Chairman's Takeaways – Day One

Digitizing the Customer Experience

• Digital counts at "the moment of truth," when the customer uses a product
• 90% of the manual touches in AR were eliminated, but the value was in the 10% opportunity to get money back

• Demographics are useless – it's about "do you hate it or love it?"
• 7000 brick-and-mortar stores closed last year, and most blame Amazon
  • Borders and Circuit City provided a bad customer experience
  • Trader Joe's tells a meaningful story and provides a great customer experience
• Digital experiences can be excellent (Doc on demand, Opternative)
• Voice will come full circle and be the new OS
• By 2020, the customer experience will overtake brand and price

Planning and Implementing Robots

• Plan on huge hype, followed by disappointment, followed by big value
• Within one year we automated 100 FTEs of work
• Front office can offer even bigger value – we gave back sales capacity
• Partnership with IT is critical – you will need hardware, test beds, and access
• Process SMEs were our best developers
• Building the COE took a few months, but then went from three robots to 400
• Having multifunction worked to our advantage – could automate end-to-end
• Our COE = a) training, b) infrastructure, c) development, d) levels 2 and 3 ongoing support
• We trained 263 people with about a 50% stick rate for developers
• Our invoice analyst was an average performer but an RPA superstar

• Good RPA implementations get 4X value and improve processes 50%
• Plan a four-month learning curve for several robots, then enterprise-wide robots in another six months
• Measure "bot velocity" – some companies are churning out one to two robots/day
• "Bot stores" – if one company has a working robot, why not sell it to another?

• Three robots eliminated 21 FTEs of work in AP, and we are planning on 50-60 FTEs by year end – headcount was eliminated too
• Start with an RPA "skunk works" – focus on the "A" first then governing the "R"

Transforming the Workforce

• Signs that your talent is ready for a modern GBS:
  • Agility and flexibility – willingness to rotate jobs
  • Putting customers before process – willingness to get involved with customer
  • VUCA – Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, Ambiguity
  • Effective in global cultures – understanding how diverse cultures solve problems

• Shift from local thinking to enterprise thinking – we reported regional/site HR to SS

• Leadership track used to be accounting/finance role, now more of an analyst role

Pushing Forward (Continuous Improvement)

• Documenting processes as a first step lends tremendous advantageous

• If cybersecurity is an afterthought, we have trouble
• For every 10 ideas, seven die, three stick, and one is the 10X
• We track ideas in a dashboard – 45 days to adopt an idea, 27 days to kill an idea

• Don't hesitate to create "buckets of leftovers" – we postponed payroll and finance (too much too fast, but can come back to it)

Working with the Millennials

• "Millennial" is an attitude, not a generation
• We allowed use of "Yammer" as a social media business tool – were willing to send questions ahead of time vs. voice questions publically
• Our training was informal and pulled together on an as-needed basis
• We gave them freedom to create a newsletter and define their own content
• They loved engagement with work-related sporting activities
• Women in leadership committee was not just composed of women
• We crowd sourced recognition programs
• We replaced chairs with couches and had open and unbound conversations with leaders

Chairman's Takeaways – Day Two

Artificial Intelligence

• We are doing an AI pilot with Watson to improve candidate sourcing
• We use AI to review history and determine how problems were solved in the past
• We use AI to gain real-time visibility of inventory

Future of BPO

• Standardize processes now…or you will wind up doing it mid project
• Design supplier proof of concepts to encourage fail-fast culture

Workforce Transformation

• Countries in Africa use cell phones for ID cards and financial transactions – Andrea
• Re-skilling is a bigger question than shared services – it is a national problem, a global problem – Andrea
• We will transform our skill sets on average three times – Stanford study
• This is not a "death knell" for BPOs – it simply gives us the freedom to determine what should be automated, internal, and outsourced
• We will be able to plug in the right talent anywhere in the world to solve problems
• We created a chief data officer role to focus on data governance

• Our hiring had been done for yesterday and needs to be done to fulfill future needs
• We went from an functional construct to a service construct

Future of GBS

• Must be global, multifunction, organized by process, and governance with business
• Needs to report to one leader? – Yes, Yes, No (but must be coordinated)
  • Who does GBS report to? – CFO, CIO, and CIO
• We do not define anything we do as GBS, just adding value – we are not mandated
• Started with lift and shift covered with a service blanket – work from there
• Best time to challenge us in the first three months, when you have a fresh perspective
• Use an ongoing challenge board, anyone can question a process
• It is really difficult, seriously difficult – local alignment, getting people to think across the enterprise vs. their business/country, and no one calls and says "good job"
• Strong functional leaders can take advantage of exhaustion or complacency

