DIGITAL REPORT 2022 MohamadRasheed of ALE: Making Unpredictable,thePredictable IN ASSOCIATION WITH:
Rasheed Mohamad of ALE: the Unpredictable,
Making
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Unpredictable,ALE: Predictable al-enterprise.com 3 ALCATEL - LUCENT ENTERPRISE
“It is important that innovation is approached holistically, rather than being confined to one department or an isolated aspect of your business,” he says.
Rasheed Mohamad, Executive Vice President at Alcatel Lucent Enterprise, gives insights into transformation, automation and the importance of predicting outcomes
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F or any modern business to be successful in procurement, supply chain and logistics, ‘systemisation’ is the name of the game. Rasheed Mohamad, Executive Vice President of Global Operations, Business Technology and Quality of Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise, knows that for a business’ transformation journey to be successful, this systemisation must be applied to its entire infrastructureincluding its internal processes.
Mohamad began his career as an engineer with SFO technologies in India, moving on to network design roles with the Indian government, before finally joining Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise (‘Alcatel’ at the 4
Mohamad manages the end-to-end (e2e) delivery of the whole quote-to-cash (q2c) ecosystem at ALE. After a customer places an order, the procurement, planning, supply chain and logistics all work together as an e2e delivery process. He is also responsible for business technology, which is a CIO function, ensuring that all of the tools, infrastructure, and, he says, “perhaps most importantly, the mindset of the people” are kept in accordance with ALE’s transformation and “coined with quality”, to make sure that they deliver the best results for their customers.
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Rasheed Mohamad of ALE: Making the Unpredictable, Predictable
time) in 2000. Here, he journeyed through different aspects of ALE’s divisions such as Operations, Finance, R&D and ManagementjoiningManagementProgrammeuntiltheExecutiveteamin
2017.
RASHEED MOHAMAD EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT, ALCATEL-LUCENT ENTERPRISE
ALE’s uniqueness derives from several elements working in unison. They provide an extensive e2e portfolio of network, communications and cloud solutions for enterprise customers with flexible business models in the cloud, on-premises and hybrid. This means that ALE customers can choose solutions that are tailored to “Our challenge is to turn unpredictabletheintothepredictable”
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customerorganisationsagilityreliability,onofourglobe.”toapplicationsandcommunicationsdigitalindustry-specificdeliveragenetworking,cloudsolutions,andservicesenterprisesacrosstheHesays,“Now,valueslieattheheartwhatwedo.Focusingcustomercentricity,speedandenablesustoofferatotalexperience.”
ALE (then Alcatel), is a 100-year-old telecoms company, and though now global, it started out from humble beginnings in the Alsace region of France. In the second half of the 20th Century the company became decidedly more disruptive. Following acquisitions, Alcatel merged with Lucent Technologies to create Alcatel-Lucent – a global communications powerhouse. “Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise separated from the Alcatel-Lucent Group in 2014,” explains Mohamad, “and we moved away to
TITLE: EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT, GLOBAL OPERATIONS, BUSINESS TECHNOLOGY AND QUALITY INDUSTRY: TELECOMMUNICATIONS
COVID-19 lockdowns pushed ALE into remote operations, accelerating its transitional process. This helped ALE generate a platform where they could do e2e tracking from order to delivery.
LOCATION: CALIFORNIA, US their unique needs and business goals. Mohamad says: “ALE’s uniqueness stems from our distinctive go-to-market offers. Our solutions are tailored to each industry and we have a commitment to our 3400 business partners to ensure continuous customer proximity.”
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ALE is focused on four verticals: Healthcare, Education, Transportation and Government. “Transformations used to be confined to a single department or area within an organisation,” says Mohamad, “but to deliver the highest level of efficiency and customer satisfaction, we believe innovation has to take place in every single department, in synergy with the whole business. In this regard, we also make sure we are using our own products for transformations. In recognition of this, we have been consecutively awarded the prestigious CIO 100 award for the past two years, and also for our work in several other domains.”
Rasheed is an expert executive with global leadership experience in business transformation at both strategic and operational levels. He currently leads the Global Operations, Business Technology and Quality teams at Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise. Rasheed’s success in transforming operations by delivering the highest level of efficiency and excellent customer satisfaction has been recognised by international awards. As sponsor of the ALE #GoGreen programme, Rasheed is committed to finding new technologies that contribute to protecting our natural capital, building sustainable cities, and limiting global climate change. Rasheed has over 20 years
Asked about ALE’s digital transformation process, Mohamad says: “when we started this journey in 2019, just prior to COVID19, we had a five-year plan. The key to a strong delivery was creating clear processes, procedures and business enablers. To implement these successfully, we first had to gather accurate information on ALE’s infrastructure. Only then, could we develop efficiencies such as automating regular processes, and using AI (Artificial Intelligence) and NLP (Natural language Processing). Anticipating outcomes was our goal, and in the supply chain world, what is most important for a customer is on-time delivery at the most optimised cost possible.”
