losses and made it<br />
much easier to manage the peaks<br />
and troughs that the stores experience<br />
on paydays, holidays and at<br />
different times of day or night. “We<br />
have seen dramatic cost savings and<br />
efficiencies at every level,” says Mayotte.<br />
“This platform<br />
paved the way for us to automate<br />
back-office processes and enhance the<br />
in-store customer experience.”<br />
Building on the success of new<br />
transactional platform PAYOMATIC<br />
turned its focus to data. From data<br />
silos, the company has achieved data<br />
democratization. “At first we leveraged<br />
external partners to help us with data<br />
warehousing and ETL processes, then<br />
as our capabilities matured we hired a
TECHNOLOGY<br />
“Migrating to<br />
managed cloud<br />
solutions lets<br />
our team focus on<br />
delivering<br />
business value<br />
rather than on<br />
hosting and setup”<br />
—<br />
Steve Mayotte<br />
<strong>Chief</strong> Information Officer,<br />
PAYOMATIC<br />
125<br />
dedicated team internally focused on<br />
data engineering. The team partnered<br />
with analysts and built a platform<br />
enabling on-demand data exploration<br />
and reporting in our on-premise<br />
infrastructure. As we’ve grown, the size<br />
of our data continues to expand<br />
exponentially. To deal with the problem<br />
we are architecting our next generation<br />
data platform running on the public<br />
cloud.” Mayotte is looking at Tableau for<br />
data visualization and Apache Hadoop<br />
for large-scale data processing on the<br />
public cloud. “Migrating to managed<br />
cloud solutions lets our team focus on<br />
delivering business value rather than<br />
on hosting and setup.”<br />
He’s proud of the way his staff has<br />
been able to develop their skills and<br />
learned how to leverage the efficiencies<br />
presented by the public cloud. For<br />
example, PAYOMATIC uses AWS<br />
managed Kubernetes to run their<br />
microservice workloads. “Previously<br />
our deployment times weren’t bad but<br />
they took the better part of a day running<br />
a mixture of automated scripts, manual<br />
procedures, and testing: now with our<br />
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PAYOMATIC<br />
126<br />
investment in DevOps, continuous<br />
integration, and continuous delivery we<br />
can deploy our microservices workloads<br />
to Production in minutes!” It’s especially<br />
gratifying to him to have built a focused,<br />
tight-knit team that has delivered results<br />
like these when other companies<br />
might have engaged Big Four consultants<br />
costing millions of dollars.<br />
These days, development teams<br />
have a big tool chest they can raid. For<br />
example, Terraform, the infrastructureas-a-service<br />
(IaaS) tool from HashiCorp<br />
has, Mayotte testifies, played a huge<br />
“The organization,<br />
having tackled<br />
the behind-thescenes<br />
technology<br />
was ready to<br />
start engaging<br />
with customers<br />
in a new channel”<br />
—<br />
Steve Mayotte<br />
<strong>Chief</strong> Information Officer,<br />
PAYOMATIC<br />
part in the DevOps work of his teams,<br />
enabling them to easily access Amazon<br />
or other cloud resources.<br />
Cybersecurity laws are evolving, he<br />
points out, with New York being the<br />
first state to publish financial service<br />
sector information security regulations.<br />
“Our CISO and his team are responsible<br />
for security compliance and we use<br />
IBM QRadar and other cloud-based<br />
SIEM (security information and event<br />
management) monitoring software tools<br />
to detect cybersecurity attacks and<br />
network breaches.” PAYOMATIC has<br />
MARCH <strong>2019</strong>
TECHNOLOGY<br />
5mn +<br />
Checks cashed<br />
annually<br />
1958<br />
Year founded<br />
1,000<br />
Approximate number<br />
of employees<br />
127<br />
invested scrupulously in tools and auditing<br />
from a risk management perspective,<br />
and is fully compliant with the New<br />
York State Department of Financial<br />
Services (NYS DFS) Part 500 cybersecurity<br />
regulations for financial institutions.<br />
INPOWER: CARD ON THE RUN<br />
Two years ago, Payomatic started to<br />
develop its hottest new offering,<br />
a prepaid MasterCard that allows<br />
Payomatic customers to pay bills,<br />
withdraw money from an ATM, shop<br />
online, or have paychecks and other<br />
government checks like tax refunds<br />
directly deposited, all without a traditional<br />
bank account. The inPOWER<br />
card, accredited to the highest PCI<br />
Level 1 standard, has not been on the<br />
market long, having been launched in<br />
November 2018 but, linked to a new<br />
mobile app it’s already transforming<br />
customer engagement, he enthuses.<br />
“The organization, having tackled the<br />
behind-the-scenes technology was<br />
ready to start engaging with customers<br />
in a new channel – mobile.”<br />
Payomatic partnered with a mobile<br />
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PAYOMATIC<br />
128<br />
COMPANY FACTS<br />
commerce specialist to identify the<br />
highest value opportunities to transform<br />
consumer experience and extend the<br />
familiar store experience into the<br />
digital world. Assigning a dedicated<br />
product team, Stuzo researched the<br />
customer base to produce a product<br />
strategy and roadmap. The result<br />
was a mobile app for iOS and Android<br />
that launched with the inPOWER<br />
card. “All of the services supporting<br />
the mobile app run on AWS cloud.<br />
The app’s initial features focus on<br />
inPOWER customers with plans for<br />
new products and features in <strong>2019</strong>.<br />
Early customer adoption has been<br />
excellent. We are really excited about<br />
mobile as an alternative distribution<br />
channel to the stores. It gives us a much<br />
closer relationship and understanding<br />
of the customer and their behavior.”<br />
Connecting the in-store experience<br />
with the digital experience will be<br />
his focus over the coming year, he<br />
continues, adding features like staging<br />
transactions, which are making it easier<br />
to complete them in store or even ‘on<br />
the run’ using mobile technology.<br />
“Utility payments make up a large<br />
portion of our bill pay-ment transac-<br />
“We are really exc<br />
about mobile as<br />
an alternative<br />
distribution chan<br />
to the stores”<br />
—<br />
Steve Mayotte<br />
<strong>Chief</strong> Information Officer,<br />
PAYOMATIC<br />
MARCH <strong>2019</strong>
TECHNOLOGY<br />
ited<br />
nel<br />
tion volume. Say a customer has been<br />
saving up to pay multiple bills at the<br />
month’s end. When they come to visit<br />
a store there is a lengthy data entry<br />
process to complete all their transactions.<br />
Our vision is that customers<br />
store their bills in our mobile app and<br />
choose to process their payments<br />
in-store or through the mobile app. ”<br />
Steven Mayotte has a palpable<br />
relish for his role as CIO of PAY-<br />
OMATIC, which he says is not really<br />
about technology so much as about<br />
customer engagement. “Younger<br />
customers would probably rather not<br />
come into a store at all, but they are<br />
always going to need our financial<br />
services. My view is that we must<br />
meet the customer wherever and<br />
however they want to be met. We need<br />
to be relevant to all our customers for<br />
the next 30 years or more and the<br />
technology is just serving to advance<br />
that strategy.”<br />
129<br />
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130<br />
CAMPUS-WIDE<br />
TECHNOLOGY<br />
TRANSFORMATION<br />
WRITTEN BY<br />
HARRY MENEAR<br />
PRODUCED BY<br />
CRAIG DANIELS<br />
MARCH <strong>2019</strong>
TECHNOLOGY<br />
131<br />
www.businesschief.com
BOISE STATE UNIVERSITY<br />
132<br />
BRIAN BOLT, DEPUTY CIO OF BOISE STATE<br />
UNIVERSITY, DISCUSSES THE UNIQUE<br />
CHALLENGES OF EFFECTING<br />
TECHNOLOGICAL TRANSFORMATION IN<br />
AN ENTERPRISE-SCALE EDUCATIONAL<br />
INSTITUTION<br />
F<br />
or the most part, the days<br />
when an employee would<br />
graduate school or college,<br />
secure a job, work for 30 years and<br />
collect a commemorative watch have<br />
gone the way of the stegosaurus, the<br />
French Monarchy and Betamax. The<br />
US Bureau of Labor found that, in 2018,<br />
the median number of years wage and<br />
salary workers spent in a single job<br />
was just 4.2. Brian Bolt began working<br />
at Boise State as a student employee<br />
in 1997, and then as a full-time employee<br />
in 1999. After leaving for a couple<br />
years, Bolt returned and has been with<br />
the University’s IT organization ever<br />
since. He earned his MBA from Boise<br />
State in 2006 and became Deputy<br />
<strong>Chief</strong> Information Officer in 2015. His<br />
long career in higher-ed IT allows for<br />
an increasingly unique perspective as<br />
an innovator and solutioner.<br />
“I came to Boise to pursue a Bachelor’s<br />
Degree. I built on my fondness for<br />
MARCH <strong>2019</strong>
TECHNOLOGY<br />
133<br />
computers and joined a pilot program<br />
learning something that doesn’t exist<br />
anymore called Novell NetWare,” he<br />
reminisces. “It was basically a file and<br />
print service. And that’s where I got my<br />
start that led to a student employment<br />
job on campus.” Bolt’s career with<br />
Boise State has long outlived Novell<br />
NetWare, which released its final update<br />
in 2009. Over the course of his<br />
20-year IT career he has been at the<br />
heart of major changes to the campus’<br />
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Protect your cloud, network, endpoints and campus through automation, analytics and integration.<br />
Get consistent security across clouds, networks and endpoints.<br />
paloaltonetworks.com
TECHNOLOGY<br />
135<br />
IT governance. We sat down with Bolt<br />
to find out about the challenges of effecting<br />
technological transformation<br />
and change management across an<br />
enterprise-scale higher learning institution,<br />
and about Boise State’s current<br />
plans to implement a campus-wide<br />
Customer Relationship Management<br />
(CRM) approach to use data analysis<br />
to improve and maintain Boise’s university-student<br />
relationships.<br />
Located in the West of Idaho, Boise<br />
State University was founded in 1932<br />
by the Episcopal Church, becoming an<br />
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BOISE STATE UNIVERSITY<br />
136<br />
independent junior college two years<br />
later. In <strong>2019</strong>, wwwwit has over 24,000<br />
attendees and was reclassified in<br />
2015 as a Carnegie doctoral research<br />
university, as well as placing 45th on<br />
the US News and World Report’s <strong>2019</strong><br />
list of Most Innovative Universities. This<br />
year is also on track to have the institution’s<br />
largest first-year class in the<br />
university’s history.<br />
To manage the ever-growing student<br />
body, Bolt and the rest of the Boise<br />
State’s IT department are working<br />
to begin the implementation of their<br />
campus-wide CRM over the next year,<br />
with incremental rollouts expected to<br />
begin in late <strong>2019</strong>. “We don’t yet have<br />
a CRM for students that are in the<br />
K-12 environment. They’re our future<br />
pipeline if you’re looking at it from<br />
a strictly sales point of view. And at the<br />
other end of the spectrum, we have<br />
programs at the university that cater to<br />
the retirement community and ongoing<br />
education. The lifespan of a customer<br />
for us could be 60 years long,” explains<br />
Bolt. “But right now, we only have a<br />
CRM for the bookends of our lifecycle:<br />
applicants and alumni. We have nothing<br />
in between that manages the most<br />
important part.” Managing IT governance<br />
strategy at an enterprise-scale<br />
educational institution presents its own<br />
unique difficulties, particularly when<br />
implementing campus-wide technology<br />
transformation. Bolt reflects on<br />
the challenges to be faced in order to<br />
successfully roll out the CRM: “There’s<br />
managing technology change in a very<br />
disparate environment, learning how<br />
to manage change rollouts, and also<br />
being accepting of the fact that some<br />
MARCH <strong>2019</strong>
TECHNOLOGY<br />
137<br />
EXECUTIVE PROFILE<br />
Brian Bolt<br />
Brian began his academic studies at Boise State in<br />
1996 and started his IT career the following year.<br />
After learning about the higher-ed environment as<br />
a departmental Network Administrator, he moved to<br />
the central IT office as a Systems Engineer. From<br />
there, he progressed into management roles within<br />
technical operations until founding the Project<br />
Management Office in 2011. He currently serves<br />
as Deputy CIO.<br />
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BOISE STATE UNIVERSITY<br />
138<br />
“THE LIFESPAN OF<br />
A CUSTOMER FOR US<br />
COULD BE 60 YEARS<br />
LONG, BUT RIGHT<br />
NOW WE ONLY HAVE<br />
A CRM FOR THE<br />
BOOKENDS OF THAT<br />
LIFECYCLE: APPLIC-<br />
ANTS AND ALUMNI”<br />
—<br />
Brian Bolt,<br />
Deputy <strong>Chief</strong> Information Office,<br />
Boise State University<br />
of the technologies we have may have<br />
reached the end of their lifecycle.”<br />
Over the course of his career at Boise,<br />
Bolt has faced each of these challenges<br />
and more.<br />
Though his career at Boise State began<br />
working with the Novell NetWare<br />
operating system, by 2007 Bolt could<br />
see that transformation and transition<br />
were long overdue. “At one point<br />
in time, universities were looked to as<br />
leaders with regard to technology and<br />
its adoption,” he says, “but I think in the<br />
90s the corporate world started to get<br />
ahead.” Technology, Bolt points out,<br />
became more entrenched and slower<br />
moving in academia. “So, we held<br />
onto our Novell infrastructure for a lot<br />
longer than the corporate world ever<br />
did. Which is fine. It’s just kind of the<br />
way that universities work, and there’s<br />
a reason why universities have been<br />
around for a long time. They’re typically<br />
deliberate about their decision-making<br />
process.” Boise’s relationship with<br />
Novell came to an end as a result of<br />
reduced reliability due to vendors not<br />
being able to invest as much money in<br />
maintenance updates. “We were probably<br />
one of the last schools running<br />
MARCH <strong>2019</strong>
TECHNOLOGY<br />
CLICK TO WATCH: ‘MILLION DOLLAR SCHOLARS’<br />
139<br />
Novell’s technology,” he says. “It was<br />
a dying technology that wasn’t being<br />
maintained as well as it could be.”<br />
Bolt reflects that the transition that<br />
followed Boise leaving Novell behind<br />
was one of the “big breaks” of his<br />
career. “I received an invitation to the<br />
Googleplex to learn about Google<br />
Apps for Education. This was 2007,<br />
remember,” he notes, “the early days.”<br />
Bolt attended the Googleplex in 2007<br />
to learn about the work being done<br />
to bring Google apps to educational<br />
institutions. Excited by the possibilities,<br />
Bolt returned to Boise and pitched<br />
the idea to management and IT “and<br />
that was the first domino of removing<br />
Novell from our environment.” He<br />
laughs before admitting that “it was<br />
kind of the Wild West of IT governance<br />
back then. We kind of inflicted<br />
change on campus, and the first year<br />
afterwards was pretty rocky. We had<br />
some people that were very satisfied<br />
and some people that were really not.<br />
We had rocked their world by taking<br />
away their email client and calendaring<br />
system they’d been using for ten years.”<br />
The fallout from the implementation of<br />
Google Apps taught Bolt valuable les-<br />
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BOISE STATE UNIVERSITY<br />
24,000+<br />
Approximate number<br />
of students<br />
200+<br />
Programs of study<br />
140<br />
1,135<br />
Full time staff<br />
MARCH <strong>2019</strong>
TECHNOLOGY<br />
141<br />
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BOISE STATE UNIVERSITY<br />
142<br />
sons about the benefits of staggered<br />
rollouts and pilot programs. “I learned<br />
a lot about what happens after a project<br />
goes live in a large, disparate organization<br />
such as a higher-ed institution,” he<br />
says. “If you’re afforded the opportunity<br />
to start small and rollout incrementally,<br />
