Tag Archives: Digital Transformation

Joanna Taylor, Senior Manager | EMEIA Advisory – EY

A conversation with Joanna Taylor – Senior Manager | EMEIA Advisory at EY

Joanna Taylor is a member of EY’s European, Middle East, India and Africa (EMEIA) Advisory team with over a decade of experience in the Life Sciences industry, working globally across the R&D and Commercial functions.

She has implemented regulatory information management, document management systems, clinical data warehouse, clinical reference library, master data management and product lifecycle management systems and enjoys working with Business and IT stakeholders to help organizations to overcome the challenges of harnessing new and emerging technologies and create real business value.

Joanna has a BSc (Hons) in Mathematics and an MSc in Management and combines her professional experience with PhD research into the benefits and challenges of social networking for those involved in the treatment and management of non-communicable diseases. She is a published researcher, presents at conferences and is a lecturer on the Business of eHealth and Public Health Informatics.

What do you hope the audience will learn from this webinar?

I hope that the audience will be as energized and motivated as we are about the future of regulatory in Life Sciences and how digital technologies such as cloud based solutions from Veeva, robotics and artificial intelligence can achieve real business value to the industry. The technologies already exist and it is often the business change required for this type of transformation that poses the biggest hurdle.  We plan to discuss approaches to enabling business change during the webinar and hope that participants will learn something new about how they can achieve the success they are striving for.

What discussions do you look forward to having with the audience?

Building a better working world is our purpose at EY. I’m looking forward to hearing about the experiences of participants in digitally transforming their regulatory functions, where they have had the most difficulties, how they have addressed these and the potential they see for the future. Sharing these insights, experiences and “war wounds” amongst this community is where we learn from each other and convert theory into practice.

What do you enjoy most about your role?

The variety of interesting people that I work within the industry and how different companies are responding to the regulatory pressures and technology trends that they are faced with. I am a practical person and seeing tangible change in the industry, that ultimately have positive implications for patients, is why I get up in the morning.

How did you get into the industry?

After becoming a consultant, I had my first experience working in the industry during the implementation of a clinical trial management system. I was hooked and the rest is history.

Join Joanna Taylor on 15th February for a webinar entitled Digital Transformation in Regulatory at 3PM CET/2PM GMT.

Bart McMannon – Channel & Product Marketing Manager, Panini

A conversation with Bart McMannon – Channel & Product Marketing Manager at Panini

Bart McMannon

Bart McMannon serves as Panini’s Channel and Product Marketing Manager and has over 20 years’ combined experience in Product Management, Marketing, and Development.

He has brought new products to market and has improved many products for various companies. After much market research, Bart is currently focused on expanding Panini’s product portfolio and increasing channel sales.

Join Bart McMannon on 5th October for a webinar entitled How Intelligent Capture Can Help Digitally Transform Your Financial Institution  at 2PM London/9AM New York.

1. What do you hope the audience will learn from this webinar?

I am confident attendees will learn about what “intelligent” scanners are and the benefits of using them, both in banks and in business.

2. What discussions do you look forward to having with the audience?

I am looking forward to learning more about their current beliefs on remote deposit capture and reactions to the intelligent scanner model.

3. What do you enjoy most about your role?

I greatly enjoy introducing new technologies and product into the market and even better . . . love hearing that they make life easier!

4. How did you get into the industry?

I was a product manager for years and owner of a small company that produced small electronic products so when the opportunity arose to serve both the banking and small business industry, I jumped at the chance.

5. Where is your favourite place in the world and why?

My favourite place is wherever my family is. There are many beautiful places in the world and I love to travel, so whenever/wherever my family can join me is my favourite place to be.

Join Bart McMannon on 5th October for a webinar entitled How Intelligent Capture Can Help Digitally Transform Your Financial Institution  at 2PM London/9AM New York.

Register Here!

Piyush Saxena – AVP & Head, Next Gen Datacenter Practice, HCL

A conversation with Piyush Saxena – AVP & Head, Next Gen Datacenter Practice at HCL.

