Technology - May 2023

BLOCKCHAIN & AI HELPING SOLVE ENTERPRISES’ DATA PROBLEMS

Digital twins playing a key role in overcoming sustainability challenges

Sustainability may have been on the public agenda for years, but it has taken the introduction of ambitious sustainability goals by governments around the world to push the topic to the top of corporate and government agendas

As our physical and digital worlds converge, digital twins can play a key role in helping society to overcome some of its most urgent sustainability challenges.

A way to model and understand how to reduce energy consumption and emissions so organisations can test scenarios to reach sustainability and climate goals, research from Capgemini last year found that 57% of organisations believe digital twin technology is critical to improving sustainability efforts.

With increasing adoption of digital technologies across all industry verticals, digital twins can be a company’s most effective tool for improved mitigation strategies and ensuring compliance with their ESG goals. As Dr Phani Bhushan Sistu, IoT Solutions Lead at Hitachi Vantara told me this month, digital twins are a valuable tool for improving business infrastructure, products, and processes – both existing and new – to meet ESG mandates.

And with the digital twins market projected to grow 10-fold within the next five years, organisations will have to move quickly to meet critically-important ESG goals.

marcus.law@bizclikmedia.com

MARCUS LAW

“Digital twins can be a company’s most effective tool for ensuring compliance with ESG goals”

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CONTENTS

UP FRONT

14 BIG PICTURE When is a photo not a photo?

16 LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT

Jensen Huang

20 FIVE MINS WITH Prelini Udayan-Chiechi

FEATURES

42 DIGITAL ECOSYSTEMS

How consulting firms enable digital transformation success

74 ENTERPRISE IT

How digital twins unlock enterprises’ sustainability efforts

102 DATA & ANALYTICS

Combining AI and blockchain for the future of data analytics

130 AI/ML

RPA driven by machine vision becoming crucial for businesses

150 TOP 1 0

Software-as-a-Service providers

COMPANY REPORTS

26 MCLAREN

Supply chain transformation in the fast lane

50 HENKEL

Henkel’s secret to success: amazing customer experience

82 SAP

Innovating to secure the world’s largest private cloud

110 VCU SCHOOL OF DENTISTRY

A cultural shift in IT is transforming dentistry at VCU

140 HCLTECH

Optimise manufacturing with digital and industry 4.0

162 MICROSOFT

Mike J. Walker at Microsoft empowers pharma supply chain innovations

178 CANADIAN CANCER SOCIETY

Digital technology & data is transforming cancer care

194 EPLDT

ePLDT is securing digital transformation in the Philippines

210 BIZERBA

Why Bizerba prides itself on being

226 GLOBAL SWITCH

Global Switch London, a blueprint for a greener future

244 QUALCO

Innovation as a source of value in credit management

258 FARADAY FUTURE

The leader in luxury electric vehicles

276 NY CANCER & BLOOD SPECIALISTS

NYCBS electronic records and robot processes help heal humans

288 SUNRISE GMBH

Transforming a digital media landscape

304 BOOHOO GROUP

Boohoo Group and the cost of cybersecurity infrastructure

Fluent Order Managements drives real-time business and customer benefits

Jamie Cairns, Chief Strategy Officer at Fluent Commerce, on how its order management platform enhances operational efficiency and customer experience.

Fluent Commerce is a global software company focused on distributed order management. Its cloud-native platform, Fluent Order Management, provides accurate and near real-time inventory data visibility, order orchestration, fulfilment optimisation, instore pick and pack, customer service, and reporting to transform fulfilment into a competitive advantage.

As Jamie Cairns, Chief Strategy Officer at Fluent Commerce explains, the process of managing orders begins with inventory data. “Being able to unify a view of inventory and then syndicating that inventory data out across a range of different channels lets you improve the customer experience,” Cairns comments.

That, in turn, has a range of different operational efficiency benefits, reducing costs by reducing split shipments, cancelled orders, and customer service calls.

As Cairns describes, order management represents an opportunity for retailers and B2B organisations to harness inventory data to provide real-world benefits. One of their recent innovations, Fluent Big Inventory, is about unifying in near real-time those inventory sources, enabling all systems to become inventory aware.

“It is not just about enhancing the order fulfilment process, which is typically what has been the domain of an order management system,” Cairns explains. “It’s about making inventory data available to other systems, like search, as well and ultimately being able to personalise search results based on inventory.” With changing customer preferences in recent years,

brands have had to adapt quickly. As Cairns explains, Fluent Order Management not only provides a robust software-as-a-service platform, but at a lower total cost so businesses can move quickly and meet customer expectations efficiently.