that’s a good path to take.”<br />
Bolt has worked with Boise State’s<br />
current <strong>Chief</strong> Information Officer, Max<br />
Davis-Johnson, since he joined the<br />
university from Arizona State in 2010.<br />
“Max was a game changer in terms<br />
of how the university viewed technology<br />
as more of a strategic partner<br />
rather than just a cost center,” says<br />
Bolt. Davis-Johnson was responsible<br />
for implementing the university’s<br />
Roadmap series of transformational<br />
projects across campus. Excitedly,<br />
Bolt says, “As a result of that, we got<br />
a data warehouse off the ground, and<br />
we implemented our first student and<br />
faculty portal.” Then, he explains,<br />
the IT department used these large<br />
projects as a base on which to build<br />
up its governance structure.<br />
With either large-scale projects or<br />
gradual transformation of IT governance<br />
strategies, Bolt reasserts the<br />
MARCH <strong>2019</strong>
TECHNOLOGY<br />
fact that technological transformation<br />
across universities is about managing<br />
the expectations and response<br />
of diverse user groups. “Thankfully<br />
we’re in <strong>2019</strong> now, and not in 2008,” he<br />
says, reflecting on the overall level of<br />
technological literacy. “Our faculty and<br />
staff have become more adept at using<br />
technology. I think ten years has made<br />
a lot of difference.” On the other hand,<br />
the expectations of students have<br />
changed, influenced by a generation of<br />
social media users and online consumers.<br />
“Some of our applications and<br />
systems had more of a legacy look and<br />
feel,” didn’t provoke positive responses<br />
from the student body. “They want to<br />
see the stuff that provides convenience<br />
more than anything else,” explains<br />
Bolt. “And that takes us into the current<br />
generation of thinking, which uses data<br />
to provide that,” which is at the heart of<br />
Boise’s new CRM.<br />
“Right now, we have a task force in<br />
place. We have a charge that’s been<br />
given to us by three of the University’s<br />
six Vice Presidents,” says Bolt. The<br />
task force is exploring a unique approach<br />
to the process, which took shape during<br />
the department’s exploration of the<br />
143<br />
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BOISE STATE UNIVERSITY<br />
144<br />
solutions offered by Amazon Web<br />
Services. “We decided to go down the<br />
AWS route,” says Bolt, reflecting that<br />
it took a year-and-a-half to unite the IT,<br />
purchasing and legal departments in<br />
support of “buying a commodity as a<br />
service, not a capital investment.” He<br />
laughs, “no kidding. So after eighteen<br />
months, we had a signed contract with<br />
AWS, which provided us a suite of tools<br />
to use for new projects.” Once the<br />
department had access to AWS, their<br />
governance strategy took a note from<br />
the academia playbook: “we work a<br />
lot with faculty members that seek out<br />
grant opportunities. Granting agencies,<br />
such as National Institute of Health,<br />
will put out a call for proposals along<br />
the lines of ‘we have a need. Write your<br />
response, and we may or may not give<br />
you money to do the research’. We<br />
decided to do something similar within<br />
our own organization and call it a ‘call<br />
for participation’.” The team drafted up<br />
a call for participation, asking for applications<br />
and solutions for AWS machine<br />
learning and data lake storage. “The response<br />
was interesting,” chuckles Bolt.<br />
“We have seven participants from our<br />
technology office, and the person who<br />
“THERE’S A REASON<br />
WHY UNIVERSITIES<br />
HAVE BEEN AROUND<br />
FOR A LONG TIME.<br />
THEY’RE TYPICALLY<br />
DELIBERATE ABOUT<br />
THEIR DECISION-<br />
MAKING PROCESS”<br />
—<br />
Brian Bolt,<br />
Deputy <strong>Chief</strong> Information Office,<br />
Boise State University<br />
wanted to be our project manager was<br />
actually our solutions architect, so he<br />
really decided to stretch his skills.” He<br />
reflects that, “one of the reasons why<br />
this worked is that we had the business<br />
unit say they wanted to be part of it as<br />
well. They actually brought the problem<br />
to us. They wanted to forecast demand<br />
for the Summer sessions so that they<br />
would know how many classes to<br />
schedule and how many adjunct professors<br />
to hire.” Regardless of the level<br />
of success the project achieves, Bolt is<br />
excited to both broaden the horizons<br />
MARCH <strong>2019</strong>
TECHNOLOGY<br />
145<br />
and skillsets of the participants, and<br />
to use it as a springboard for the next<br />
initiative: exploring applications for<br />
Amazon Alexa. “It’s going to be done<br />
by our Director of Development,” Bolt<br />
says. “He wants to invest in Alexa skills<br />
and figure out where those fit in our<br />
environment, because smart speakers<br />
are everywhere in our personal lives.<br />
Trying to figure out where they best<br />
fit in an educational environment is<br />
definitely an interest.”<br />
Of course, finding applications<br />
for AWS and planning the rollout of<br />
a campus-wide CRM are just two of<br />
the many projects on Bolt’s desk. He<br />
reflects that, “one of the biggest things<br />
I’ve been involved with the past year<br />
has been restarting our IT governance<br />
structure. There’s not necessarily<br />
a command and control model in<br />
the university. So, when it comes to a<br />
finite resource such as IT, we have a<br />
lot of demands placed on us to deliver<br />
x, y and z, and without structure as<br />
to which large projects we should be<br />
working on and where we’re going, the<br />
gap in stakeholder support creates a<br />
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BOISE STATE UNIVERSITY<br />
146<br />
fair amount of chaos.” To solve this,<br />
over the past year Bolt and his committee<br />
co-chair, Boise’s Dean of Extended<br />
Studies, have put together a list of<br />
large development projects. The system<br />
has added structure, Bolt explains<br />
that “getting that framework put into<br />
place has been a good thing. It’s been<br />
a year-long process to get that set up<br />
and I think we’ll benefit from that. So<br />
will the university. Because we’re working<br />
on their goals. Not necessarily our<br />
goals. And that’s hugely beneficial to<br />
all parties.”<br />
“It’s great that we have a scope for<br />
what we want to deliver, an area we<br />
want to deliver to, and a partner in<br />
a particular school on campus that’s<br />
willing to work with us,” he says. Bolt’s<br />
team is currently in the procurement<br />
phase. Hoping to learn from their<br />
experiences with AWS, Bolt estimates<br />
“we’ll shorten that process from 18<br />
months down to a four-or-five-month<br />
process. We’ve learned a lot, and I think<br />
we’ve learned how to partner better<br />
with areas on campus to expedite<br />
things like this. So, we’re hoping to have<br />
a technology and a path chosen by<br />
early summer.<br />
MARCH <strong>2019</strong>
TECHNOLOGY<br />
147<br />
“This has a chance of being a transformational<br />
project for us because it<br />
essentially creates a CRM with a very<br />
long lifecycle.” The Boise State CRM<br />
will manage student data, allowing the<br />
university to “know how to best advise<br />
its students by pulling information from<br />
its systems of record. That can really<br />
help us understand the entire makeup<br />
of the individual,” says Bolt. Looking<br />
back on a career of large technological<br />
changes, incremental progress and<br />
unique challenges, Bolt looks forward<br />
to another exciting chapter in the his-<br />
tory of an institution he knows like the<br />
back of his hand. “Our challenges and<br />
successes over the past ten years<br />
have put us in a spot where we can be<br />
successful with something as large as<br />
a campus-wide CRM.”<br />
www.businesschief.com
INFOR, <strong>USA</strong><br />
148<br />
The Infor<br />
OS Platform:<br />
Leveraging an<br />
API gateway<br />
and data to<br />
unlock human<br />
potential<br />
WRIT TEN BY<br />
HARRY MENEAR<br />
PRODUCED BY<br />
CRAIG DANIELS<br />
MARCH <strong>2019</strong>
TECHNOLOGY<br />
149<br />
www.businesschief.com
INFOR, <strong>USA</strong><br />
We sit down with Joseph<br />
Pascaretta and Massimo<br />
Capoccia of Infor, <strong>USA</strong> to<br />
talk about Infor OS, Infor ION,<br />
Birst Analytics, Coleman AI<br />
and Infor Data Lake.<br />
150<br />
I<br />
was actually a customer of Infor before<br />
I joined the organization,” remembers Joseph<br />
Pascaretta, Vice President & General<br />
Manager Infor OS at Infor, <strong>USA</strong>. “I liked it as an<br />
organization so much that I joined the company.<br />
It feels like a large start-up.” Massimo Capoccia,<br />
Senior Vice President Infor OS, Technology confirms:<br />
“I have a career where I’ve had the opportunity to<br />
build a platform from scratch, from the beginning.<br />
That has been an amazing journey.”<br />
Between them, Pascaretta and Capoccia have<br />
over 16 years’ experience at Infor. Headquartered<br />
in New York and with 168 offices globally, as well as<br />
over 15,000 employees serving 68,000 customers,<br />
Infor is a global leader in business cloud software<br />
products for companies in industry specific markets.<br />
“We believe that data is really at the center of unleashing<br />
human potential,” says Pascaretta. “We have<br />
an Intelligent Cloud Digital Gateway: a way to be<br />
able to bring all of that data together, but then allow<br />
organizations to innovate effectively and quickly,<br />
leveraging real tools and assets all delivered in<br />
the Cloud.”<br />
MARCH <strong>2019</strong>
TECHNOLOGY<br />
151<br />
www.businesschief.com
INFOR, <strong>USA</strong><br />
“I was actually<br />
a customer of<br />
Infor. I liked it<br />
so much that<br />
I joined the<br />
organization”<br />
—<br />
Joseph Pascaretta,<br />
Vice President & General Manager, Infor<br />
152<br />
From the Infor OS API gateway and<br />
integration of third-party applications,<br />
to its own Coleman Artificial Intelligence<br />
(AI), to an infinitely scalable Data Lake,<br />
Infor understands the necessity for<br />
powerful machine learning systems<br />
to handle the vast quantities of data<br />
inherent to Industry 4.0. Infor is applying<br />
machine learning to Big Data and<br />
scaling it infinitely using the power<br />
of cloud computing. Pascaretta notes<br />
that the integration of data, AI and<br />
cloud scalability is “the huge value<br />
proposition of what we’re doing and<br />
the major differentiator”. He adds:<br />
“No other enterprise software organization<br />
is doing what we’re doing. They’re<br />
doing elements of it in pockets and silos,<br />
but not all together as one integrated<br />
platform solution delivered fully in<br />
the Cloud.”<br />
“Thinking about data as the critical<br />
asset is really the foundation of all this,”<br />
says Pascaretta. Traditionally, companies<br />
store data in data warehouses<br />
which filter all incoming data that has<br />
already been processed for specific<br />
purposes. “The first mistake that<br />
MARCH <strong>2019</strong>
TECHNOLOGY<br />
enterprise organizations make when<br />
you want to have data storage for<br />
multiple person consumption is that<br />
they think that the data warehouse is<br />
the place to be,” notes Capoccia. “But<br />
that’s actually what people were doing<br />
five or 10 years ago.” With the everincreasing<br />
quantities of data enterprises<br />
are presented with, the necessary<br />
approach Infor recognises is to pair<br />
Big Data with AI applications. “If you<br />
want to use the same data that has<br />
been filtered for analytics for an AI<br />
application, you’re going to miss a lot of<br />
other types of data,” Massimo explains.<br />
153<br />
EXECUTIVE PROFILE<br />
Joseph Pascaretta<br />
Joseph is Vice President & General Manager for<br />
the Infor OS business unit where he is responsible<br />
for global growth, business development and<br />
strategic partnerships. During his career, Joseph<br />
has held a number of business development,<br />
business strategy, engineering, sales and<br />
marketing roles in software and technology fields<br />
and has been recognized as Ernst & Young<br />
Entrepreneur of the Year for Product Solutions.<br />
Joseph specializes in building businesses and<br />
launching innovative new products and solutions.<br />
www.businesschief.com
INFOR, <strong>USA</strong><br />
154<br />
EXECUTIVE PROFILE<br />
Massimo Capoccia<br />
An experienced and impassioned technology<br />
executive, Massimo Capoccia specializes<br />
in technology, software architectures, and<br />
enterprise software strategy. He has built three<br />
architectures and platforms from the ground-up<br />
and understands the life-cycle management of<br />
a software product. In his current role as Senior<br />
Vice President Infor OS, Technology, he invests<br />
his time meeting with customers and prospects,<br />
discussing strategic value of software, and<br />
supervising architecture development projects.<br />
MARCH <strong>2019</strong>
TECHNOLOGY<br />
“We really believe in<br />
offering complete solutions,<br />
both on the platform and<br />
on the application. So if<br />
a functionality is not really<br />
our core, we partner<br />
with a third party”<br />
—<br />
Massimo Capoccia,<br />
Senior Vice President Infor OS, Technology<br />
155<br />
“If you want to do an enterprise search,<br />
you’re going to miss other types of<br />
data as well. So, a data warehouse is not<br />
complete, per se. You need a different<br />
type of storage that allows you to store<br />
structured and unstructured data all<br />
together in a very cheap way.”<br />
This is where Infor’s Data Lake comes<br />
into play. “The Data Lake stays on<br />
Amazon Web Services (AWS) AmazonS3<br />
technology, which is available all<br />
the time and is very cheap and scalable,”<br />
Capoccia explains, adding that the Data<br />
Lake stores “all the transactions, all the<br />
market data, all the documents, all the<br />
IoT readings”. “Everything you think of<br />
when you think about data – it can go<br />
there,” he adds. “From the Infor Data<br />
Lake, we will integrate automatically<br />
with a data warehouse. We have an<br />
elastic search as well as an index, so<br />
you can search the data warehouse<br />
even built for indexing data like you<br />
would do with a Google search.”<br />
Infor ensures the security of its Data<br />
Lake using its proprietary security<br />
platform. “We have a huge investment<br />
in security,” says Massimo. “We provide<br />
www.businesschief.com
TECHNOLOGY<br />
CLICK TO WATCH: MASSIMO CAPOCCIA, SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT<br />
INFOR OS, TECHNOLOGY - INTRODUCTION TO INFOR OS<br />
157<br />
a single sign-on, user management,<br />
and permission management platforms.”<br />
Traditionally, there is a danger of gaps<br />
in security appearing between a core<br />
platform and third-party software,<br />
but Infor prides itself on the degree to<br />
which its OS integrates with third-party<br />
applications. “Even if you would build<br />
an application on top of Infor, maybe an<br />
AOI platform, it would still respect the<br />
security,” Capoccia notes.<br />
Once Infor has gathered a customer’s<br />
data, its AI and analytics services<br />
come into play. “Being able to consume<br />
“You need<br />
a different type<br />
of storage that<br />
allows you<br />
to store structured<br />
and unstructured<br />
data all together<br />
in a very<br />
cheap way”<br />
—<br />
Massimo Capoccia,<br />
Senior Vice President Infor OS, Technology<br />
www.businesschief.com
INFOR, <strong>USA</strong><br />
COMPANY FACTS<br />
•●19 of the top 20<br />
aerospace companies<br />
•●9 of the top 10<br />
high tech companies<br />
● •●18 of the 25 largest<br />
US healthcare<br />
delivery networks<br />
•●18 of the 20 largest<br />
US cities<br />
158<br />
•●19 of the top 20<br />
automotive suppliers<br />
•●17 of the top 20<br />
industrial distributors<br />
•●15 of the top 20<br />
global retailers<br />
•●4 of the top 5 brewers<br />
•●17 of the top 20<br />
global banks<br />
•●9 of the 10 largest<br />
global hotel brands<br />
•●8 of the top 10<br />
global luxury brands<br />
MARCH <strong>2019</strong>
TECHNOLOGY<br />
and leverage analytics and business<br />