BIOEXECUTIVE RASHEED MOHAMAD
Find out more We shape the world of logistics. Every day, we go above and beyond to meet the needs of our customers. By anticipating challenges and applying our visionary mindset, we advance global trade and bring communities together.
In December 2019, Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise, one of the world’s leading networking, communications and cloud solutions, chose Kuehne+Nagel as its 4PL partner for Europe. Kuehne+Nagel maintains a network of partnerships with other supply chain operators, innovators and disruptors throughout the world – customers can achieve a distinct competitive advantage by leveraging its Software AND a Service delivering three key advantages, visibility, resilience and sustainability With ALE, seamless integration is ensured using a full EDI set up (based on EDIFACT messages) between the two partners, the European Distribution Centre, and carriers, explains Mark Edenburg, Global Business Manager High Tech at Kuehne+Nagel.
As Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise’s 4PL provider, Kuehne+Nagel leverages its data-centric IT architecture and its global control tower footprint to support ALE’s competitive positioning.
Kuehne+Nagel’s flexibility of service makes its customer’s supply chain more resilient. For example ALE’s volumes fluctuate, with peaks at year- and quarter-end. ”We have a transactional model in place. The shared multi-customer environment in our Luxembourg control tower is a key enabler when handling these spikes in volumes”. Kuehne+Nagel takes the burden from ALE in a multitude of ways, such as managing its relationships with carriers, KPIs, the lifecycle of complex tariff arrangements and, very importantly, continuous improvement (CI).
“CI is the next step in the evolution of our partnership with ALE,” says Edenburg. “It’s key, especially in these times, to concentrate on supply chain optimisation and – together –find effective answers and solutions.”Findout more
The Art of Supply Chain Orchestration
“ALE has full visibility on all events in our visibility portal’. We use advanced tools such as a Transport Management System (TMS) with strong dynamic planning and optimisation capabilities to automate processes, and our own in-house collaboration platform for customer service, which provides a single point of contact for all requests and deviations relating to order life-cycle execution. The ability to execute request trend-analysis and determine rootcauses really drives improvement!”
“The transformation helped to provide that fundamental baseline of forecasting, like optimising our supply chain, flow and delivery,” he says. “The good news in terms of the structures we’ve implemented alongside the reactive and proactive teams, which we have called ‘daily escalation’ and ‘the shortage target teams’, is that we were able to effectively manage the entire process and haven’t had to cancel a single order, which is a great thing”.
KNOW...YOUDID
With lead times now at 70 weeks - which we see continuing into 2023 - and with price increases across the globe, we need to be vigilant and dynamic in terms of anticipating those outcomes that yield to calculation and therefore prediction.
Rainbow (ALE’s cloud-based communications platform), provides connectivity across voice, video and messaging, enabling remote connectivity for all employees globally.
“Typically, the lead time of the components was 16 weeks,” says Mohamad, “but it went up to almost 70 weeks, which meant that we had to anticipate for 18 months in advance when securing components. This unusually long lead-time made forecasting really challenging.”
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“It's a great tool,” says Mohamad, “which provides us with some features similar
“Historically, the accuracy of our data has allowed us to provide trends for that, so we can plan and project outcomes,” says Mohamad. “When COVID-19 hit, we had to identify the challenges which arose, but because we already had the infrastructure in place, we had the capability enabled on our internal platform ‘RainbowTM by Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise’, which allowed us to fully transform. Of course, the supply chain also transformed along with that, and we were able to identify clear goals in terms of our expectations and resilience towards customer needs.” In 2020, COVID-19’s knock-on effects worldwide, began leading to material shortages – shortages that only began to increase at the start of 2021.
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“Innovation must take place in every single department in synergy with the organisation”whole to those offered by other vendors in the industry, but it’s far more unique and tailored to the business’ needs, and because it also integrates the backend, this makes it an incredibly powerful tool. The Rainbow platform provides much more than just simple communications, it also provides tracking of all of our orders. We have also developed chatbots, called ‘ALE delivery chatbots’, and these enable access for ALE colleagues and business partners to realtime stock estimation, the ability to order directly and highly accurate order tracking capabilities. It’s our cloud-based go-to marketOperationally,tool.” all of ALE’s systems are driven to streamline processes as much as possible, ensuring maximum efficiency. Mohamad says: “The Digital Age Communications’ (DAC) three pillars – Digital Workplace, Enterprise Agility and Flexible cloud models – support enterprises in their digital transformation journey”. Because many office-based businesses have now adopted remote working, it is important to facilitate digital workspaces. “This is where we stand out,” says Mohamad.
RASHEED MOHAMAD EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT, ALCATEL-LUCENT ENTERPRISE
“Another great change that came out of this situation was that we had to push the subscription model with more total cloud-enabled solutions,” says Mohamad.
“At
“Then there’s enterprise agility, where connectivity has to be both seamless and flexible, and our Digital Age Networking (DAN) solutions help to achieve this. Lastly, we have flexible cloud platforms that connect all of these things together, so that everybody can work collaboratively within one integrated system.”