Piyush Saxena

Piyush has more than a decade of experience helping HCL customers design contemporary data centers. His current focus is to design and implement SDI-driven Data Centers for Enterprises looking to support their digital initiatives.

Join Piyush Saxena on 27th September for a webinar entitled Accelerate SDI Adoption to Power Digital Transformation  at 1PM ET / 10AM PT.

What do you hope the audience will learn from this webinar?

IT infrastructure is quickly moving from monolithic blocks to software defined spaces. Customer conversations nowadays are focused on everything as a service i.e. towards logical construct of infrastructure and not on asset ownership – that is where SDI becomes crucial. As we speak, the SDI market spend is projected to reach $54 billion by 2019. In the webinar, we will elucidate how SDI can be used to architect the future of enterprise IT. The webinar will help you understand challenges faced by an enterprise while adopting SDI. How HCL, via its end-to end SDI offering, is enabling enterprises take the software defined approach to modernize their infrastructure and build digital backbone.  The audience will understand the steps and HCL accelerators used to build SDI.

What discussions do you look forward to having with the audience?

As with any new and evolving technology – without a mature, well-considered and tool-based approach, SDI initiatives can become complex and expensive, and not generate the promised ROI if not approached correctly. Customers need to decide between a build vs buy approach when it comes to SDI.

This will be the focus of my discussion in the webinar. How organizations should approach SDI adoption, how they should mitigate the risks associated with implementation, and how they should plan investment in SDI. Enterprises should look to adopt a certified blueprint based approach to SDI which can help them to drive IT agility, dramatically reduce deployment & operations risks, and increase efficiency.

What do you enjoy most about your role?

I am currently responsible for identifying and evangelizing all new technology based solutions for our customers. With the plethora of technology solutions available in the market it’s a daunting task to evaluate and recommend the best and most optimal solutions to our customers and ensure successful implementation of the same. It gives me immense satisfaction to see successful implementation of our recommendations to our customers. We end up making wrong choices at times, but addressing these choices and providing alternate solutions as required is a challenge we take head-on.

How did you get into the industry?

I was always interested in technology solutions that can be practically implemented to deliver business solutions to customers. I was extremely inspired by the technology boom in early 2000’s which brought Indian IT firms to the global mainstage. To pursue my interests in this areas and also contribute to the Indian IT success story I decided to pursue a career in this industry. It has been a fulfilling roller-coaster ride till date.

Where is your favorite place in the world and why?

I hail from a small town in India named Bhopal. With a large number of lakes and hills and a moderate climate, this is one of the most scenic places I have been in my life. With the extensive travel that comes as part of my job, I cherish every day I can get back to my home town and spend time with my parents and friends, tracking or boating.

Join Piyush Saxena on 27th September for a webinar entitled Accelerate SDI Adoption to Power Digital Transformation  at 1PM ET / 10AM PT.

Register Here!

3 Steps Toward Powering Digital Transformation through Software Defined Infrastructure

Written by Piyush Saxena, AVP & Head, Next Gen Datacenter Practice, HCL

Over the past 12-18 months, we have seen enterprise IT leaders turning to Software Defined Infrastructure (SDI) to enable a resilient and scalable IT architecture that can keep pace with digital initiatives at the business level. SDI is fast becoming a required necessity for enterprises that are not just grappling with customer-centric digital requirements, but executing enterprise-wide transformations that are fundamentally shifting the foundation of IT from “run IT” to “change IT.” To ensure IT infrastructure is keeping pace, what is needed is a highly-configurable and programmable infrastructure that delivers policy driven automation, agile operations and proper service orientation—all while enhancing the customer experience—which is where SDI uniquely steps up to the challenge.

Based my experience enabling SDI for global clients as head of HCL’s Next Gen Datacenter Practice, here are three ways you can power digital transformation through SDI:

  1.  Integrate Infrastructure Architecture

Creating the best modern data center requires standardization and integration across cloud and on-premise architecture. While this is a daunting task, one way IT leaders are approaching the task is by essentially imitating characteristics of public cloud in their on-prem infrastructure in order to maintain agility and scalability while optimizing workloads and managing legacy environments. By leveraging automation as the efficiency driver, enterprises are deploying “cloud enabled” on-prem infrastructure that is highly scalable (even for IaaS and PaaS components), while also reducing manual intervention along the way.