intelligence across all of an enterprise’s<br />
back-end systems is definitely key,”<br />
says Pascaretta. “So we leverage our<br />
Infor Birst Analytics platform that is<br />
designed to optimize complex business<br />
processes. The idea is that it’s<br />
faster time to value and it’s deployed<br />
in the cloud. So once you have that<br />
data together, being able to see into<br />
the data and leverage analytics and<br />
business intelligence around it is<br />
definitely critical.”<br />
Named after the inspiring physicist<br />
and mathematician Katherine Coleman<br />
Johnson, whose trail-blazing<br />
work helped NASA land on the moon,<br />
Infor’s Coleman AI platform represents<br />
a giant leap for artificial intelligence<br />
at scale. This platform allows users<br />
to retrieve, analyse and leverage data into<br />
business decisions such as preventative<br />
maintenance, inventory optimization<br />
and inventory predictions. The Infor<br />
Coleman AI platform also recognizes<br />
patterns in behavior to help businesses<br />
automate processes like purchasing.<br />
“Every time multiple users ask a question,<br />
we’ll apply machine learning to optimize<br />
the answers back to the users,” Capoc-<br />
159<br />
www.businesschief.com
INFOR, <strong>USA</strong><br />
INFOR, <strong>USA</strong><br />
$3.1bn+<br />
Approximate<br />
revenue<br />
2002<br />
Year founded<br />
160<br />
15,000+<br />
Approximate number<br />
of employees<br />
“We really believe in offering complete<br />
solutions, both on the platform and on<br />
the application. So if a functionality is<br />
not really our core, we partner with a<br />
third party,” says Capoccia.<br />
“HCL Technologies is another one of<br />
our great strategic partners, not only<br />
from an implementation side but also<br />
for next generation digital transformation<br />
engineering and delivery,” Pascaretta<br />
adds. He explains that HCL<br />
provides customer-specific engineercia<br />
explains. Coleman’s automation<br />
services also extend to ordering and<br />
invoicing. To transfer paper invoices to<br />
a digital format for Coleman, Infor has<br />
partnered with Ephesoft for its ocular<br />
character recognition (OCR) needs.<br />
With such a strong focus on proprietary<br />
software, Infor draws a sharp<br />
divide between high investment, high<br />
focus in-house products and the use of<br />
trusted third-party partners also<br />
working on the cutting edge of tech.<br />
MARCH <strong>2019</strong>
TECHNOLOGY<br />
161<br />
ing expertise when a client wants “to<br />
take their technology to the next level”.<br />
The two companies first partnered in<br />
2015, with HCL dedicating hundreds of<br />
employees to support Infor.<br />
<strong>2019</strong> will be an exciting year for Infor,<br />
Pascaretta and Capoccia agree. The<br />
Infor Data Lake will have a global<br />
compliance platform built on top of its<br />
existing security systems, and new<br />
features on Coleman AI are set to<br />
launch, as well as Infor OS support for<br />
external users. “Once you have data,<br />
being able to unleash and innovate -<br />
that’s a key thing to what we’re<br />
providing,” Pascaretta concludes.<br />
www.businesschief.com
162<br />
WRIT TEN BY<br />
ANDREW WOODS<br />
PRODUCED BY<br />
TOM VENTURO<br />
MARCH <strong>2019</strong>
TECHNOLOGY<br />
163<br />
www.businesschief.com
CHOICE FINANCIAL<br />
We speak to CIO Tim Heilman at<br />
Choice Financial regarding its<br />
recent technological innovations<br />
that place people front and center<br />
164<br />
T<br />
here is a certain tale that typifies<br />
Choice Bank, according to its <strong>Chief</strong><br />
Brand and Innovation Officer, Tim<br />
Heilman. “We had a customer call one of our<br />
locations, simply needing to run to the bank<br />
to do a deposit; I believe the account was<br />
overdrawn,” Heilman explains. “However, this<br />
customer had run out of gas on his way to the<br />
bank and so he was simply calling the bank<br />
to say: ‘You’re not going to believe this but<br />
I am on my way to see you, and now my car’s<br />
out of gas.’ I think the typical response from<br />
a bank would be something like, ‘Oh, we<br />
apologize, that’s too bad. Just run that check<br />
in whenever you can.’ However, the employee<br />
said, ‘Where are you at? I will be right there.’<br />
The employee went straight to the customer,<br />
took receipt of his check, and actually delivered<br />
some gas to get his car started, so he could<br />
go about his day. People first, banking second,”<br />
he summarizes.<br />
People First is an enduring mantra for the<br />
North American community bank. Headquartered<br />
in North Dakota, Choice is a financial<br />
MARCH <strong>2019</strong>
TECHNOLOGY<br />
165<br />
www.businesschief.com
CHOICE FINANCIAL<br />
166<br />
“This isn’t banking first:<br />
it’s whatever you’re<br />
shopping for, or<br />
whatever you’re<br />
doing, that initiates<br />
a desire or a need<br />
for banking”<br />
—<br />
Tim Heilman,<br />
<strong>Chief</strong> Brand and Innovation Officer,<br />
Choice Bank<br />
institution that prides itself on a communal<br />
responsibility and personal touch.<br />
Heilman often describes the company<br />
has having a family feel – and the loyalty<br />
this engenders has kept him at the<br />
company for the past 15 years, where<br />
he has seen the bank grow immensely<br />
since its founding in 2001. Choice is<br />
the result of a merger involving four<br />
local banks: Citizens State Bank Grafton-<br />
Petersburg (with locations in Grafton<br />
and Petersburg), First Capital Bank of<br />
North Dakota (with locations in West<br />
Fargo and Goodrich), First State Bank<br />
Langdon and Walhalla State Bank.<br />
MARCH <strong>2019</strong>
TECHNOLOGY<br />
167<br />
Each local bank was known for its<br />
strong community banking culture and<br />
it’s clear that Choice Bank has kept this<br />
up as a sum of those parts.<br />
PEOPLE FIRST<br />
Heilman is in charge of the bank’s<br />
technological solutions and his enthusiasm<br />
is infectious. “I am in charge of<br />
the overall brand for the organization.<br />
Choice is a community bank and forwardthinking<br />
in the technological sense so<br />
we blended that together in People First.<br />
We truly put people before banking. We<br />
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CHOICE FINANCIAL<br />
168<br />
have created an atmosphere of empowering<br />
employees to do things that go<br />
above and beyond what a typical<br />
banking experience would be. That<br />
is our focus.”<br />
Heilman has been involved in a lot of<br />
technological changes at Choice since<br />
he took on the role. The North Dakota<br />
native has overseen and directly led<br />
numerous IT operations, with his role<br />
evolving to include brand marketing<br />
and innovation. “My role allows me to<br />
really focus in on communication,” he<br />
explains. “Externally, we are building<br />
MARCH <strong>2019</strong>
TECHNOLOGY<br />
some great community involvement<br />
pieces where we take a truly philanthropic<br />
approach, when it comes to<br />
giving back to our community. Obviously,<br />
that’s a responsibility of a community<br />
bank, but we really like to show in<br />
big ways how we can make those differences<br />
to people’s lives in the communities<br />
we serve. I want to have genuine,<br />
authentic relationships and be able to<br />
serve customers with value-add services<br />
that are not expected or typically delivered<br />
by a bank. Part of what we’re doing<br />
internally is the initiative I call ‘being<br />
philanthropic’. Instead of adding five<br />
more banking locations in a specific<br />
community, we might partner with<br />
a handful of other community leaders<br />
to help build something that the communities<br />
can actually use. We’d rather<br />
do that than have a lavish facility; it just<br />
isn’t that important to us. We’d rather<br />
give back to our communities.”<br />
Choice has recently reinvigorated an<br />
initiative to get children interested in<br />
personal finance and savings called<br />
Adventure Club, which incentivizes kids<br />
to save. “If you empower your children<br />
to make their own decisions, they might<br />
actually impress you with what they 169<br />
EXECUTIVE PROFILE<br />
Tim Heilman<br />
Tim Heilman joined Choice Financial in 2004 where he started<br />
as a single IT department. Through the years, Tim’s role has<br />
expanded into executive leadership and currently serves as<br />
EVP, <strong>Chief</strong> Brand and Innovation Officer. Tim’s leadership<br />
has guided Choice to be a leading edge innovator in<br />
community banking technologies, and an early adopter<br />
of IP technology and online account opening. He has<br />
successfully guided Choice through multiple software<br />
and system conversions and several other organizational<br />
initiatives. Tim believes in the concept of high tech and<br />
high touch, and above all else the importance of<br />
great culture and great service.<br />
www.businesschief.com
CHOICE FINANCIAL<br />
EMPOWERING<br />
the Financial World<br />
At FIS, we provide the technology<br />
and solutions to allow financial<br />
institutions of all sizes to empower<br />
their customers, their transactions,<br />
and their business.<br />
TO LEARN MORE ABOUT HOW FIS CAN<br />
EMPOWER YOU, VISIT www.fisglobal.com<br />
decide to do with their money,” Heilman<br />
explains. “The solution has an app<br />
that the child and parents both share<br />
on their own devices. You can create<br />
goals, objectives, rewards; it could be<br />
anything that the parent and children<br />
agree on. Once those goals and rewards<br />
are set and achieved, then the money<br />
slides from the parent account to the<br />
child, which is instantaneous within the<br />
app. Apple Pay is tied to it, and it has<br />
real time notifications of what the child<br />
is spending their money on. We also<br />
have a company working out of San<br />
Francisco that does HSAs (health<br />
savings accounts) in what has been<br />
a two-year relationship.” Every one of<br />
Choice’s fintech partners has to be<br />
a cultural fit, first, offering a product the<br />
bank firmly believes in.<br />
INTERNAL OPERATIONS<br />
2009 represented a seismic shift at<br />
Choice when its internal communications<br />
became audio-visual. “It’s been<br />
a 10-year transition,” Heilman explains.<br />
“In fact, before that, in 2006 we switched<br />
everything to full-on voice-over IP.<br />
I think the biggest shift for us, and the<br />
biggest opportunity we have taken<br />
MARCH <strong>2019</strong>
TECHNOLOGY<br />
171<br />
“Again, we’re using<br />
a lot of Cisco<br />
equipment but we<br />
do have other vendors<br />
in the back that are<br />
helping us monitor the<br />
network very closely”<br />
—<br />
Tim Heilman,<br />
<strong>Chief</strong> Brand and Innovation Officer,<br />
Choice Bank<br />
advantage of, with technology, involves<br />
the ability to communicate. Geographically,<br />
we are quite spread out across<br />
two states, and people that work with<br />
others on a daily basis now have<br />
the ability to see who they’re talking<br />
to at any given time. There’s nothing<br />
better than a face-to-face, in-person<br />
discussion.”<br />
A new employee receives a video<br />
phone on day one so they can start<br />
building relationships with other team<br />
members. “This has made an organization<br />
with close to 400 employees feel<br />
like a small, intimate and authentic<br />
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CHOICE FINANCIAL<br />
172<br />
organization,” Heilman explains. “I’ve<br />
been really proud of how it’s brought<br />
people closer together.” Choice’s<br />
vendor of choice is Cisco which takes<br />
care of all of the network, infrastructure<br />
and security at the bank. “We’re using<br />
a lot of Cisco equipment but we do have<br />
other vendors in the back that are helping<br />
us monitor the network very closely.”<br />
Video communication, they like to<br />
call video collaboration, has allowed<br />
the bank to build greater bonds after<br />
a number of acquisitions. Choice is<br />
committed to keeping people in jobs<br />
during acquisitions, a time when<br />
typically 30% of staff can be laid off<br />
right out of the gate. “Our goal, commensurate<br />
with our culture, is to not lay<br />
anybody off, and we’ve now done three<br />
acquisitions,” says Heilman. “Plus, the<br />
cultural shift (following an acquisition)<br />
can take three to five years to sync up<br />
when you bring two organizations together<br />
and video collaborations really<br />
help to reduce that timeframe.”<br />
Choice views its fintech vendors,<br />
such as Cisco, with the same value as<br />
its customers and they work together<br />
through those situations that need to<br />
be fixed, or tricky installations that<br />
require collaboration. “Collaboration<br />
MARCH <strong>2019</strong>
TECHNOLOGY<br />
173<br />
gets results,” says Heilman. “So, I think<br />
maintaining the relationships and constantly<br />
seeing if there’s some reciprocating<br />
value that we can give back and<br />
forth always goes a long way.”<br />
FINTECH<br />
Regarding the fintech side of Choice’s<br />
operations Heilman is proud to be building<br />
Banking-as-a-Service. “For about<br />
two years now, we’ve gotten into what<br />
we like to call Banking as a Service. If<br />
you have a really good idea that can improve<br />
banking, or you have a way to<br />
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CHOICE FINANCIAL<br />
174<br />
“PeopleFirst is<br />
what makes our<br />
organization come<br />
together. We have<br />
true purpose in<br />
defining why we do<br />
what we do, and not<br />
just what we do”<br />
—<br />
Tim Heilman,<br />
<strong>Chief</strong> Brand and Innovation Officer,<br />
Choice Bank<br />
MARCH <strong>2019</strong>
TECHNOLOGY<br />
reinvent banking and the experience<br />
that surrounds it, then we’d love to talk to<br />
you. We started that process a couple of<br />
years back.”<br />
Heilman enthuses about frictionless banking,<br />
which he sees as shaping the very future of<br />
fintech. “This isn’t banking first: it’s whatever<br />
you’re shopping for, or whatever you’re doing,<br />
that initiates a desire or a need for banking.<br />
It’s where we kind of come along for the ride,”<br />
he explains. “That’s currently being built into<br />
an existing system that’s already successful<br />
to provide a service that way. It’s another<br />
area that I see banking, as an industry, expanding<br />
into. As far as growth strategies, and<br />
what’s over the horizon, that’s typically what<br />
I’m seeing. We’re also going to work with<br />
a company in Sydney, Australia, which is getting<br />
a product developed that incorporates AI into<br />
mobile banking. It’s almost a personal finance<br />
coach and that’s where I see things going.”<br />
And It’s this rich combination of technology,<br />
fintech and people that will see Choice Bank<br />
continuing to grow across the everchanging<br />
financial landscape.<br />
175<br />
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176<br />
Protecting<br />
companies on<br />
their digital<br />
transformation<br />
journeys<br />
WRITTEN BY<br />
SOPHIE CHAPMAN<br />
PRODUCED BY<br />
CRAIG DANIELS<br />
MARCH <strong>2019</strong>
TECHNOLOGY<br />
177<br />
www.businesschief.com
DIMENSION DATA<br />
As a supplier to Fortune<br />
100 firms, Dimension<br />
Data continues<br />
to expand its digital<br />
offerings to a variety<br />
of industries<br />
178<br />
G<br />
lobal system integrator – Dimension Data’s<br />
operations span across 47 markets on<br />
five continents. The company employs<br />
more than 28,000 people and serves over 8,000<br />
clients, and as a member of Japan’s Nippon<br />
Telegraph and Telephone (NTT) Group, services<br />
70% of Fortune 100 and 60% of Fortune 500<br />
businesses. Dimension Data was established in the<br />
South African capital city, Johannesburg, in 1983.<br />
The company listed on the Johannesburg Stock<br />
Exchange four years later, with international<br />
expansion beginning in 1993 into the firm’s first<br />
international market, Botswana. In the following<br />
years the business reached the Asia Pacific region,<br />
followed by the northern hemisphere. At the turn<br />
of the century, Dimension Data listed on the<br />
London Stock Exchange, raising raised US$1.25bn.<br />
As the company continued to grow it won over<br />