Future of Global Process Owners (GPOs)

• Each region created own P2P, but we tasked them with integrating to one
• OK for global environments to have a few standards (vs. one), and allow exceptions
• Process documentation can be painful, but it is critical
• Shared services is a good independent place to house master data
• Have region process owners that liaise between GPO and countries
• You do not have to have common systems to have a global process
• Help country restructure their organization after you shift work to shared services
• Monitor adoption of the process
• Process master black belts are for sale outside of the shared service
• The GPO is responsible for training, but not the training resources

Humanized Leadership

• Our current motivation tactics to retain important staff are to grudgingly offer more money and a new job title or a promotion without a raise
• It is a myth that high tech cannot be high touch (Doc software)
• People will forget what you said/did but will not forget how you made them feel – Maya Angelou
• Add targets for behaviors in your KPIs, not just $
  • President of J&J has a metric of having the healthiest workforce
• Poor staff motivation can cut productivity by 50%
• Avoid "presentee-ism" (turning up for work when you could not care less)
• 31% of British workers would be happy to report to a robot vs. their current boss

Managing Change

• I spent two days listening and having meals with an influential resistor
• You do not have to move negatives to positives, but you have to get them to neutral
• We established a different but connected model for very small countries
• Distinguish between the philosophically pure and the pragmatically possible

Service Focus

• Do not get blindsided by tech – these are not technology projects, they are people projects

Chairman's Takeaways – Day Three

Innovation

• Disruption spreads – automated cars
  • What about truckers?
  • Do not need hotels anymore, sleep in the car
  • Who are police going to arrest?
• Robots and drones will guide us through stores, ship our packages, and make our cocktails
• Block chain and 3D printers will almost eliminate the supply chain process
  • Amazon will print your product in the truck on the way to your house
• 80% of our data is unstructured
• If you do not like change, you are going to like irrelevance even less
• "How did your company go bankrupt?" "First gradually, then suddenly"
  • The Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemingway

• Uber owns no cars, AirBnB owns no hotels, and Facebook owns no content
  • They own the "edge"
  • Where your customer touches the product
  • OPA = Other People's Assets – less assets, more speed
• Get ready to be sold – Waze will sell you a donut, your car will give you a coupon for the three passengers in your car, and your washing machine will buy you a new tie
• Amazon will print your package in the truck on the way to your house – the edge
• Alexa only mentions one product when you order – what will that cost to be the one?
• You will be able to talk to an ad with embedded chat bots
• AI is not coming… it is here
• Step one, install software… there is no step two (are you that easy?)

• The day Kodak went bankrupt, Instagram raised $1 billion – Photography did not go away… Kodak did
• AI is hard – the most important and difficult part is training people
• The "Bozone" layer is middle management, you have to reach through it and give people another chance – make it safe for people
• If it is your idea, it is innovation… if it is done to you, it is disruption
• If you get culture and team right, innovation will flow
• Innovation is like baseball – if you fail 70% of the time, you are awesome
• 20% of what you see at Kayak every day is an experiment… constant testing
• When you fail… kill projects, not people

• One persona at Expedia beat Travelocity – combined air, hotel, and car. Take care in who you hire….
• Big teams do not innovate – little teams do (2 pizza rule)
• Who are the idea approvers? – people in the department?… should be outside of department (the jet plank)
• Internet was a C-suite position, then it grew up, and we did not need it anymore
• Get out of the building
• Get funding from CEO
• I used legal, and advertising… but bypassed purchasing and IT (too slow)
• Hire people that do not fit in

Process Automation (not RPA)!

• Can benchmark processing activities against each other with time stamps – Ben and Celonis
• Took a couple months to get up and running, start to finish
• The transparency of the data opened our eyes (140 day tickets)… then we found other places to apply
• Created a COE on RPA and process mining
• Process mining allows you to see bottlenecks and target things you can do differently
• We manage the technology, vendor relationship, and licensing in a COE but evangelize the product to the business lines to identify the processes

Customer Experience

• A remarkable customer experience starts with heart, intuition, curiosity, play, guts, and taste – you will find that in a customer satisfaction survey
• Staple yourself to an order and follow it around
• Be the customer – take the actual journey
• Do not take c-sat questions out of the box – create questions that resonate in your culture, test anchor questions, and get reactions to statements, experiment
• Even when customers do not know it, they want something better – sometimes you have to invent on the customer's behalf

The GBS Journey

• With trust comes new partnerships and new services
• Digital will get you there, but you need the tools to get better
• RPA targeted areas of processes with more people
• RPA, if not done right, can multiply mistakes fast