  1.  Align People, Process and Technology

SDI is a cultural shift as much as a technical shift, which means an in-depth understanding of the underlying people and process is a necessity. This is especially evident when IT tasks are automated, altering the previously-defined process for employees. Understanding the processes, changes must be understood in detail which requires new skill sets and a shift in culture for people to work together with infrastructure. That infrastructure is also going through a modernization exercise, and must be aligned to the people and processes which support this modernization.

  1.  Follow a certified blueprint based approach

The steps above are extremely difficult, and could endanger the enterprise if not done correctly. One of the ways we help our clients reduce risk is by guiding them through a certified blueprint based framework, which we call VelocITy. As the name suggests, the framework quickly and thoroughly streamlines SDI adoption, minimizes implementation challenges and risks and reduces time-to-market to deliver optimal ROI for the enterprise. The VelocITy framework itself also follows a phased approach, ensuring that skillsets are assessed, architectures are planned and the migration, deployment and operations are executed with confidence.

To learn more about this phased approach and to adopt SDI with confidence, register for my September 27th webinar with VMware, where I will cover these steps in greater detail.

Register Here!

Janez Sodja – NiceLabel, Enterprise Sales Manager

Janez SodjaJanez Sodja is Enterprise Business Manager at NiceLabel, helping companies to adopt best practices in labeling and marking.  Having worked with hundreds of clients from around the world, including Fortune 500 companies from a variety of industries, he has deep expertise in enterprise solutions that enable companies meet the highest quality process requirements.  Recently, he worked with world’s largest manufacturer of organic dairy products that implemented a standardized label management solution for all of its labeling and marking printers, which enabled them to reach previously unattainable levels of productivity.

 

What do you consider to be some of the current key talking points concerning labeling in food and beverage industry?

We see a growing trend for process optimization, such as centralization and standardization, as companies are, in order to compete, under increasing pressure to digitally transform their processes. With regard to labeling, companies realize legacy labeling systems are not future-proof.  Traditional systems don’t enable them to reduce direct and indirect cost and capitalize on market opportunities. Companies are looking at how to increase the agility of their business, ship product faster, have less downtime, have less product returns, reduce inventory, mitigate the risk of mislabeling etc. Also, there is more and more focus on web technologies and mobile printing.

Are there any prevailing food and beverage company concerns regarding printing & labeling? 

Increasingly, companies tend to avoid being dependent on legacy systems or plug-ins. They start to see the disadvantages of having to install label applications on separate workstations, so browser-based web technologies are becoming more and more important. Several companies are challenged with how to get to a single unified label management solution that would also support direct marking, so they wouldn’t need different solutions from different vendors. We also see that more and more companies want to reduce IT complexity because this also helps to reduce costs and unplanned downtime, as well as save time and increase agility.

What do you hope the audience will learn from this webinar?

We will explain the success story of a global dairy company that significantly reduced costs and increased accuracy by standardizing labeling and marking printing. We expect the audience to learn about the next generation label management systems and see how they can turn hidden labeling costs into visible savings and achieve new levels of productivity.

What discussions do you look forward to having with the audience?

We will be delighted to illustrate the differences between traditional labeling practices and modern label management systems as well as demonstrate how companies can minimize revenue loss and increase sales by eliminating labeling or marking errors, achieve faster time-to-market by empowering business users to respond to label change requests without IT assistance, and significantly reduce IT costs and unplanned downtime.

What do you enjoy most about your role?

It is rewarding to work with companies from around the world and see how NiceLabel can help them solve real business problems and become more successful.

Join Janez Sodja and Ken Moir, VP Marketing at NiceLabel on 5th October for a webinar titled ‘Learn How a F&B Company Transformed Labeling For Success ‘ at 3PM London/10AM New York.

Register here.

What Is The Future of Food Labeling Systems?