100 client, vendor, and industry awards in 2015,<br />
and over 50 in the first half of the following year.<br />
MARCH <strong>2019</strong>
TECHNOLOGY<br />
179<br />
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DIMENSION DATA<br />
180<br />
‘We are one of their<br />
largest global partners<br />
with a shared heritage<br />
spanning more than<br />
25 years – and we have<br />
Gold Partner status in<br />
every region in which<br />
we jointly operate’<br />
—<br />
Dimension Data<br />
The company currently operates in<br />
29 cities across 15 states in the US,<br />
and partners with the some of the<br />
largest global companies based in the<br />
country, such as Cisco. “Cisco is the<br />
worldwide leader in networking for the<br />
Internet since 1984, and today, more<br />
than 85% of all Internet traffic travels<br />
across Cisco’s systems,” Dimension<br />
Data states. “We are one of their<br />
largest global partners with a shared<br />
heritage spanning more than 25 years<br />
– and we have Gold Partner status<br />
in every region in which we jointly<br />
operate.” Dimension Data has also<br />
established Gold Partner status with<br />
Microsoft in 21 countries and Titanium<br />
Partner status with Dell EMC. US firms<br />
such as NetApp, McAfee, and Oracle<br />
have also partnered with the IT services<br />
provider. In 2015, the company also<br />
partnered with the Amaury Sports<br />
Organisation (ASO), agreeing to<br />
a five-year deal to be the technology<br />
partner of for cycling events. As part of<br />
the agreement, the company provides<br />
telemetrics for the sports.<br />
The firm aims to use technology to<br />
accelerate the business of its clients,<br />
targeting four key areas within its<br />
services: digital infrastructure, hybrid,<br />
cloud, workspaces of tomorrow, and<br />
cybersecurity. Dimension Data noticed<br />
the growth of IT-as-a-service across<br />
these four sectors, allowing the<br />
business to cover a range of offerings<br />
from cloud advisory services to<br />
on-premise cloud solutions. Due to its<br />
work with both public and private cloud<br />
computing, the company’s operations<br />
are defined as hybrid cloud services.<br />
The company has a holistic approach<br />
towards its clients – from consulting<br />
engagement to the management of IT<br />
operations. Dimension Data also offers<br />
what it dubs “omnichannel customer<br />
MARCH <strong>2019</strong>
TECHNOLOGY<br />
CLICK TO WATCH: ‘WHO’S DIMENSION DATA?’<br />
181<br />
experience”, covering mobile, digital,<br />
physical, Internet of Things (IoT),<br />
automation, bots, virtual agents, video<br />
and artificial intelligence (AI). “It’s<br />
this frictionless switching between<br />
channels that defines the omnichannel<br />
experience… Our Omnichannel CX<br />
works with you to get measurable<br />
results in terms of winning new customers,<br />
retaining existing customers,<br />
improving productivity, and reducing<br />
cost to serve.”<br />
As well as its wide range of offerings,<br />
the company’s technology solutions<br />
have been designed for a variety of<br />
industries – education, financial<br />
services, healthcare, manufacturing,<br />
media and communications, pharmaceutical,<br />
retail and sport, stating: “We<br />
offer broad technology expertise in<br />
a range of verticals. Combined with<br />
our strategic partnerships and robust<br />
services portfolio, we can help you<br />
achieve your digital transformation<br />
objectives … Whether you’re an<br />
educational institution, a manufacturer,<br />
or a healthcare provider, we can<br />
ensure your IT platforms and services<br />
www.businesschief.com
TECHNOLOGY<br />
‘The company’s technology solutions have<br />
been designed for a variety of industries –<br />
education, financial services, healthcare,<br />
manufacturing, media and communications,<br />
pharmaceutical, retail and sport’<br />
Team Dimension Data sponsors a professional cycling team partnered with Qhubeka, a charity<br />
programme in South Africa that aims to fund 5000 bicycles each year to help children attend<br />
schools and adults to attend work. The team boasts Mark Cavendish in its ranks, a former<br />
World Champion and winner of an incredible 30 stages of the Tour de France.<br />
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DIMENSION DATA<br />
184<br />
‘Security is enabling<br />
digitization. If you<br />
look at fintech or<br />
technology businesses,<br />
they are leading<br />
this charge’<br />
—<br />
Dimension data<br />
are fit for purpose and future proof.”<br />
For Dimension Data, cybersecurity is<br />
becoming an increasingly profitable<br />
business. “Cyber-attacks abound in<br />
the digital age. Digital transformation<br />
and hybrid IT are pushing security<br />
perimeters off premises, into the cloud,<br />
and into the workplace. As a result,<br />
enforcing cybersecurity policies is<br />
more complex than ever,” states the<br />
MARCH <strong>2019</strong>
TECHNOLOGY<br />
1983<br />
Year founded<br />
28,000+<br />
Approximate number<br />
of employees<br />
HQ<br />
Johannesburg,<br />
South Africa<br />
company. The firm’s moto of “risk less,<br />
achieve more” allows customers to<br />
continue to embrace ongoing developments<br />
and ensure their operations are<br />
secure. The company offers a range of<br />
solutions, including formulated policies,<br />
predictive protection, and assessments<br />
and responses. “Security is<br />
and always will be big business. Big<br />
dollar figures are quoted in terms of<br />
what cybersecurity is doing to the world.<br />
Security is enabling digitisation. If you<br />
look at fintech or technology businesses,<br />
they are leading this charge. Many<br />
of these businesses are asset light,<br />
whilst ensuring secure transactions,<br />
so we think that security expands<br />
beyond the physical perimeter into<br />
the cloud environment.”<br />
Dimension Data promises to enable<br />
clients to keep up-to-date with new<br />
technologies, tackling cybersecurity,<br />
data and the cloud, and infrastructure.<br />
“We deliver wherever you are, at every<br />
stage of your technology journey,” the<br />
company promises. “We invest heavily<br />
in innovation to bring together the<br />
world’s best technologies, from consulting,<br />
technical and support services to<br />
a fully managed service, to our global<br />
client base.”<br />
185<br />
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INNOVATION<br />
186<br />
HELPS DRIVE<br />
SUPPLY CHAIN<br />
PRODUCTIVITY<br />
WRIT TEN BY<br />
JOHN O’HANLON<br />
PRODUCED BY<br />
DENITRA PRICE<br />
MARCH <strong>2019</strong>
SUPPLY CHAIN<br />
187<br />
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HYSTER<br />
188<br />
HYSTER COMPANY<br />
IS POSITIONING ITSELF<br />
TO MEET SEISMIC<br />
CHANGES IN THE<br />
WAREHOUSING AND<br />
MATERIAL HANDLING<br />
INDUSTRY. WE SPEAK<br />
TO GIJO GEORGE,<br />
BUSINESS UNIT<br />
DIRECTOR FOR FOOD<br />
AND BEVERAGE<br />
A<br />
ppointing Gijo George as<br />
its first ever <strong>Business</strong> Unit<br />
Director for Food and Beverage<br />
was part of a wider Hyster Company<br />
strategy to focus on a cultivating<br />
a deeper understanding of the unique<br />
challenges of key industry segments<br />
and help influence marketing initiatives<br />
and product development.<br />
George is a seasoned supply chain<br />
veteran, bringing to his newly-created<br />
role not only 20 years of procurement<br />
leadership, but also a deep knowledge<br />
MARCH <strong>2019</strong>
SUPPLY CHAIN<br />
189<br />
from a customer perspective – as<br />
a Hyster national account customer<br />
for 11 years. “I was a very active<br />
customer, too,” he asserts. “Pursuing<br />
innovative solutions for the business.<br />
Hyster approached me to join their<br />
marketing group because I had that<br />
customer perspective on the food<br />
and beverage side.”<br />
THE CUSTOMER’S PERSPECTIVE<br />
As a major cold storage and warehousing<br />
company with more than 170 global<br />
locations, the world’s largest cold chain<br />
solutions provider faced some very<br />
specialized material handling issues.<br />
Warehouses that operate at -20<br />
degrees put material handling equipment<br />
under extreme stress: steel<br />
becomes brittle, batteries lose power,<br />
fluids become viscous.<br />
“It was my job as a procurement<br />
professional to cultivate a strong<br />
supplier relationship. Hyster became<br />
one of the preferred suppliers at that<br />
time. Cold storage warehouses are<br />
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HYSTER<br />
190<br />
among the most challenging warehouse<br />
environments, mainly due to<br />
condensation and the need for driver<br />
comfort,” he says, “and Hyster has<br />
become a serious competitor in the<br />
sub-zero space.”<br />
A good example is the new Class III<br />
End Rider – designed with a variety of<br />
industry-exclusive and best-in-class<br />
ergonomic enhancements and productivity-enhancing<br />
Smart features to help<br />
operations boost labor efficiency and<br />
increase throughput in order picking,<br />
unloading and other warehouse tasks.<br />
It was awarded “2018 Product of the<br />
Year” by Material Handling Product News.<br />
Hyster Company continues to apply<br />
its expertise and customer feedback<br />
from a broad global install base to<br />
develop innovative solutions that build<br />
on its reputation for strong, durable<br />
equipment while integrating intelligent<br />
software capabilities to help operations<br />
meet increasingly demanding<br />
productivity goals.<br />
TOTAL COST OF OWNERSHIP<br />
As in any industry requiring capital<br />
investment in specialized equipment,<br />
there is a temptation, especially among<br />
smaller food and beverage operators,<br />
to make purchase decisions based<br />
“Hyster has<br />
become<br />
a serious<br />
competitor<br />
in the subzero<br />
space”<br />
—<br />
Gijo George,<br />
<strong>Business</strong> Unit Director for Food<br />
and Beverage, Hyster<br />
MARCH <strong>2019</strong>
SUPPLY CHAIN<br />
CLICK TO WATCH: ‘HYSTER: TOUGH AND RESOURCEFUL’<br />
191<br />
solely on price. Gijo George is a passionate<br />
evangelist for the concept of total<br />
cost of ownership (TCO) that reveals<br />
the broader decisions facing a CPO.<br />
“It’s our strategy to work very closely<br />
with our customers to help them manage<br />
their balance sheet.” For example, the<br />
emphasis on operator comfort addressed<br />
by the end rider can positively<br />
impact broader labor issues prevalent<br />
in many warehousing operations.<br />
Recruiting and retaining skilled labor is<br />
increasingly a challenge. With record<br />
low unemployment, labor has become<br />
a scarce and valuable resource. Some<br />
statistics show productivity falling by as<br />
much as 14% since 2013 and turnover<br />
rates around 30% have been recorded<br />
in ambient warehouses (60% in cold<br />
stores). Average onboarding costs for a<br />
skilled operator stand at around $10,000.<br />
“Hyster is addressing the issue on<br />
two fronts: focusing on robust telematics<br />
solutions to measure performance<br />
and productivity while engineering<br />
ergonomic solutions to help improve<br />
operator comfort and reduce potential<br />
fatigue. We have some of the most<br />
comfortable platforms in the industry,<br />
designed to help minimize fatigue<br />
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HYSTER<br />
192<br />
and absorb shock and vibration in a<br />
multitude of operating environments.”<br />
CLEVER COMFORT<br />
Warehouses are not normally well-lit at<br />
the picking point. The new Hyster End<br />
Rider series of lift trucks have industryexclusive<br />
LED platform lights to provide<br />
operator awareness in low light or<br />
congested areas and the LED fork<br />
lights offer in-trailer illumination,<br />
helping raise pedestrian awareness,<br />
can reduce product damage and help<br />
increase the bottom line.<br />
The lift trucks also incorporate an<br />
‘Intelligent’ suite of solutions providing<br />
improved productivity, load stability<br />
and ergonomics. An optional extended<br />
operator platform provides more usable<br />
foot space than the leading competitors,<br />
allowing operators to adjust stance<br />
to provide postural relief. The Ultra<br />
Cushion reduces shock and vibration<br />
to improve operator comfort and<br />
provide steady footing.<br />
George involves the financial leadership<br />
to explain the real cost benefits of<br />
such equipment. Acquisition costs are<br />
MARCH <strong>2019</strong>
SUPPLY CHAIN<br />
balanced against operational costs,<br />
end-of-life costs and labor costs. “I aim<br />
to give the total picture; a better appreciation<br />
of the decision they are about to<br />
make - and for our current customers<br />
we point out that trucks become more<br />
expensive with every year that passes.<br />
They can consider minimal technology<br />
investments such as telemetry that<br />
can be added onto older trucks. This<br />
gives visibility into the way the truck is<br />
operating and the ability to measure<br />
and manage those costs. Our dedicated<br />
fleet management organization works<br />
as consultants and advisors to our<br />
193<br />
EXECUTIVE PROFILE<br />
Gijo George<br />
Gijo brings over twenty years of experience in Procurement,<br />
Supply Chain, Sales, and IT Applications. He currently<br />
leads the Global Procurement function, responsible for<br />
both Direct and Indirect supporting 170+ facilities. He has<br />
extensive experience in Capital Expenditure Projects such<br />
as construction, automation, assets and systems upgrades<br />
and renovation as well as Goods and Services Procurement<br />
for categories like Energy, Consumables, Contingent<br />
Labor, etc. Prior to Americold, Gijo worked for Rock-Tenn,<br />
The Home Depot, The Hackett Group, GeP, and consulted<br />
for several Fortune 500 companies.<br />
www.businesschief.com
HYSTER<br />
STEEL<br />
THAT<br />
SUPPORTS<br />
THE<br />
WORLD<br />
From our beginning in 1907, through our incorporation as<br />
Steel of West Virginia, Inc. in 1982, to the present as a<br />
wholly-owned subsidiary of Steel Dynamics, Inc., we have<br />
had a long tradition of product innovation and process<br />
improvement. As an ISO 9001:2015 certified manufacturer,<br />
we continue to expand and improve our manufacturing<br />
capabilities and production efficiencies. For our customers,<br />
this means we will always be the low-cost, high-quality<br />
producer.<br />
Our structural steel sections are produced from electric furnace steel, continuously<br />
cast and hot rolled on highly specialized mills. We produce special shapes<br />
as well as standard beams, channels and MC channels. We also produce flat<br />
bars at the newly acquired SWVA-Kentucky rolling mill. These products are<br />
used by a wide range of OEM customers, including industrial truck and truck<br />
trailer manufacturers, rail, off highway equipment, guardrail, solar energy, and<br />
shipbuilding companies. We also have fabricating and processing capabilities,<br />
both at SWVA, Inc. and at our subsidiaries Marshall Steel, Inc. and Steel Ventures,<br />
Inc. SWVA, Inc. has been a long time supplier of forklift mast sections<br />
and hanger bars to Hyster-Yale. It has been a true partnership as our team<br />
designs our manufacturing systems to take care of this valued customer’s<br />
needs. We look forward to continuing our partnership well into the future!<br />
MARCH <strong>2019</strong><br />
CALL US TODAY<br />
1 (800) 624-3492<br />
www.swvainc.com
SUPPLY CHAIN<br />
accounts in order to streamline and<br />
manage those costs.”<br />
Hyster sale teams are also equipped<br />
to support smaller customers that are<br />
not ready to invest in large-scale fleet<br />
enhancement. They may not realize<br />
that they can adopt the latest and most<br />
appropriate electric, lithium-ion, hydrogen<br />
fuel cell or gas-powered units<br />
without heavy capital investment. “We<br />
have designed pay-per-use models<br />
that make it economically feasible for<br />
a ten-truck customer to take advantage<br />
of a hydrogen fuel cell solution<br />
that would yield 20% to 30% power<br />
gain and 10% to 15% productivity gains<br />
just from not having to refuel so much<br />
and the resultant downtime.”<br />
Gijo George spends a lot of his time<br />
traveling the North American market to<br />
learn at first hand what his customers<br />
