SSONext

Today on SSONext, host Barbara Hodge sits down with Jaco Van Der Merwe - 'the payroll pundit' - a passionate payroll professional who promotes collaborating with senior management to plan a more strategic payroll that supports and furthers corporate goals. He has deep experience with payroll accounting procedures as well as in designing and implementing internal controls. Jaco and Barbara dig into...

Robert Weltevreden is described as "one of the few truly full-stack GBS leaders out there" and we at SSONext are lucky to have him on as our first guest on the SSONext podcast! Robert has a long track record in the GBS (global business services) space, most recently at Novartis, and previously Syngenta AG. Despite the pandemic, Robert has achieved some terrific results in productivity, scaling, an...

The team at SSON are very excited to announce our new podcast: SSONext - Fuelling the future of shared services .  Let's dive straight into the why, the what – and perhaps most importantly, why you should care if you're in the shared services industry!  Our promise on this podcast? This will be the 20 minutes a week where you get the information you need to ensure you are in the loop on developmen...

Robert Welborn returns to take us through his interesting recent past.  Also, join our Celonis Podcast Mini Series guest JP Thomsen by visiting celonis.com/celosphere-live , a vailable on-demand.    

Max Just returns to deep dive into the fact that The Future of Work is Now. Also, join our Celonis Podcast Mini Series guest JP Thomsen by visiting celonis.com/celosphere-live . Also available on-demand following the live stream dates.     

Babs Hodge provides insight into BCP based on information first reported on March 25th. And JP Thomsen joins us to discuss Process Mining and how Celonis is helping. You can join JP by registering for Celosphere Live.

Craig Libby reflects on decades in Shared Services and how that history informs his current thinking. And JP Thomsen joins us to discuss hurdles customers are facing and how Celonis is helping. And you can join JP by registering for Celosphere Live.

Intel's Steven Remsen made the cross-country trip from Portland, OR to Orlando for OPEX Week. We caught up with him to discuss process mining. As a practitioner, he understands the three basic steps of process mining from the academic space: discovery, conformance, and enhancement. He demonstrates this point with one more fantastic story about how data won't work together if people can't. Thanks t...

Uzair Rashid, with CVS Healthcare, explains the importance of structuring innovation. By leveraging technology in conjunction with traditional medical resources, the healthcare system can clean up the funnel of patients who are better served with these new innovations. Thanks to Celonis for sponsoring their podcast miniseries. This week, Part 1: Disruptive Trends. In this episode, JP discusses cur...

The entertaining Genworth Financial team joins us from OPEX Week 2020 to tell us their enterprise's transformation story—or journey, more accurately. Kathleen starts off by explaining her view of the company 15 years ago: "It was a very siloed organization. It was very much command and control; very hierarchical. We were focused very much on our processes, like manufacturing, because we came from...

Joe Jordan joins us from OPEX Week in Orlando. As the director of operational excellence for Edward Jones, Joe sought inspiration from the hit TV show Shark Tank to give a platform to the innovative minds of Edward Jones. If anyone across the firm's workflow has an idea about how to transform their part of the business, they are given the opportunity to present it to the C-suite. If the idea ultim...

Gerald Lackey, VP of Business Optimization and Agility at GAF, discusses their 18-month journey into their current transformation. Gerald is no stranger to enterprise transformations, having participated in a few himself, but he outlines a few unique strategies GAF is taking. For example, GAF is especially focused on business outcomes for their customers. That means that instead of creating a solu...

On this episode of "Tomorrow Today," Barbara Hodge discusses the power of continuous education. With the turn of the decade, Barbara decided to make some changes to her own learning path. She is fully open to, and expects, new insights from her new experience to spill over into the way she works. On an enterprise level, global corporations also expect talent to continuously peruse new avenues of e...

Reka Mishra is the managing director of the transformation office for the SVB Financial Group. She lays out the basics of mergers and acquisitions before diving in on operational excellence. For M&A, it is imperative to have a target operating model in place. That model must consist of four key elements: people, process, technology, and data. Change management, communication, and HR must also be i...

Adrian Terry, VP of GM Financial's OpEx function, discusses their unique approach to IT and RPA. Initially, IT had some processes they wanted to automate. From there, a pilot was developed. It soon became clear that the broader organization could benefit from similar processes, so GM onboarded their own RPA business automation talent. Now, IT and RPA have been conjoined. While each department stil...

Barbara Hodge reflects on 2019, identifying the trends that shaped the decade. Data, self-service, and automation has affected us all. A new awareness of personal data and its power—for good and for evil—came to light, for example, with the Cambridge Analytica scandal. At the same time, all of that data that has been given and taken has made surprisingly little headway within industry, as enterpri...

NASA's Pam Wolfe joins us to discuss their RPA journey, which started over two years ago in their Shared Services Center. Establishing RPA governance across NASA has taken time, strategy, and strong support across the agency. In many ways, NASA's move to RPA is very similar to the typical enterprise, but let's not forget—NASA sends people to space. In fact, a recent decision was made to send astro...

Hendrik Boehmer is the People Experience & Operations Lead for Unilever. While such a title is a few syllables longer than its counterpart, Hendrik explains that Unilever's HR transformation involved a complete reimagination of the role. First, hand-picked roles that were once outsourced were brought back in house in order to achieve HR's new goal: more simple, more impact, and more human. What th...

Martin Felder is the head process automation center at Linde Global Services. He discusses his role with Linde as well as their journey into RPA. Instead of taking the typical low-hanging-fruit approach, Martin tackled Linde's impending future when deciding where to implement RPA first. He explains the whys and hows of this, including how he got the C-suite to sign off—and fund—such a huge initiat...

In this episode, IEEE's Lee Coulter discusses the notion that the future of every successful company will depend on the transformation into a technology services business—even pizza. This far-reaching conversation covers the entirety of the current "data chasm." Lee kicks the discussion off by justifying his aversion to the term RPA. He notes that organizations start with task automation before mo...

Dmitri Popov, global service management lead for Mann + Hummel Group, joins us today to discuss scaling RPA. Dmitri himself admits that such a process is painful, in part because of the few successful enterprise examples for which to model after. Dmitri points to IBM as a company who has done it well. Next, Dmitri discusses how to leverage shared services in the most efficient way, exemplifying R&...

Roland Haefs, with Henkel, discusses enterprise evolution and the shift from having purely transactional relationships to becoming a true business solutions provider. It takes strong leadership and an entrepreneurial spirit to pull off such a transformation, which Roland details. In order to demonstrate his point, Roland lays out Henkel's approach to the shared services process of master data mana...

In this episode, Kai-Eberhard Lueg, Global Business Solutions expert with Siemens, discusses the future of automation. Specifically, commerce is experiencing a new type of customer expectation that involves an increase in personalization and speed. While these two concepts seem counterintuitive, digitalization and shared services make it possible. Digitization is only as effective as the foundatio...

Dr. Ayanna Howard is a chair of the School of Interactive computing at Georgia Tech, an academic, and a startup founder. While her talents are as vast as her pursuits, she sums up their relation as interactive computing. In her words, "Interactive computing is really this theme that the human is center to everything that we do when we think about computing and artificial intelligence." Dr. Howard...

Michael Xiao starts this conversation a little off topic with Daoism. Or is it? As the conversation goes on, the philosophies behind Daoism get compared to the way humans navigate technology in an almost primal way. Programs like Facebook are designed to be addictive, giving those types of platforms a negative connotation. But at Blue Cross Blue Shield, where Michael works, their approach to AI is...