ALE’s unanticipated remote operations meant that they had to identify how best to adapt their q2c chain under such challenging circumstances and to understand how predictability could be improved as a system. But this obstacle delivered unexpected results for their processes as well as their outlook.
“We have our cloud platforms including Rainbow Office powered by RingCentral which enables the connection of devices, people and processes, and we’ve recently signed a strategic partnership agreement with Avaya that extends the availability of Avaya’s OneCloud CCaaS (Contact Center as a Service) composable solutions to ALE’s global base of customers, while also making ALE, people are our strength and we work like a family”
RASHEED MOHAMAD EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT, ALCATEL-LUCENT ENTERPRISE
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To understand ALE’s present processes, you need to consider them in context of the transformation journey they had a few years“There’sback.no shortage of processes in our company,” says Mohamad. “As well as being ISO certified, our operating model identifies and defines key areas to optimise the company's quality system. Giving our processes a definition allows us to run the business in a systematic and structured way. Most importantly, we automate any processes that are routine.”
ALE’s digital networking solutions available on a global basis to Avaya customers. So we have all the geared solutions available, and this structure has been focused to provide the growth that we actually need for our five-year plan.”
“So how do we integrate such variables into our system to enhance reactivity when they arise?”, asks Mohamad. “When I look at challenges, I classify these into three areas: the first are internal challenges, which are ever present; the second are external-predictable challenges; 14 al-enterprise.com
Automation assumes regular and uninterrupted processes. But irregular events like material shortages, pandemics and regional conflicts are of a different ilk and have an unavoidable impact on entire ecosystems.
K&N Engineering is a fundamental element of ALE’s partner community, ensuring that the supply chain is resilient, and the third are external-unpredictable challenges, which are essentially the unknowns. Our focus at ALE is to make sure that all predictable challenges, whether they be internal or external, are handled by automation processes supported by AI to ensure that we work as flawlessly as possible. If the predictable systems are optimal, then we are able to focus on the unpredictable and react effectively, thanks to data analysis.”
The optimisation of systems, digitalisation and automation are critical to the business
RASHEED MOHAMAD EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT, ALCATEL-LUCENT ENTERPRISE
This is where ALE’s adaptability and agility comes in. “We optimise according to requirements on a regular basis, tweaking the systems as needed to reach KPIs,” he says.
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“It is important that innovation is isolateddepartmentratherholistically,approachedthanbeingconfinedtooneoranaspectofyourbusiness”
as a whole, but behind the scenes, it’s the people at ALE - their minds and creativity - who are the heart of the organisation. “At ALE, people are our strength and we work like a family,” says Mohamad. “We help each other to make things happen, and it is the foundation of our teamwork, and it is very important to us. This is also very personal to me as I've been with the company for 20+ years now. The satisfaction you get when you are working on something with a purpose is fundamental to ALE, and I attribute that mainly to the people that I’m working alongside, and their mindsets to make things happen. Culture plays a key role at ALE, and we place a lot of importance on it.”
Orienting himself with an eye to the future, Rasheed Mohamad concludes: “With all of these changes, we predict a huge increase in uptake for our subscription model. Significantly, with lead times now at 70 weeks – which we see continuing into 2023 – and with price increases continuing across the globe, we need to be vigilant and dynamic in terms of anticipating those outcomes that yield to calculation, and therefore prediction. Integrating intelligence throughout the supply chain will result in precise forecasts, tracking and automated pick and pack with added valueUltimately,activities.”atALE, Mohamad and the wider team always strive, he says, “to turn the unpredictable into the predictable.” and as a 4PL partner (Fourth Party Logistics), provides ALE with the ecosystem to make sure they have a clear e2e delivery mechanism for their system.
“The ALE #GoGreen programme aims to decrease the organisation's overall carbon footprint. By reducing paper files and the use of excessive emails, as well as sharing files in a more ecofriendly, agile and efficient manner, we can reduce our overall CO2 emissions,”
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RASHEED MOHAMAD EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT, ALCATEL-LUCENT ENTERPRISE
“It's almost the fifth year of our partnership,” explains Mohamad. “K&N’s innovation and technology continues to hugely benefit us as well as aligning with our willingness and vision to undergo such a technological evolution. Working together as a team to make this happen has been great. And as a bonus it’s also one of the reasons for our improvement in on-time deliveries over the last few years, which has made our customers very happy, of course.”
There are other notable developments too. Mohamad is a sponsor of ALE’s #GoGreen program. This initiative aims to find new technologies that will contribute to protecting natural capital, building sustainable cities and limiting global climate change.
explains Mohamad. “At ALE, we continue to encourage remote work, and an important part of this initiative is enabling effective hybrid-working which contributes to cutting travel emissions. As part of the effort, we are also utilising our facilities to host key events remotely, such as our annual Connex conference.”
“With price increases continuing across the globe, we need to be vigilant and dynamic when anticipating outcomes which yield to calculation and therefore prediction”
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