Business development stems from customer loyalty. In order to create programs that are tailored to existing workflows, including efficient call center processes, companies must design to scale and continually adapt to develop new and better ways of exceeding customer expectations for service and support. In this session, Dr. Marlene Kolodziej will discuss how programs based on effective existing processes cost up to 50% less than acquiring and implementing new third-party systems. Through Dr. Kolodziej’s creation of the Centralized Services division at Ricoh USA, she has worked to implement a cloud-hosted automated call distribution system, a web-form routing program and virtual queue callbacks to assess customer needs and establish a unified approach to address challenges and meet goals.

The COVID-19 pandemic forced businesses to quickly — and drastically — reconsider and accelerate their digital transformation plans, resulting in a more focused conversation on the importance of technology adoption across organizations. If the pandemic taught us anything, it’s that change isn’t going to slow down, and organizations need to look forward to the future of their organizations. What was learned during the pandemic and how can this be applied to organizations going forward to “future-proof” themselves for the next disruption? In this executive interview, Mike DePrisco, Chief Operating Officer, Project Management Institute (PMI) will explore the impact of pandemic-led digitization and innovations, the subsequent disruption to organizations, industries and people, how companies are adapting amidst the competitive landscape, and immediate next steps for organizational leadership.

How to work in a start up when your company has 130,000 employees? At Johnson and Johnson, every leader is an Innovator. We measure Innovation skills and associate individuals together to create start up like high performance teams to deliver growth.

In this talk we’ll explore the Quality and Customer Service connection. Quality acts as the frontline for the development team partnering with Customer Service as the frontline to customers. The partnership of these two organizational functions is critical both with each other and the engineering teams because of the long term effects on the customer experience. This discussion will explore the outbound relationships of the development, quality, and customer service team interactions. Then we’ll put a lens on the feedback loop, or the inbound calls to customer service, the escalation paths necessary to resolve issues, and the connection back to quality. These are some of the critical infrastructure necessary to help create a great and long-lasting customer experience.

Is your culture what you want it to be or what you have allowed it to become? If you’re not talking about it and working on it every day, chances are it’s the latter. At the foundation of any successful company is a strong culture, driven by the spirit of continuous improvement, and powered by passionate leaders. If you’re lacking any of those elements, you’re missing an opportunity to create lasting growth with your most important asset – your people. In this presentation, Brett Wood, the President & CEO of Toyota Material Handling North America, will provide leadership principles and practices that you can implement to create a culture of continuous improvement, and he will give tangible examples of Toyota’s Kaizen culture in action.

With the global pandemic impacting travel globally, the travel industry, the traveler outlook has been transformed almost overnight. The need for self service is higher than ever before. This segment will focus on Delivery Transformation and technology advancements delivers on self service excellence

Many experienced leaders know the importance of designing an interactive customer experience program, but often fail to connect the experience across the entire value-chain. This session will showcase the power of creating an exceptional experience for customers, suppliers and cost savings it can bring your organization.

Karen Norheim, President & CEO, American Crane & Equipment, will share her leadership philosophies and how to develop a highly productive workforce. Karen will discuss challenges faced and tips to create a successful work/life balance.

AB-InBev, the world’s largest beer brewer has been transforming their entire supply chain. Innovating through discovery, development, and scaling of technology has enabled AB-InBev Brewmasters to deliver fresh beer to markets across the globe keeping sustainability as a top priority

The presentation will be focused on the impacts of the COVID crisis and sociopolitical issues. I will show how the COVID crisis changed the marketplace using beer as an example, but also speak about how to motivate essential factory workers at a time when most others were working from home and how to operate in a post-COVID world. How focusing on Safety and Health as your first priority guarantees business continuity, service, quality and cost.

If you have Operational Technology (shop-floor systems); or want to deploy or connect OT devices (PLC, Robots, gateways, AGV, AMR, IIoT devices) and software applications: You should join this presentation to learn how to plan for infrastructure, network and cyber security concerns, and how to support systems ongoing to keep your company safe.

Join us for an Executive Interview Dave Coleman, Controller and Continuous Improvement Manager at Goodyear Tire & Rubber. In this interview, you will hear the biggest challenges faced by Senior-Level Executives in the world of culture transformation along with the most common characteristics present. You will learn how to develop a positive culture in the workplace. You won’t want to miss this!