in different industries really want. Its<br />
stakeholders, he has found, share the<br />
Hyster vision of an ecologically and<br />
economically sustainable end-to-end<br />
supply chain. “We deploy a number of<br />
strategies to collect customer feedback<br />
and identify their pain points.<br />
At the same time, as an organization<br />
with manufacturing facilities globally,<br />
“We have some<br />
of the most<br />
comfortable<br />
platforms in<br />
the industry,<br />
designed to<br />
help minimize<br />
fatigue and<br />
absorb shock<br />
and vibration<br />
in a multitude<br />
of operating<br />
environments”<br />
—<br />
Gijo George,<br />
<strong>Business</strong> Unit Director for Food<br />
and Beverage, Hyster<br />
195<br />
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HYSTER<br />
we leverage the expertise and experience<br />
of our best suppliers and solicit<br />
opportunities to work with them to add<br />
value to the product.”<br />
196<br />
CUBES TO LAKES<br />
Fluctuations in the U.S. and global<br />
steel economies are another factor<br />
that affects the thinking of equipment<br />
manufacturers. George maintains close<br />
contact with his financial, procurement<br />
and IT counterparts to focus on solutions<br />
that make best economic sense while<br />
optimizing lead times. “We utilize a lot<br />
of just-in-time data management and<br />
data mining tools, moving us from ‘data<br />
MARCH <strong>2019</strong>
SUPPLY CHAIN<br />
cubes’ to data lakes which can swallow<br />
the input costs, global price indices,<br />
tariffs, tax information and the like, to<br />
enable the best solutions and the best<br />
decision making across the business.”<br />
By focusing on the food and beverage<br />
customers, Gijo George sits at the heart<br />
of the business. After all, this fast<br />
evolving, population-driven sector will<br />
never decline, and Hyster is positioned<br />
as a key player in its development.<br />
A characteristic of operations in this<br />
space is that they have purchased<br />
piecemeal in the past, ending up with<br />
a stable of equipment from different<br />
suppliers. “Over time our customers<br />
acquired different brands of equipment.<br />
Another aspect of my job is to help them<br />
understand how our brand is differentiated<br />
in the market and educate them on<br />
the TCO (total cost of ownership) that<br />
they would be returning to the business.”<br />
197<br />
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Delivering<br />
sustainability<br />
through a<br />
198<br />
supply chain<br />
transformation<br />
WRIT TEN BY<br />
DALE BENTON<br />
PRODUCED BY<br />
ARRON RAMPLING<br />
MARCH <strong>2019</strong>
SUPPLY CHAIN<br />
199<br />
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EMMERSON PACKAGING<br />
SERGE CORRIVEAU, VICE PRESIDENT<br />
OF SUPPLY CHAIN AT EMMERSON<br />
PACKAGING, EXPLORES HOW<br />
THE COMPANY’S SUPPLY CHAIN<br />
TRANSFORMATION DELIVERS ON<br />
ITS SUSTAINABILITY GOALS<br />
200<br />
A<br />
cross the modern business landscape,<br />
the perception of procurement and<br />
supply chain management is undergoing<br />
a dramatic transformation. Traditionally viewed as<br />
a business support function and merely a cost<br />
center, businesses all over the world are currently<br />
investing into their supply chains as a recognition<br />
that it is now viewed as a true business enabler. For<br />
Emmerson Packaging, one of the leading flexible<br />
packaging solutions providers in North America,<br />
the supply chain has been built into the company’s<br />
core operations since it was founded back in 1956.<br />
For Serge Corriveau, Vice President of Supply<br />
Chain, the supply chain management function of<br />
Emmerson Packaging is the ‘WD40’ of the business.<br />
“We’re like a machine and as long as we’re well oiled,<br />
everything works and the business can continue to<br />
be successful,” he says. “My motto is be brilliant, be<br />
brief and be gone. If we’re not moving, innovating<br />
and changing in a particular part of the business<br />
then we look at that as a missed opportunity.”<br />
Corriveau joined the business in 2013, initially<br />
MARCH <strong>2019</strong>
SUPPLY CHAIN<br />
201<br />
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EMMERSON PACKAGING<br />
202<br />
“WE’RE LIKE A MACHINE<br />
AND AS LONG AS<br />
WE’RE WELL OILED,<br />
EVERYTHING WORKS<br />
AND THE BUSINESS<br />
CAN CONTINUE TO BE<br />
SUCCESSFUL”<br />
—<br />
Serge Corrivea,<br />
Vice President of Supply Chain,<br />
Emmerson Packaging<br />
working as a business analyst before<br />
being given the role of change management<br />
lead for a new SAP system<br />
implementation. The implementation<br />
of SAP provided the opportunity for<br />
Emmerson Packaging to transform<br />
its supply chain vertical. “Once the<br />
model was presented, our CEO asked<br />
me if I would like to lead the charge<br />
in implementing the changes,” he says.<br />
“I accepted the challenge and the rest<br />
is history.”<br />
The new supply chain vertical consists<br />
of five departments within Emmerson<br />
Packaging including warehousing, logistics,<br />
purchasing, production planning<br />
and customer service. The customer<br />
service department was added to the<br />
supply chain vertical in early 2018.<br />
“Customer satisfaction is dependent on<br />
the supply chain, so this recent addition<br />
made perfect sense,” Corriveau says.<br />
“Customer service is a fundamental<br />
part of any successful business and<br />
its very important in the supply chain<br />
because it’s the source of customer<br />
information, it provides the customer<br />
with real-time information on product<br />
availability and distribution operations,”<br />
he says. “These departments<br />
are particularly important in ensuring<br />
MARCH <strong>2019</strong>
SUPPLY CHAIN<br />
CLICK TO WATCH: ‘EMMERSON PACKAGING ON MARITIME MADE’<br />
203<br />
a seamless supply chain and by overseeing<br />
all five departments it ensures we<br />
can support the overall strategy of the<br />
business.” Corriveau had previously<br />
worked with automotive giants Hyundai<br />
and Kia and was familiar with working<br />
in a large-scale company with “tons of<br />
resources and a very strict structure”.<br />
But as Emmerson Packaging set about<br />
building a supply chain vertical, Corriveau<br />
realized that enhanced inventory planning<br />
and control was required. “The first<br />
step before anything could be achieved<br />
was to look at data, create and track<br />
KPIs and make changes along the way in<br />
order to reach a state of control,” he says.<br />
“Once we reache that level of control,<br />
you can step back and trust the team to<br />
deliver. If something was to go sideways<br />
then we’d react properly because we<br />
are in control and being proactive. Clear<br />
communication internally and externally<br />
is so important”.<br />
With data monitoring and KPIs<br />
established, Emmerson Packaging<br />
created an element of control over<br />
inventory management and established<br />
the same level of control over<br />
logistics and purchasing. “Control<br />
means making everything resource<br />
www.businesschief.com
That’s why we’ve<br />
joined Project STOP.<br />
NOVA Chemicals is a Strategic<br />
Partner in Project STOP, a global<br />
initiative that brings corporations and<br />
governments together to keep plastic<br />
from reaching the world’s rivers and<br />
oceans through the development<br />
of waste collection services and<br />
a recycling supply chain.<br />
The immediate focus of that effort<br />
is the countries of Southeast Asia,<br />
where fast-growing economies<br />
mean the demand for products<br />
packaged in plastic are outpacing<br />
governments’ abilities to meet the<br />
challenge of waste management.<br />
At NOVA Chemicals we’re<br />
passionate about sustainability.<br />
That’s why, along with investing<br />
in Project STOP, we’re engaged in<br />
R&D work focused on developing<br />
packaging solutions that support<br />
a circular economy.<br />
We’re proud to play a key role<br />
in Project STOP and its crucial<br />
efforts to build a better future.<br />
novachemicals.com<br />
Copyright NOVA Chemicals Corp. <strong>2019</strong>, all rights reserved.
Imagine a<br />
future without<br />
marine plastic<br />
pollution.<br />
It starts with making more plastics recyclable.<br />
There is growing awareness and concern<br />
about marine plastic pollution—and there’s<br />
an increasing determination to put an end to it.<br />
One part of the solution is Project STOP, a joint initiative<br />
started in 2017 by SYSTEMIQ and Borealis to help stop<br />
the flow of plastics and other materials into the world’s<br />
rivers and oceans.<br />
Another part of the solution is to further develop<br />
infrastructure to collect and recycle plastic packaging,<br />
especially in the world’s fast-developing nations.<br />
Of course, that also requires making plastic goods,<br />
particularly plastic packaging, more recyclable to<br />
support a circular economy that puts more recycled<br />
plastics into new products—and less into places<br />
where they don’t belong.<br />
Initiatives like Project STOP will test and develop new<br />
solutions with the potential to seriously slow—and<br />
eventually eliminate—the flow of plastics into the world’s<br />
oceans. Together with work to develop more recycling<br />
and recovery technologies and more recyclable products,<br />
we can realize the promise of a circular economy.<br />
Below are some emerging trends that are yielding<br />
promising results.<br />
More applications for recycled plastic material.<br />
The plastics industry is investing in research and<br />
development centered around technology for creating<br />
“clean” recycled polyethylene and incorporating it into<br />
finished products with performance comparable to<br />
100% virgin plastic.<br />
Simpler is better for the environment.<br />
Many food packages are made with a mix of materials,<br />
making them difficult to recycle. Companies are now<br />
working with their suppliers to eliminate foil, nylon and<br />
other materials and move to single-material, recyclable<br />
flexible film structures.<br />
The bottom line: Recyclable plastic<br />
packaging has value as recyclate,<br />
adding an incentive to implement new<br />
waste collection and recycling systems<br />
that can go a long way toward keeping<br />
plastics out of the world’s oceans.<br />
The more flexible, the smaller the footprint.<br />
Replacing traditional materials like cans, glass and<br />
cardboard with flexible plastic packaging significantly<br />
reduces packaging volume, reducing the carbon<br />
footprint during production and shipping.<br />
One-piece closures for easier recyclability.<br />
Another important trend is the shift from two-piece,<br />
mixed-material closures to one-piece, recyclable<br />
closures in beverage and other containers.<br />
What about<br />
food waste?<br />
Advances in package integrity—<br />
improved barrier, toughness and seal<br />
—in polyethylene-based flexible film<br />
structures help improve package integrity<br />
and extend shelf life. That means less food<br />
is spoiled, which reduces landfill waste<br />
and even more importantly, helps to<br />
address world hunger. It’s a win-win.
EMMERSON PACKAGING<br />
206<br />
based,” Corriveau says. “Data is key<br />
there as it cannot be disputed. We<br />
break each department down into<br />
pieces and work through it one piece<br />
at a time and it’s been a successful<br />
strategy for the company”.<br />
The advantages of data analytics<br />
are plain to see, allowing the business<br />
to make smarter decisions and<br />
predictions, but building a supply chain<br />
vertical in this organization highlighted<br />
to Corriveau that the data “just wasn’t<br />
there yet”. This forced the organization<br />
to re-examine the perception of what<br />
the supply chain actually is, as Corriveau<br />
felt there was often a misplaced belief<br />
that it was “just warehousing and<br />
logistics”. “Supply chain for Emmerson<br />
Packaging is so much more than that:<br />
there’s production planning, manufacturing,<br />
procurement, warehousing and<br />
the list goes on,” he says. “Production<br />
planning scheduling is the very heart of<br />
our organization. We have worked hard<br />
to nail down our data and forecasting<br />
and are incredibly proud of where we<br />
MARCH <strong>2019</strong>
SUPPLY CHAIN<br />
207<br />
are. With new insight we were able to<br />
make changes across the business,<br />
for example moving the releases of<br />
warehouses from customer service<br />
to warehousing and logistics – this<br />
streamlined the flow with our customers<br />
as the information to deliver on this<br />
promise resides in the supply chain”.<br />
Emmerson Packaging’s customer<br />
base continues to evolve. The modernday<br />
customer demands transparency<br />
in products and across supply chains.<br />
Emmerson Packaging prides itself on<br />
its commitment to sustainability as a<br />
business and delivers on this not only<br />
through its internal commitment but its<br />
products – specifically recyclable and<br />
biodegradable options. Corriveau was<br />
proud to go into detail around Emmerson<br />
Packaging’s SmartPack. Manufactured<br />
through a process that significantly<br />
reduces environmental impact<br />
without compromising on quality or<br />
lead times, SmartPack proved how<br />
crucial it is to have control over the entire<br />
supply chain. In order to achieve this<br />
www.businesschief.com
EMMERSON PACKAGING<br />
innovative and truly ground-breaking<br />
process, Emmerson Packaging sought<br />
out a strategic partner, which it found<br />
in Nova Chemicals. “I cannot stress<br />
enough the importance of having trusted<br />
partners in everything you want to<br />
achieve through the supply chain,” says<br />
Corriveau. “We’ve been doing business<br />
with Nova Chemicals for many years<br />
and they have been instrumental in our<br />
success because of their commitment<br />
to innovation and our partnership.”<br />
“We’ve had discussions with suppliers<br />
in the past that wanted to cut corners.<br />
We’re not willing to short change<br />
the process and we ensure all of our<br />
strategic partners are of the same<br />
belief. Nova Chemicals agree with this<br />
sentiment, having worked with us on<br />
this SmartPack project and they<br />
were keen to move fast.” Moving fast<br />
proves key for Emmerson Packaging<br />
as Corriveau notes that consumer<br />
demands are changing and in order to<br />
be ahead of the curve they need to be<br />
proactive. “The new era of customers<br />
place a greater emphasis on the<br />
environmental impact of the products<br />
We’re more than<br />
a transportation<br />
provider. We’re<br />
a business partner<br />
WHAT WE DO<br />
We create, proactively communicate, and flawlessly<br />
execute, innovative solutions that intertwine the needs<br />
of our clients and comingle them with our<br />
conveyances so that value is realized together.<br />
OUR WHY, HOW & WHAT ARE<br />
SIMPLY DEFINED AS:<br />
Why: Adding Gray Matter to What Matters.<br />
How: Developing Long-Lasting Tiered Relationships.<br />
What: Create and Flawlessly Execute Innovative Solutions<br />
Flawless Execution is a disciplined cycle of stating our objective; planning the<br />
solution; proactive communication internally and externally; followed by<br />
continuous improvement through learned results<br />
WHY ONE FOR FREIGHT?<br />
FIND US ON<br />
Visit our Site<br />
Get in Touch<br />
MARCH <strong>2019</strong>
SUPPLY CHAIN<br />
209<br />
they buy, and are going to greater<br />
lengths than ever before to ensure<br />
“they are not part of the problem, but<br />
part of the solution”.<br />
The demands of the customer extend<br />
into certifications, with Emmerson<br />
having proudly achieved Safe Quality<br />
Foods (SQF) certification, among<br />
others. While for many businesses the<br />
customer drives these decisions,<br />
Emmerson Packaging is proactive and<br />
has higher expectations of its supplier<br />
network and warehousing. “It’s about<br />
trying to stay ahead of the customer<br />
demand,” says Corriveau. “We approach<br />
everything with the notion that sooner<br />
or later, the customer is going to ask us<br />
to elevate our game and go beyond<br />
SQF certification – so we can’t be<br />
chasing.” Emmerson achieves this<br />
through a three-pillar approach: safety,<br />