By Ken Moir, VP Marketing, NiceLabel                           

The food and beverage industry is changing. Companies are under pressure to digitally transform in order to compete. Labeling has never played a more crucial role in food and beverage businesses. Legacy, manual labeling processes must give way to a standardized and streamlined approach enabled by modern label management systems; these enable a holistic approach for digital transformation of label and marking processes and have become one of the key success factors in the attempts to streamline their processes.

Standardization is key

By standardizing on label management system and unifying their labeling and marking, companies gain a substantial competitive advantage. As food and beverage companies migrate to a modern label management system they:

• Drive down costs by reducing the labor, time, and expertise required to change and maintain label formats
• Get products to market faster resulting in business growth
• Reduce the risk of production shutdowns and non-compliance with labeling requirements
• Enhance collaboration with business partners by making the enterprise more responsive to change requests

The global pioneer’s experience

NiceLabel recently worked with the world’s largest manufacturer of organic dairy products that needed to standardize its label management for all of its industrial printers. NiceLabel helped the company become an innovator by deploying the first standardized label management solution, in the food and beverage industry, for all of their labeling and marking printers.

They are the first company in the world that’s actually unified their labeling and marking and we’ve got the first label management system in the world that supports both labeling and marking. What is really new is that is the first unified label management system that supports label printers and other packaging printers.

factory line and products

By modernizing their labeling, the company significantly reduced costs and increased label and marking accuracy and productivity. It now has a more transparent label management process, which helps them ensure accurate product and production data throughout the entire label-printing process. The system does not allow human data entry error and there is a huge cost benefit related to direct costs, including the known costs. This includes the cost of labor and streamlining the process. Indirect costs are addressed by the integration, such as avoiding quarantine, rework, and extra labor looking for errors.

As the happy client put it, they have “definitely seen an increase in productivity thanks to the solution. Our labeling systems run more efficiently. We no longer spend time mitigating manual data entry errors and we’ve been able to streamline support as well.

The next generation technology enabled the global dairy company to streamline production and position the company for future growth. The solution is applicable to any food and beverage company.

Is your labeling process future-proof? What are your current challenges? Feel free to post a question below or email me at [email protected].

On the 5th October, Janez Sodja, NiceLabel Enterprise Sales Manager and I will be presenting the global dairy company’s case study. Join our complementary webinarLearn How An F&B Company Transformed Labeling For Success ‘to discuss this area in more detail. Please click here to register.

 

Antony Bourne – Vice President of Global Industry Solutions, IFS

Antony BourneAs Vice President of Global Industry Solutions, Antony leads a team of global industry experts who cover IFS’s focused industries and supports sales, marketing and partner enablement. Antony has over 20 years of experience in the IT industry, including working in the manufacturing sector.


Prior to joining IFS in 1997, he held Business Analyst positions with Ford Motor Company and AlliedSignal. During this time, he implemented ERP applications as well as business process improvements.

 

How did you get into the industry and what do you enjoy most about your role?

I started as a business analyst at Ford Motor Company in the early 1990’s and helped them install a new ERP package when the plant was sold to another company, and after this an opportunity arose to go to Ireland to be trained in SAP, but then had a call from IFS and have been there ever since.

What motivates you?

I love seeing new technology and how it can make a real difference in people’s lives, everything from the Amazon Echo which is now my mum’s best friend through to IoT connectors on pest control devices!

What will the audience learn from attending the webinar?

I hope that the audience will see that companies are taking advantage of what digital technology can give them today and also gain insight into what they need to be aware of before launching into new digital change projects.

How are you hoping to help IFS grow in the near future and what are your plans for 2017 and 2018?

I hope that I will be able to talk to people that have never heard of IFS and open their eyes to an alternative solution that could have a big impact on their business. As for my plans for the coming year(s), I just want to keep on learning new things and to help companies take advantage of a solution that will help them be agile in an ever changing world.

Don’t miss the opportunity to join Anthony and IFS in their upcoming webinar: “Unlocking the Revolutionary Benefits of Digital Change”. Register now!