When designing business processes for supply chain, we often start by planning to implement best practices. What can be easily overlooked is the actual needs of the business, both now and in the future. Sometimes a less mature or simplified version of a best practice may be the right solution to achieve business excellence, with a roadmap for process maturity as the business changes. In this presentation I will discuss aligning best practices with business needs for Planning and Inventory based processes.

One of the biggest aspects of the day to day operations of any organization is communication. Sadly, it’s also one of the most overlooked! Internal communication drives business success. It can make or break a project and usually shows up on performance reviews, yet never makes it into the training manual. We need to change our approach to create a culture of positive interactions, increased productivity, happier employees, and less waste overall. The best part is, it doesn’t cost you anything to take full advantage of it! Today, we’re going to review three things you can do right now to ensure your team is creating the results you need through their communications.

This presentation will share lessons learned and experiences from implementing an innovation mindset for an R&D organization. We are all busy but innovation is a lifeblood for the business. It generates novel ideas for products or services that make a significant impact. It is fundamental that your team is encouraged to participate and that a culture of exploring new concepts and technologies is established. Even within large corporations employees can demonstrate an intrapreneurial spirit. In order to be effective and efficient, establishing a systematic approach is key. Start small, fail fast and push constant experimentation. Make the process simple to follow, support a sense of community and above all make it fun and rewarding.

Join us for an Executive Interview with Vinay Indraganti the Vice President of Global Digital Transformation and Strategy at Ingredion. In this interview, Vinay will dive into the digital transformation journey at Ingredion including factors to create a successful transformation and how to empower employees to work with next-generation technologies.

Emerging technologies are rapidly changing the automation landscape and the enterprise digital operating model. Firms that fail to see the big picture and address automation through a complementary set of technologies, will eventually fail to achieve their goals of digital transformation. Hyperautomation is redefining how firms should define, architect, and deliver automation programs at an enterprise scale and deliver measurable financial outcomes.

Join us for an Executive Interview with Andrew Laudato, the COO at Vitamin Shoppe. Andrew will be diving into why the Vitamin Shoppe has decided to implement the buy online, store ships method. Join us to learn how this method has been implemented, how it has affected Vitamin Shoppe and the best advice Andrew would give to other companies!

Matt Donovan, Chief Engineer for Metal Additive Manufacturing at Jabil, will outline a vastly improved, new method for testing metal print quality. Jabil is collaborating with partners at NASA, Sandia National Labs, Auburn University and the ASTM AM Center of Excellence to develop and publish data to substantiate this method which has the potential to save significant time and costs in metal 3D prints. At the recent AMUG’21 conference in Orlando, Matt told a standing-room-only crowd about how this rapid-build quality inspection method can save companies months of time and significant costs.

LEGO (Business Services) is building a Culture of Operational Excellence in a very LEGO way including storytelling to build understanding and connection – Swamp to Summit, change management does exist and why it is difficult and the BSO Journey so-far and what comes next…

Today we are challenged with complex global issues. This calls for an end-to-end solution to support development and workflow management to collaboratively achieve sustainable desired future conditions. This session will provide a quick overview of some of these challenges and will further articulate the need and value for an integrated technology implementation approach to achieving sustainability. It will also feature real life examples of how this integrated approach enables various communities to successfully streamline the various project lifecycle components, with accurate and relevant data and more efficient and compatible analytical and visualization capabilities.

The global marketplace is evolving rapidly, and the ability to adapt is a defining factor between manufacturers that merely survive, and those that thrive. As rising costs, supply chain issues, skills gaps, resource shortages, and challenges related to COVID-19 escalate, manufacturers must look to intelligent cloud and intelligent edge solutions to build smart, agile factories.

Join us for an Executive Interview with Benjamin Davis, EVP, IT for Cambria. In this interview, Benjamin will be discussing the Cambria’s transformation into digital manufacturing. He will cover the type of business partnerships that Cambria engaged in to advance the transformation, the performance indicators to measure the success and the overall business results of the transformation.

What if you could add 20 minutes per work day to yourself and everyone on your team without working after hours? No gimmicks, quick fixes or sales pitches here. Just good, old-fashioned common sense structured, meeting etiquette designed to build resilience and increase your effectiveness as a leader.