quality and productivity. “You can’t be<br />
productive if you don’t produce quality<br />
product.” he says. “And you can’t<br />
produce quality products if you don’t<br />
do it in a safe environment.”<br />
To this end, Emmerson Packaging<br />
invests heavily in safety programs<br />
www.businesschief.com
EMMERSON PACKAGING<br />
210<br />
MARCH <strong>2019</strong>
SUPPLY CHAIN<br />
and internal reward systems designed to<br />
encourage employees to go above and<br />
beyond to be safe, produce quality products<br />
and be productive. Corriveau believes<br />
being safe<br />
is the most important out of the three. “Once<br />
you have employees who are working safe,<br />
quality products and productivity follow,”<br />
he says. “We want our employees to come<br />
to work in a safe environment and at the end<br />
of the day go home safely to their families.<br />
We work hard to instill this quality into our<br />
employees so they are safe inside and<br />
outside of work.” Corriveau believes the<br />
results speak for themselves as the company<br />
has been recognized as one of Canada’s<br />
Best Managed Companies for nine consecutive<br />
years by Deloitte. For him, this recognition<br />
echoes Emmerson Packaging’s CEO’s<br />
sentiment that “our customers push us to be<br />
better” because the company looks to<br />
always be ahead of the curve, and therefore<br />
needs a workforce that is ready to go above<br />
and beyond.<br />
Emmerson Packaging has three major<br />
markets: frozen food, pet food and towel and<br />
tissue otherwise referred to as “overwrap”.<br />
Having two plants, one in the town of Amherst,<br />
Nova Scotia and one in the small city of<br />
Belleville, Ontario means that Emmerson<br />
Packaging’s supply chain needs to be best in<br />
211<br />
www.businesschief.com
EMMERSON PACKAGING<br />
212<br />
class. “In some cases, there is<br />
a large geographical distance from<br />
these customers, so how do we compete?<br />
By being better, fluid, and by<br />
providing a seamless journey,” says<br />
Corriveau. “We work hard with trusted<br />
partners such as ONE For Freight,<br />
a solutions first transportation company<br />
that helps us achieve our goals. We<br />
can compete with anyone on lead<br />
time and service.”<br />
As Emmerson Packaging continues<br />
its journey of supply chain transformation<br />
it does so with a key competitive<br />
advantage that no other current<br />
packaging producer has. Together with<br />
“WE’RE NOT WILLING<br />
TO CUT CORNERS<br />
AND WE ENSURE ALL<br />
OF OUR STRATEGIC<br />
PARTNERS ARE OF<br />
THE SAME BELIEF”<br />
—<br />
Serge Corrivea,<br />
Vice President of Supply Chain,<br />
Emmerson Packaging<br />
trusted partners like Nova Chemicals,<br />
the company not only produces its own<br />
packaging but proactively works on<br />
innovative and new concepts in its own<br />
Research & Development department<br />
and in-house laboratory. Emmerson<br />
Packaging is also proud to be vertically<br />
integrated and converts its own products.<br />
Ultimately, the success of Emmerson<br />
boils down to its commitment to<br />
sustainability and its customers. “If our<br />
MARCH <strong>2019</strong>
SUPPLY CHAIN<br />
1956<br />
Year founded<br />
450+<br />
Approximate number<br />
of employees<br />
213<br />
customers are successful, then and<br />
only then do we get to be successful,”<br />
says Corriveau. “From the very first<br />
days of the company we’ve been<br />
extremely proud of how we operate<br />
and how we continue to strive to<br />
reduce our impact on the environment.<br />
Moving forward, it’s about looking at<br />
what more can we do for our customers,<br />
our employees and our communities.<br />
By focusing on sustainability,<br />
Emmerson Packaging believes they<br />
can deliver a quality product to their<br />
customers that not only meets the<br />
demands of the market but is also<br />
environmentally responsible”.<br />
www.businesschief.com
214<br />
A DIGITAL<br />
TRANSFORMATION<br />
WITH KEY PARTNERS<br />
AT THE CORE<br />
MARCH <strong>2019</strong>
TECHNOLOGY<br />
215<br />
WRIT TEN BY<br />
DALE BENTON<br />
PRODUCED BY<br />
JAMES BERRY<br />
www.businesschief.com
TRAFFIX<br />
CARLOS TRIVINO,<br />
DIRECTOR OF IT, EXPLORES HOW<br />
PARTNERS AND PEOPLE<br />
PROVE KEY AMIDST TRAFFIX’S<br />
DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION<br />
216<br />
or more than 40 years, Traffix has<br />
F<br />
provided comprehensive third-party<br />
logistics and transportation solutions to<br />
customers across North America and established<br />
itself as a true market leader. Key to the company’s<br />
continued success had been a strong vision that<br />
places its customers, carriers and internal teams<br />
at the forefront of everything it does. The company<br />
describes itself as ‘the transportation people’ and<br />
this in particular continues to be a true competitive<br />
advantage at a time where technology has completely<br />
redefined the industry over the last decade.<br />
Carlos Trivino joined Traffix back in 2014 as<br />
Director of IT for the company, bringing with him an<br />
extensive history of experience in transportation,<br />
logistics and technology implementation. He joined<br />
the company with a simple mission of looking at<br />
how Traffix could increasingly utilize technology to<br />
better serve its customer base and he admits that<br />
joining Traffix was almost a no-brainer. “I had done<br />
some consulting with Traffix and after a while I just<br />
felt that it was a great company,” he says. “It’s a<br />
privately held company and has some key partners<br />
MARCH <strong>2019</strong>
TECHNOLOGY<br />
217<br />
Carlos Trivino<br />
EXECUTIVE PROFILE<br />
With 28 years’ experience in various disciplines in the<br />
transportation industry, Carlos’ career has encompassed<br />
a number of roles from dock floor right through to management.<br />
With a passion for systems and technology, he<br />
took on the role of System Operator and his career path<br />
changed. As Information Technology Manager, Trivino<br />
was tasked with supporting the growth, design and<br />
development of new functionality within an in-house<br />
FMS (Freight Management System).<br />
www.businesschief.com
Driving Digital<br />
Transformation<br />
Digital Transformation Starts Here<br />
Now, more than ever, technology plays a critical role in an organization’s ability to evolve<br />
and continue to increase business value. Transformation is imperative for all businesses, from<br />
small to enterprise, in order to survive and advance in a digital economy. By leveraging<br />
modern technology in all areas of your business, you can improve customer experience,<br />
workforce enablement, and operational agility, keeping your business competitive, profitable<br />
and relevant. Gibraltar Solutions offers a wide selection of products and services to assist<br />
companies in their digital transformation journey.<br />
REQUEST A CONSULTATION TODAY<br />
VISIT OUR SITE TO LEARN MORE<br />
ABOUT GIBRALTAR SOLUTIONS<br />
Gibraltar Solutions is a leading Canadian technology provider<br />
with over 20 years of experience in the IT industry. We help<br />
customers streamline and manage their IT processes to improve<br />
productivity, performance and profitability.
TECHNOLOGY<br />
“IT’S A PRIVATELY<br />
HELD COMPANY<br />
AND HAS SOME<br />
KEY PARTNERS<br />
WITHIN THE<br />
COMPANY<br />
THAT KNOW THE<br />
BUSINESS VERY<br />
WELL AND HAVE<br />
BEEN EXTREMELY<br />
SUCCESSFUL”<br />
—<br />
Carlos Trivino,<br />
Director of IT, Traffix<br />
within the company that know the business<br />
very well and have been extremely<br />
successful. Over time, as Traffix has<br />
grown and evolved, my role now looks at<br />
the technology partnerships, ensuring<br />
that software and hardware partners<br />
are vetted and align to what we want<br />
to achieve as a company.”<br />
In 2018, Traffix experienced significant<br />
growth as its existing user base<br />
of 60-70 users skyrocketed to close to<br />
300 users at any given time. This placed<br />
extreme pressure on the company as its<br />
existing technology architecture was<br />
only capable of handling the original<br />
number of users. This prompted the<br />
company to invest and embark on a<br />
digital transformation which would see<br />
Traffix respond to this growth spurt and<br />
be ready to experience further growth<br />
in the future. “We had to make a quick<br />
decision as to what type of technology<br />
we wanted and needed and what we<br />
were going to leverage to achieve<br />
our goal, which is to be one of the<br />
top logistics companies in Canada,”<br />
says Trivino.<br />
Key to this growth plan, and to<br />
Trivino’s own remit, was striking strategic<br />
partnerships with technology vendors<br />
which could accelerate Traffix’s growth<br />
–this is where the company turned to<br />
Gibraltar Solutions and Trimble Transportation<br />
and Logistics (TMW). As a leading<br />
Canadian technology provider, Gibraltar<br />
Solutions recommended Nutanix<br />
hyperconverged cloud infrastructure.<br />
Nutanix will allow Traffix to leverage<br />
cloud-based technology to effectively<br />
monitor and manage a 24/7 operation<br />
across its entire footprint. It also allows<br />
Trivino and his IT team to “focus more on<br />
219<br />
www.businesschief.com
TRAFFIX<br />
Trimble Transportation<br />
Trimble Transportation provides solutions to create a fully integrated supply chain.<br />
With an intelligent ecosystem of products and services, Trimble Transportation<br />
enables customers to embrace the rapid technological evolution of the industry<br />
and connect all aspects of transportation and logistics—trucks, drivers, back<br />
office, freight and assets. Through the combined legacy of PeopleNet, TMW<br />
Systems and 10-4 Systems, Trimble Transportation delivers an open, scalable<br />
platform to help customers make more informed decisions and maximize<br />
performance, visibility and safety.<br />
► Analytics<br />
► Driver Apps and Efficiency<br />
► Navigation, Routing and Final Mile<br />
► Regulatory Compliance<br />
► Transportation Management<br />
Systems<br />
► Vehicle Health and Maintenence<br />
► Video and Safety Solutions<br />
Get moving and find out more at: trimble.com<br />
transforms<br />
TECHNOLOGY THAT<br />
TRANSFORMING THE WAY THE WORLD WORKS
TECHNOLOGY<br />
221<br />
the user experience and performance,<br />
rather than worrying about the technology<br />
and troubleshooting X or Y”, notes<br />
Trivino. “We focus on the things that<br />
really matter and that allows us to drive<br />
true value across the organization.”<br />
Traffix also leverages Citrix’s digital<br />
workspace to deliver applications, which<br />
allows the company to have greater<br />
access to and understanding of data<br />
flow. Trivino recognizes this as a key<br />
trend across the industry. He notes that<br />
companies and users were satisfied<br />
with “minimal” information, but in recent<br />
years customers are demanding more<br />
information and visibility and accurate<br />
data within their systems. “They want<br />
to be able to do more analytics on their<br />
side so that they can realize greater<br />
cost savings and performance,” he says.<br />
“The information would historically be<br />
accessed by a server or a PC but now<br />
it’s about remote desktops and hyper<br />
converged technology, which is where<br />
Citrix comes into play. The technology<br />
through Citrix makes the data flow faster<br />
and more efficient than ever before, not<br />
only for end users to be able to access<br />
but for us to be able to produce that<br />
information.” In addition to Citrix Work-<br />
www.businesschief.com
TRAFFIX<br />
222<br />
“WE FOCUS ON<br />
THE THINGS THAT<br />
REALLY MATTER<br />
AND THAT<br />
ALLOWS US<br />
TO DRIVE<br />
TRUE VALUE<br />
ACROSS THE<br />
ORGANIZATION”<br />
—<br />
Carlos Trivino,<br />
Director of IT, Traffix<br />
space, Traffix, with Gibraltar’s assistance,<br />
also deployed Citrix SD-WAN, a next<br />
generation WAN edge platform that<br />
provides high performance and consistent<br />
application delivery to its branch<br />
offices. Within the branch, Citrix SD-WAN<br />
also consolidated expensive routing and<br />
security hardware, simplifying network<br />
management and reducing costs.<br />
In order to monitor and understand this<br />
information flow it requires a comprehensive<br />
and proven multi-modal dispatch,<br />
operations and accounting system that<br />
truly enables efficiency and scalability.<br />
This is where TMW, through its Truck-<br />
Mate solution, has been instrumental.<br />
“Trimble Transportation is pleased to<br />
be a critical part of the technology and<br />
application backbone helping to fuel<br />
Traffix’s explosive growth,” says Harald<br />
Fritz, Vice President, TruckMate.<br />
“Traffix’s collaboration and partnership<br />
drive continuous improvement within<br />
the TruckMate TMS including Command<br />
Center, CRM, Agent Mobile Solution<br />
and several complimentary, 3rd party<br />
software solutions. Embedded business<br />
intelligence (BI) capabilities and KPIs<br />
provide critical data into the entire<br />
decision continuum, from Sales through<br />
execution to billing and the company’s<br />
accounting and financials. Traffix is one<br />
of the most innovative brokerage and<br />
logistics providers always challenging<br />
themselves and us to capitalize on<br />
new opportunities.”<br />
When it comes to scalability, the<br />
Nutanix platform holds the key to Traffix’s<br />
technology transformation, as it enables<br />
the company to stack and grow without<br />
“ripping everything out and buying a new<br />
Storage Area Network (SAN)”. Through<br />
Nutanix, Citrix, Gibraltar Solutions and<br />
of course TMW, Traffix can invest and<br />
MARCH <strong>2019</strong>
TECHNOLOGY<br />
223<br />
put more resources into its infrastructure<br />
as the business continues its rapid<br />
growth with a significantly lower up-front<br />
cost. For Trivino, it represents the value<br />
both he and the company place in the<br />
relationships Traffix looks to strike on<br />
its continuous growth journey. “We look<br />
to partner with people that want to<br />
grow together with us. If we succeed,<br />
the partner succeeds and so over time<br />
they become strategy partners with us.”<br />
With vast amounts of data and greater<br />
access to that data, the conversation<br />
inevitably turns towards security. Traffix<br />
is investing heavily in cloud solutions and<br />
automated technology, but how does<br />
it ensure that this data is being stored<br />
securely and that customers can trust<br />
the company with sensitive information?<br />
Traffix has a wide number of monitoring<br />
systems that look closely at system<br />
behavior. Should the system behavior<br />
seem out of turn or erratic, then it creates<br />
an email response to the personal and<br />
alerts them to it. Citrix also plays a key<br />
role in the security of data, securing<br />
laptops and servers when out of use<br />
to mitigate the risk of data leaks. Trivino<br />
www.businesschief.com
TRAFFIX<br />
224<br />
MARCH <strong>2019</strong>
TECHNOLOGY<br />
“WE ALWAYS LIKE<br />
TO LEVERAGE<br />
THE PEOPLE<br />
THAT HAVE<br />
BEEN WITH THE<br />
BUSINESS<br />
A LONG TIME.<br />
SOME HAVE<br />
BEEN HERE<br />
MANY YEARS,<br />
OTHERS ARE<br />
NEW. EACH AND<br />
EVERY PERSON<br />
BRINGS A LOT<br />
OF VALUE TO<br />
THE COMPANY”<br />
—<br />
Carlos Trivino,<br />
Director of IT, Traffix<br />
225<br />
www.businesschief.com
TRAFFIX<br />
226<br />
1979<br />
Year founded<br />
300<br />
Approximate number<br />
of employees<br />
notes that restructuring the technology<br />
architecture of the company provided him<br />
with an opportunity to look a little closer at<br />
how Traffix could better monitor the<br />
security of its data and effectively build in<br />
a new level of threat protection.<br />
As the company continues to explore the<br />
possibilities of technology, the very core<br />
of the business remains the same. Part of<br />
the very reason Trivino joined the company<br />
was the way it invests in its people, and<br />
while Traffix introduces more new technology,<br />
such as automation, to its operations,<br />
MARCH <strong>2019</strong>
TECHNOLOGY<br />
these people will always remain key.<br />
“We always like to leverage the people<br />
that have been with the business a long<br />
time. Some have been here many years;<br />
others are new. Each and every person<br />
brings a lot of value to the company,” he<br />
says. “In the artificial intelligence (AI)<br />
space, we are looking at the repetitive<br />
nature of capturing information and<br />
removing the person from that and<br />
moving them into a role that will bring<br />
a different but more important value<br />
to the business.”<br />
“We can strategically place them somewhere<br />
where we can use their years of<br />
experience in another area, and they<br />
can focus more on the company itself.”<br />
Trivino points to an example where the<br />
business would place an employee<br />
in a Team Lead role and support new<br />
people coming in, helping them get to<br />
grips with the technology and overall<br />
Traffix operations. “They are teaching<br />
the new employees and helping them<br />
understand that this is how we operate,<br />
this is how we do things, and basically<br />
227<br />
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TRAFFIX<br />
228<br />
“EACH PARTNER<br />
HAS DIFFERENT<br />
TYPES OF<br />
SOFTWARE<br />
THAT WE CAN<br />
LEVERAGE FROM<br />
AND SO WE WILL<br />
LOOK MORE AT<br />
GETTING THAT<br />
DATA INTO OUR<br />
SYSTEM, AND<br />
VICE VERSA,<br />
TO BE ABLE TO<br />
GIVE OUR END<br />
CUSTOMER THE<br />
INFORMATION<br />
THAT THEY NEED<br />
A LOT QUICKER”<br />
—<br />
Carlos Trivino,<br />
Director of IT, Traffix<br />
MARCH <strong>2019</strong>
TECHNOLOGY<br />
overseeing that department and letting<br />
go of that repetitive task that is very<br />
mundane,” he adds.<br />
Traffix’s digital transformation journey<br />
shows no signs of slowing down. In<br />
line with the company’s growth ambitions,<br />
Traffix will continue to invest and<br />
adopt innovative technologies in order<br />
to continue to achieve rapid growth<br />
and process information. 2018 proved<br />
a pivotal year for achieving this as the<br />
company focused on investing in its<br />
network infrastructure, laying down<br />
the foundation for the company’s digital<br />
future. “What we’re focusing on now is<br />
the user facing and customer facing<br />
technology, so more software development<br />
and more integration between key<br />
partners,” says Trivino. “Each partner<br />
has different types of software that<br />
we can leverage from and so we will<br />
look more at getting that data into our<br />
system, and vice versa, to be able to<br />
give our end customer the information<br />
that they need a lot quicker.”<br />
229<br />
www.businesschief.com
FROM E-MAIL ROLLOUTS<br />
TO BIOMETRIC SCANNERS:<br />
TECHNOLOGY<br />
TRANSFORMATION<br />
230<br />
AT THE CALGARY<br />
DROP-IN CENTRE<br />
We talk to Helen Knight, Director of IT,<br />
and Paul Twigg of Sierra Systems/NTT DATA<br />
Services, exploring their technological<br />
transformation of the Calgary Drop-In Centre<br />
to better the lives of its staff, volunteers<br />
and the city’s homeless community<br />
WRIT TEN BY<br />
HARRY MENEAR<br />
PRODUCED BY<br />
ARRON RAMPLING<br />
MARCH <strong>2019</strong>
TECHNOLOGY<br />
231<br />
www.businesschief.com
CALGARY DROP-IN CENTRE<br />
232<br />
H<br />
elen Wetherley Knight, Director of<br />
Information Technology (IT) at the<br />
Calgary Drop-In Centre (The DI), has<br />
always been excited by computers. “My parents<br />
met through computer dating,” she mentions, “so<br />
I’m the product of that technology from the early<br />
70’s. I started programming when I was nine and<br />
I was very interested in technology, however, in<br />
high school, I learned that ‘tech was for boys’, so<br />
I backed away for a few years. Now, I am a pretty<br />
loud advocate for keeping women engaged in<br />
technology.” Knight has worked in IT for over 20<br />
years, spending 12 of those years at Suncor<br />
Energy while also running her own consulting<br />
business, Helen Knight Consulting Inc. During that<br />
time, she was also a regular volunteer at the Calgary<br />
Drop-In Centre in the city’s downtown.<br />
Serving over 10,000 people a year, the DI<br />
provides essential care, health services, employment<br />
training and housing support to those in<br />
need. In 2018, the DI provided Calgary’s homeless<br />
population with over 100,000 pieces of<br />
clothing, served over 400,000 meals in its dining<br />
hall, and provided 420,000 individual nights of<br />
shelter. When, in 2016, the DI began searching for<br />
a new IT Director, Knight’s volunteering record put<br />
her at the top of the list. “There was a focus on<br />
having someone with non-profit experience. I<br />
was lucky to be considered because I had been a<br />
volunteer.” She explains: “That speaks to one of<br />
MARCH <strong>2019</strong>
TECHNOLOGY<br />
233<br />
www.businesschief.com
CALGARY DROP-IN CENTRE<br />
234<br />
the opportunities at non-profits: there’s<br />
so much emphasis placed on non-profit<br />
expertise, and there are so few people<br />
that have technical backgrounds with<br />
non-profit experience, that the<br />
technical needs of non-profits have<br />
gone underserved for years.”<br />
With the support of the DI Board,<br />
Knight is effecting a four-year complete<br />
technology transformation at the<br />
Calgary Drop-In. She was keen to<br />
discuss how her team is approaching<br />
organizational change management<br />
across one of Calgary’s largest non-<br />
profits, her current and future plans to<br />
use cutting-edge biometric technology<br />
to increase efficiency and security, as<br />
well as putting confidential personal<br />
data back into the hands of Calgary’s<br />
homeless population. In addition, Paul<br />
Twigg, VP of Technology at Sierra<br />
Systems, an NTT DATA Services<br />
company, serves as the centre’s<br />
strategic partner and plays a large<br />
role in helping Knight implement her<br />
ambitious technology transformation.<br />
“I’m lucky that I walked in with years<br />
of experience and a Master’s Degree in<br />
MARCH <strong>2019</strong>
TECHNOLOGY<br />
CLICK TO WATCH: ‘FUELLED BY KINDNESS’<br />
235<br />
www.businesschief.com
CALGARY DROP-IN CENTRE<br />
236<br />
IT strategy, because there was a lot of<br />
low hanging fruit,” explains Knight,<br />
acknowledging that in the non-profit<br />
sector, technology is difficult to invest<br />
in without donor support. When she<br />
arrived at the DI only 70 of 270 staff<br />
had email addresses, so the first task<br />
was to roll out Office365 across the<br />
organization. She notes, “I made a mistake<br />
by just sending out videos on how<br />
to use the new tools – it took me about<br />
four months to realize that I would be<br />
more successful supporting this user<br />
group in a room with a human being<br />
they liked and trusted.”<br />
Knight admits: “I had a lot to learn<br />
about appropriately engaging this<br />
compassionate, service-focused<br />
audience with technology.” However, the<br />
first steps of her technology transformation<br />
quickly yielded fruit. By<br />
calculating the opportunity cost of<br />
wasted time due to the DI using<br />
multiple free and donated tools and<br />
databases, Knight was able to prove a<br />
return on investment of US$1.5mn per<br />
year, and return 20 hours per week<br />
per person that could be spent manag-<br />
MARCH <strong>2019</strong>
TECHNOLOGY<br />
“IT’S A LABOR OF<br />
LOVE, BECAUSE<br />
I BELIEVE THESE<br />
TOOLS WILL<br />
EFFECTIVELY<br />
IMPROVE EVERY<br />
ASPECT OF THE<br />
STAFF’S LIVES”<br />
—<br />
Helen Knight<br />
CIO/Director of Technology<br />
Calgary Drop-In and Rehab Centre<br />
ing relationships. “We went from our<br />
volunteer and donor department using<br />
five different calendars, answering<br />
the phone full-time and carrying the<br />
burden of disparate systems, to<br />
having a push system where the<br />
donors and volunteers engage<br />
directly by registering on a website,<br />
being onboarded by a system,<br />
and signing up for the shifts that they<br />
wanted, so the staff were able to<br />
focus on relationship building,” she<br />
recounts. “There was significant<br />
change management and it was a<br />
really careful process, but it’s a labor<br />
237<br />
EXECUTIVE PROFILE<br />
Helen Wetherley Knight, MBA<br />
Fighting poverty with technology, Helen is the<br />
Director of IT for the Calgary Drop-In Centre, the<br />
most effective Homeless Shelter in Canada.<br />
Leading an IT Transformation that will deliver<br />
annual savings of $1.5 Million USD, Helen is<br />
driving meaningful change for vulnerable<br />
Calgarians. Helen is also a passionate advocate<br />
for increasing gender diversity in IT, serves on<br />
two non-profit boards and was a Canadian<br />
CIO of the year finalist for 2018.<br />
www.businesschief.com
Rooted in Community<br />
We are proud to support The Calgary Drop-In Centre<br />
with innovative technology solutions that help make<br />
a positive emotional impact in the community,<br />
and in people’s lives.<br />
sierrasystems.com<br />
of love,” Knight insists, “because I<br />
believe that all of these tools will<br />
effectively improve the staff’s lives.”<br />
Knight stresses that the essence of<br />
her technological transformation at the<br />
Drop-In is the empowerment of its staff<br />
and volunteers. “I’m not here to replace<br />
anybody,” she insists. “I’m here to take<br />
away busy work and pain. I think technologists<br />
get into a lot of trouble when<br />
they feel so confident that they reach<br />
past their level of expertise and start<br />
making policy decisions, or feel that<br />
just because they can prove something<br />
with data, that it’s the right and humane<br />
thing to do,” she reflects. “I fully accept<br />
that my skill-set ends at the technology,<br />
and that the front-line workers are the<br />
experts in client care”<br />
Twigg, who has been working alongside<br />
Knight and her team to bring<br />
Sierra Systems’ expertise to bear on<br />
the challenges of technological transformation<br />
at the Drop-In, agrees. “It’s<br />
not about cool tech. It’s about giving<br />
a person experiencing homelessness<br />
a bed, a sandwich, a laundry service<br />
and everything else that comes with it,”<br />
he emphasizes. “All non-profits require<br />
technology. They just haven’t been
SECTOR<br />
“IT’S NOT ABOUT COOL<br />
TECH. IT’S ABOUT GIVING<br />
A HOMELESS PERSON<br />
A BED, A SANDWICH,<br />
A LAUNDRY SERVICE<br />
AND EVERYTHING ELSE<br />
THAT COMES WITH IT”<br />
—<br />
Paul Twigg<br />
VP of Technology<br />
Sierra Systems/NTT DATA Services<br />
able to invest in it because the charity<br />
funding model makes it difficult to put<br />
money into technology even though it<br />
will save money down the line.”: Sierra<br />
Systems, an NTT DATA Services company,<br />
specializes in IT consulting in order<br />
to provide its clients with innovative,<br />
forward-thinking solutions.<br />
The process of choosing a strategic<br />
partner was fairly unconventional. “We<br />
spent six months figuring out what the<br />
exact problems were that we wanted<br />
to solve instead of running to a bunch<br />
239<br />
EXECUTIVE PROFILE<br />
Paul Twigg<br />
Paul Twigg is the National VP of Technology for Sierra<br />
Systems an NTT DATA Services Company. He is an<br />
award winning IT business leader with executive and<br />
hands-on experience in delivering leading edge cloud,<br />
data and innovation services. He is a recognized<br />
speaker and thought leader in the technology field<br />
driving innovation and digital transformation ideas.<br />
Paul is security cleared (Canadian Secret Level) and has<br />
vast experience creating technology strategy to develop<br />
creative and innovative data centric services tailored<br />
towards increasing efficiencies and reducing costs<br />
within an organization. He is a motivational leader who<br />
enjoys building successful and productive teams.<br />
www.businesschief.com
CALGARY DROP-IN CENTRE<br />
240<br />
of vendors and doing multiple demonstrations,”<br />
Knight explains. “It’s the<br />
opposite of how teams engage<br />
vendors normally.” This approach<br />
helped Knight choose a company that<br />
would offer a complete service. “We<br />
were really looking at solving the entire<br />
problem,” she says. “The finance, the<br />
HR, the IT, the client relationship, the<br />
client service; the entire problem,<br />
instead of discrete solutions.” This is<br />
where Sierra Systems, a company<br />
already involved in donating and<br />
volunteering at the DI, came into play.<br />
After identifying Microsoft Dynamics<br />
as a customer relationship management<br />
system that could cater to the<br />
Drop-In’s needs, Knight considered<br />
two companies. “One brought me<br />
standard pricing, and Sierra, with<br />
evidence of being donors and volunteers,<br />
brought me their proposal at half<br />
price,” says Knight. “I knew they were<br />
in it with us. Sierra had the imagination<br />
that we needed.”<br />
Since then, the relationship has<br />
evolved from client-vendor to much<br />
more. In addition to back office initiatives<br />
to improve efficiency and foster digital<br />
engagement within the DI’s staff, Twigg<br />
MARCH <strong>2019</strong>
TECHNOLOGY<br />
1.2mn<br />
Meals served<br />
in total<br />
100,000+<br />
Items of clothing<br />
distributed<br />
241<br />
420,000+<br />
Individual nights of<br />
shelter provided<br />
www.businesschief.com
CALGARY DROP-IN CENTRE<br />
242<br />
and his team have worked with Knight<br />
to bring one of their more cutting-edge<br />
initiatives towards maturity. For 10 years,<br />
the Calgary Drop-In has used fingerprint<br />
scanners in order to identify and<br />
admit its clients. “It took anywhere<br />
from about seven to 30 seconds to let<br />
an individual in,” says Twigg. “Considering<br />
that, since 2 February, it’s been<br />
about -30ºF every day here in Calgary,<br />
when you’ve got several hundred<br />
people coming and going every day,<br />
upgrading the intake systems will make<br />
entering the facility much more efficient.”<br />
To solve this problem, Knight is turning<br />
to more modern forms of biometric<br />
technology with higher accuracy rates,<br />
reducing admission times to around<br />
three seconds.<br />
In addition, the nature of the DI’s<br />
work requires it to keep client records.<br />
“One billion people in the world don’t<br />
have ID, including people who need<br />
emergency services, are victims of<br />
crime, have been evicted, are human<br />
trafficking victims - maybe they’re<br />
using drugs or have mental health<br />
issues. Regardless of the client’s<br />
history, we need to know who they are<br />
so we can ensure we are meeting their<br />
“GLOBALLY, ONE<br />
BILLION PEOPLE ARE<br />
WITHOUT ID,<br />
INCLUDING PEOPLE<br />
WHO NEED EMERGENCY<br />
SERVICES”<br />
—<br />
Helen Knight, CIO/Director of Technology<br />
Calgary Drop-in & Rehab Centre<br />
unique needs.” At the heart of the new<br />
biometric identification system the DI is<br />
trialing is the desire to not only improve<br />
the quality of patient care, but also to<br />
“put the client in charge of their data”.<br />
“There are 43 conflicting legislations<br />
and ethical agreements governing<br />
client data,” Knight explains. “I’m<br />
a co-chair of a collaborative work group<br />
trying to improve communication<br />
between homeless-serving agencies<br />
in the City of Calgary, and when we<br />
tried to create a decision guide to<br />
navigate them, there was no way to<br />
figure it out; they all conflict and there’s<br />
no way to prioritize the disparate<br />
MARCH <strong>2019</strong>
TECHNOLOGY<br />
agreements.” By putting the decision<br />
to share personal data back into the<br />
hands of Calgary’s homeless population,<br />
Twigg and Knight believe that<br />
agencies serving vulnerable people<br />
across the city can improve communication<br />
and build a shared database to<br />
better serve their community.<br />
Ensuring the potential for privacy<br />
and control remains in the hands of the<br />
client, however, is a top priority for the<br />
venture. “There’s a lot of personal<br />
identifiable information that can’t be<br />
shared between agencies,” says Twigg,<br />
whose team has been collaborating<br />
with Knight and the working group on<br />
a solution. “We are designing an architecture<br />
that implements blockchain to<br />
allow a client’s health information to<br />
remain encrypted and afford the client<br />
the ability to share that information as<br />
they move between agencies, or<br />
decide what can and can’t be shared.”<br />
In addition, the biometric data recorded<br />
by the DI’s new systems, Knight<br />
explains, is anonymous by design.<br />
Another place where Knight wants to<br />
deploy biometrics down the line is in<br />
the way clients at the shelter supply<br />
personal information, as well as book<br />
medical and other appointments. “I’m<br />
more comfortable being vulnerable to<br />
243<br />
www.businesschief.com
CALGARY DROP-IN CENTRE<br />
244<br />
“THE CLIENT<br />
OWNS THE KEY,<br />
AND THE DATA<br />
IS ANONYMOUS<br />
WITHOUT THEM<br />
BEING THERE”<br />
—<br />
Helen Knight<br />
CIO/Director of Technology<br />
Calgary Drop-in and Rehab Centre<br />
a system than a person,” she admits.<br />
“On 3 January, we put a client selfserve<br />
kiosk in the dining hall of the<br />
Calgary Drop-In Centre. The feedback<br />
from the clients has been very positive.<br />
Wedesigned this kiosk with our wood<br />
shop, where our clients learn woodworking<br />
skills, added a touchscreen<br />
monitor, and a donated PC. We built it<br />
so that you could use a wheelchair or<br />
a chair, so we didn’t have to move the<br />
screens around to account for height<br />
differences. All it does right now is two<br />
things: it plays a video on data sharing,<br />
why we want your data, and that it is<br />
safe and secure; and it presents a form<br />
where you can tell us what your barriers<br />
are to finding housing.”<br />
The form asks questions used to<br />
identify the client’s barriers to housing:<br />
“For example, are you comfortable<br />
talking to a landlord?” says Knight.<br />
“Some people can be afraid of authority<br />
and may not be comfortable speaking<br />
to a landlord. If we identify that is a<br />
barrier, we’ll go with them.” Knight<br />
notes that a client’s mistrust for human<br />
authority may result in a reluctance to<br />
reveal the information that would result<br />
in them receiving help – but the kiosk<br />
MARCH <strong>2019</strong>
TECHNOLOGY<br />
CLICK TO WATCH: ‘ROOTED IN COMMUNITY, SUPPORTED IN THE<br />
CLOUD - CALGARY DROP-IN CENTER AND SIERRA SYSTEMS’<br />
245<br />
has built in anonymity and lacks a human<br />
element. “Through a touchscreen computer,<br />
we’re reaching a vulnerable<br />
clientele and are serving them in a new<br />
way,” she says. Knight has now ordered<br />
two more kiosks based on this success.<br />
“We are fulfilling an unmet need for some<br />
clients and finding new ways to build<br />
relationships,” she adds.<br />
Knight and Sierra Systems’ plan to<br />
use biometric identification in the DI<br />
also extends to the kiosks. “Once we<br />
finish a comprehensive privacy impact<br />
assessment,” Knight says, “we can put<br />
biometrics in the kiosks, so clients can<br />
choose to opt in and receive personalized<br />
services: book things like laundry<br />
and medical appointments, find out<br />
when they’re meeting a landlord - they<br />
would have a portal to their lives.”<br />
Clients would also be able to opt out of<br />
the biometric customization. “We put in<br />
this fabric flap,” she says, “so clients<br />
know for a fact that they’re not being<br />
recorded, and still have access to<br />
helpful information, opening hours,<br />
times and maps.”<br />
Knight’s plans for the DI are exten-<br />
www.businesschief.com
CALGARY DROP-IN CENTRE<br />
INFORMATION<br />
246<br />
The Calgary Drop-In Centre<br />
(the DI) is more than an<br />
emergency shelter. They<br />
provide essential care as well<br />
as health services,<br />
employment training, and<br />
housing supports to people<br />
who need help. Their<br />
programs and services<br />
connect people to permanent<br />
housing that meets their<br />
individual needs. To donate to<br />
support this project please visit<br />
calgarydropin.ca/tech<br />
sive and ambitious, but she and Twigg<br />
are eager, excited and optimistic.<br />
Knight is working with the University of<br />
Calgary and the University of Taiwan to<br />
test biometrics with the potential to<br />
detect sepsis and necrotic wounds, as<br />
well as planning on using the proposed<br />
transformation of the DI’s HR system, in<br />
conjunction with weather and environmental<br />
data, to predict workload.<br />
“Helen’s a fantastic advocate, not just<br />
for the Calgary Drop-In Centre, but for<br />
the homeless community across<br />
MARCH <strong>2019</strong>
TECHNOLOGY<br />
247<br />
Canada,” says Twigg. “It would be our<br />
dream if Helen was at the Calgary DI<br />
for the next 10 years, because we<br />
believe we could solve amazing<br />
problems together. She understands<br />
how to solve big problems, and we<br />
believe we can match those ideas with<br />
the technology and the thought leaders<br />
that we have at Sierra Systems and<br />
NTT DATA Services.” Knight makes it<br />
clear that the technology transformation<br />
she’s bringing to the DI isn’t about<br />
giving the DI ‘competitive advantage’<br />
over other agencies in Canada. “Nonprofit,<br />
especially the homeless-serving<br />
sector, is ripe for disruption, transformation<br />
and return-on-investment,” she<br />
says. “I see nothing but opportunity.”<br />
www.businesschief.com
248<br />
TM<br />
INSURANCE LIMITED
TECHNOLOGY<br />
Rewriting<br />
the rule<br />
book for<br />
249<br />
Canada’s<br />
insurance<br />
brokers<br />
WRIT TEN BY<br />
LAURA MULLAN<br />
PRODUCED BY<br />
GLEN WHITE
PBL INSURANCE LIMITED<br />
Delivering one-to-one insurance<br />
services with cutting-edge<br />
technologies, PBL Insurance<br />
is reshaping the way Canadian<br />
insurance brokers do business<br />
250<br />
D<br />
igitization is shaking up industries<br />
across the globe and it seems the<br />
insurance sector is no exception.<br />
For PBL Insurance, which has provided risk<br />
and insurance services to Canadians for<br />
almost a century, there was no doubt that<br />
digitization would be a central pillar of<br />
its strategic plan. The firm’s Director<br />
of Technology, Joey Faraone, says that<br />
by undertaking a root-and-branch<br />
digital transformation and overhauling<br />
its legacy systems, PBL Insurance is<br />
“re-writing the way insurance companies<br />
do business in Canada”.<br />
“I would say that technology is playing<br />
a very big role in driving PBL’s transformation,”<br />
he explains. “We went from<br />
having some very old technology<br />
pieces running our network to understanding<br />
that now is the time to invest<br />
and prepare the company for the next<br />
20 years of the technology curve.”<br />
Previously, Faraone says that PBL<br />
Insurance didn’t have a focused internal<br />
MARCH <strong>2019</strong>
TECHNOLOGY<br />
251<br />
www.businesschief.com
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TECHNOLOGY<br />
technology direction and so the Canadian<br />
firm decided to bring its digital strategy<br />
in-house. “The company wanted to get<br />
a better grasp on today’s technology<br />
and look at where technology will take<br />
the insurance industry in the future,”<br />
he says. “I was brought in to lead the<br />
development and management<br />
of new technologies and ensure<br />
that they align with the company’s<br />
business strategy.”<br />
Becoming a digital broker is no<br />
easy feat, but this transformation<br />
was firmly at the top of PBL’s<br />
agenda. Starting from the ground<br />
up, the Ontario-based company set<br />
up brand new back-end infrastructure,<br />
including new fiber circuits, routers and<br />
253<br />
Joey Faraone is a dedicated, dynamic and enthusiastic certified<br />
IT professional who specializes in project managing innovative data<br />
solutions to improve system stability, functionality and efficiency.<br />
Faraone is quick to familiarize himself with the latest technologies<br />
and industry developments while demonstrating a logical and<br />
analytical approach to solving complex problems and issues.<br />
Faraone is the Director of Technology at PBL Insurance where<br />
he possesses excellent interpersonal and communication skills<br />
and the ability to develop and maintain positive internal<br />
and external relationships.<br />
EXECUTIVE PROFILE<br />
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switches. “We’re wiping the slate clean<br />
and redesigning everything. We’re rolling<br />
out new technologies to help us minimize<br />
the equipment footprint but not sacrifice<br />
the service to our clients,” says Faraone.<br />
One of the company’s most cogent<br />
uses of technological innovation has<br />
been how it has selected a new cuttingedge<br />
broker management system. By<br />
adopting TechCanary, a solution based<br />
on Salesforce’s platform, PBL Insurance<br />
is breaking away from the confines<br />
of traditional insurance technology<br />
software. In using a cloud-based,<br />
analytics-driven system, Faraone says<br />
it’s reducing administrative burdens<br />
while simultaneously enhancing the<br />
visibility of its operations.<br />
“We are the first Canadian company<br />
to move to the TechCanary platform,”<br />
notes Faraone. “You could say there’s<br />
a lot of eyes on us to see how the<br />
solution is being rolled out in the<br />
Canadian market.” With such a wide<br />
range of clientele and data, Faraone<br />
believes that the platform will help<br />
MARCH <strong>2019</strong>
TECHNOLOGY<br />
“We have a one-on-one<br />
direct relationship with<br />
our clients. Our brokers,<br />
our account executives<br />
and our staff treat our<br />
clients and customers<br />
as one of their own”<br />
—<br />
Joey Faraone,<br />
Director of Technology<br />
255<br />
the company meet its customers’ needs<br />
and see what else it can do for them as<br />
an organization. “It means that we don’t<br />
have a one-way path for our clients, we<br />
can have a four-lane highway,” he notes.<br />
Shifting away from costly, hardwaredefined<br />
private networking solutions,<br />
PBL Insurance has also implanted<br />
a new software-defined wide-area<br />
network (SD-WAN). This gives PBL<br />
the ability to leverage efficiencies and<br />
create a more reliable network. It also<br />
gives the broker the option to use<br />
data optimization and analytics while<br />
leveraging a breakthrough in routing<br />
efficiencies, enhancing performance<br />
and reliability with the flexibility and<br />
affordability of a cloud service.<br />
“With our new network being rolled<br />
out, we’ve also put a lot of new contracts<br />
in place and we’ve implemented<br />
a new managed service provider (MSP),”<br />
Faraone says. “This is helping us roll<br />
out our network and enhance our user<br />
experience internally. The experience<br />
that our internal staff has been used to<br />
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versus where they are today has been<br />
a complete 180-degree turnaround.”<br />
Cloud technology has been a major<br />
trend in the insurance industry. Aside<br />
from its ability to lower costs and boost<br />
productivity through mobile working,<br />
it also offers a business continuity plan<br />
and security. Not one to stay in the<br />
shadows, PBL Insurance is embracing<br />
cloud technology through its new<br />
broker management system and<br />
colocation site.<br />
“We are moving towards the cloud<br />
more and more every day,” Faraone<br />
says. “There’s no downtime and there’s<br />
no lag, so efficiency is huge with this<br />
roll out. It’s ensuring that slow technology<br />
isn’t being used as a scapegoat.<br />
Our new broker management system<br />
also uses cloud technology which<br />
means our Account Executives can<br />
log into our system from anywhere<br />
and do business right on the spot.<br />
“We also have a very good system<br />
where we back up everything on our<br />
network nightly and then we move it<br />
to a colocation site which has its own<br />
back-up there. Then we move it to the<br />
cloud,” he continues. “It may sound like<br />
there’s a back-up of a back-up, but it’s<br />
very important to make sure that we<br />
know where all of our data is and that<br />
it’s accessible to us at a drop of a hat.<br />
“It’s promoting efficiency and productivity,<br />
but it will also change the customer<br />
experience,” he continues. “By using<br />
cloud technologies like TechCanary,<br />
our customer will be able to get faster<br />
quotes and faster service while we tie<br />
everything together.”<br />
With cutting-edge technologies being<br />
rolled out every day, technology partnerships<br />
have become critical to any digital<br />
transformation. Faraone believes that<br />
the company’s alliance with technology<br />
innovators like MicroAge is helping to<br />
MARCH <strong>2019</strong>
TECHNOLOGY<br />
257<br />
“We are the first Canadian<br />
company to move to<br />
a TechCanary platform.<br />
You could say there’s<br />
a lot of eyes on us to see<br />
how TechCanary is<br />
being rolled out in the<br />
Canadian market”<br />
—<br />
Joey Faraone,<br />
Director of Technology<br />
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drive new ways of thinking. “MicroAge<br />
is a global company which provides<br />
insights with network engineers,”<br />
Faraone explains. “We collaborate to<br />
work on developing and understanding<br />
the latest technologies to see how<br />
we can implement them here at PBL<br />
Insurance. We have continuous improvement<br />
sessions on how we can cut a little<br />
here, add a little there. This ensures that<br />
we run in a very lean but efficient way.”<br />
Behind any successful transformation<br />
is the right team and a culture that<br />
fosters innovation. With this in mind,<br />
PBL Insurance strives to engage staff<br />
by asking for opinions on the direction<br />
they’d like to see the company go.<br />
“When we decided to change broker<br />
management systems there were a lot<br />
of discussions, not just at the top but<br />
among all users about who is going<br />
be impacted by it. It’s changing the<br />
complete way our staff do work<br />
on a day-to-day basis,” comments<br />
Faraone. “The system was received<br />
very well. I think the fact that we<br />
are evolving our technology and<br />
our way of doing business is<br />
helping to attract top talent to<br />
the company because they<br />
want to be part of this journey.”<br />
MARCH <strong>2019</strong>
TECHNOLOGY<br />
CLICK TO WATCH: ‘TECHCANARY OVERVIEW’<br />
259<br />
With over 200 employees and 10<br />
offices spread throughout the province,<br />
PBL prides itself on being uniquely<br />
Ontario based. Driving efficiency and<br />
productivity with its new digital tools,<br />
Faraone says that this transformation<br />
is not just reducing costs and administrative<br />
burden, it’s also freeing up more<br />
time so that it can give its clients the<br />
personable and responsive service<br />
they expect.<br />
“We have a one-on-one direct<br />
relationship with our clients,” notes<br />
Faraone. “I think that’s where we differ<br />
from other brokers. With 10 strategic<br />
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260<br />
“We’re wiping the slate<br />
clean and redesigning<br />
everything. We’re rolling<br />
out new technologies<br />
to enable us to minimize<br />
the equipment<br />
but not sacrifice the<br />
service to our clients”<br />
—<br />
Joey Faraone,<br />
Director of Technology<br />
MARCH <strong>2019</strong>
TECHNOLOGY<br />
office locations throughout the province, we<br />
have the ability to service our clients locally,<br />
and we take pride in servicing communities<br />
big and small in Ontario. Our brokers, our<br />
Account Executives and our staff treat our<br />
clients and customers as if they are one of<br />
their own.”<br />
Technology and customer service go hand<br />
in hand at PBL Insurance, and as the industry<br />
shifts under the influence of the technological<br />
revolution it seems the company is ready for<br />
any dynamic changes that may come its way.<br />
“In five or 10 years, I expect PBL Insurance<br />
will be the top broker in Ontario, building<br />
partnerships yearly with other brokerages<br />
in the industry,” predicts Faraone. “I believe<br />
we will be a leader in innovation and that we<br />
will be an example to other brokerages on<br />
how they can leverage the latest technology<br />
to their advantage. It’s not always about<br />
spending the most money and getting<br />
the latest and greatest, it’s about<br />
understanding and fine-tuning technology<br />
to your company’s needs.”<br />
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