During the COVID-19 pandemic when stores were closed, Fluent Order Management enabled businesses to adapt quickly. “Stores still had inventory and there were huge spikes in online demand,” Cairns explains. “Our customers were able to adapt in a matter of a day to completely change their fulfilment workflows.

“Digital agility is essential,” he concludes. “We are not trying to predict what the future is, but to provide a toolset that allows you to adapt as the future evolves.”

BIG PICTURE

Image credit: Samsung, Getty Images

When is a photo not a photo? Seoul, South Korea

Samsung has shown how its Galaxy cameras combine super resolution technologies with a deep-learning AI model to produce highquality images of the moon, in response to accusations it was ‘faking’ photos.

“When you’re taking a photo of the moon, your Galaxy device’s camera system will harness this deep-learning-based AI technology, as well as multi-frame processing, ito further enhance details,” the company said in a blog post.

Jensen Huang: Nvidia’s CEO on ‘the iPhone moment’ of AI

Nvidia’s CEO, Jensen Huang,

Since founding NVIDIA in 1993, Jensen Huang has served as its President, Chief Executive Officer, and a member of its Board of Directors.

Starting out in PC graphics, NVIDIA helped build the gaming market into the largest entertainment industry in the world today. The company’s invention of the GPU in 1999 made possible real-time programmable shading, which defines modern computer graphics, and later revolutionised parallel computing. More recently, GPU deep learning ignited modern AI – the next era of computing – with the GPU acting as the brain of computers, robots, and self-driving cars that can perceive and understand the world.

A recipient of the Semiconductor Industry Association’s highest honour, the Robert N. Noyce Award; IEEE Founder’s Medal; the Dr Morris Chang Exemplary Leadership Award; and honorary doctorate degrees from Taiwan’s National Chiao Tung University, National Taiwan University, and Oregon State University, Huang has also been named the world’s best CEO by Harvard Business Review and Brand Finance, as well as Fortune’s Businessperson of the Year and one of TIME magazine’s 100 most influential people.

Prior to founding NVIDIA, Huang worked at LSI Logic and Advanced Micro Devices. He holds a BSEE degree from Oregon State University and an MSEE degree from Stanford University.

Nvidia helping enable AI breakthroughs In a recent keynote address at the company’s GTC conference, Huang outlined how a new generation of breakthroughs will be put at the world’s fingertips.

With computing now advancing at what he called “lightspeed” at GTC, Huang announced a broad set of partnerships with Google, Microsoft, Oracle, and a range of leading businesses that bring new AI, simulation, and collaboration capabilities to every industry.

“The warp drive engine is accelerated computing, and the energy source is AI,” Huang said in his keynote. “The impressive capabilities of generative AI have created a sense of urgency for companies to reimagine their products and business models.”

NVIDIA and its partners are offering everything from training to deployment for cutting-edge AI services, with Huang announcing new semiconductors and software libraries to enable fresh breakthroughs.

on the company’s role in the future of artificial intelligence and how we are at the ‘iPhone moment’ of AI

“The warp drive engine is accelerated computing, and the energy source is AI”

The iPhone Moment of AI

NVIDIA’s technologies are fundamental to AI, with Huang recounting how NVIDIA was there at the very beginning of the generative AI revolution. Back in 2016, Huang handdelivered to OpenAI the first NVIDIA DGX AI supercomputer – the engine behind the large language model breakthrough powering ChatGPT.

Launched late last year, ChatGPT went mainstream almost instantaneously, attracting over 100mn users, making it the fastest-growing application in history.

“We are at the ‘iPhone moment’ of AI,” Huang said.

NVIDIA DGX supercomputers, originally used as an AI research instrument, are now running 24/7 at businesses across the world to refine data and process AI, Huang reported – “DGX supercomputers are modern AI factories”.

Microsoft and Nvidia

At GTC, Huang also announced that NVIDIA and Microsoft will connect hundreds of millions of Microsoft 365 and Azure users to a platform for building and operating hyperrealistic virtual worlds.

“Microsoft and NVIDIA are bringing Omniverse to hundreds of millions of

Microsoft 365 and Azure users,” Huang said, also unveiling new NVIDIA OVX servers, a new generation of workstations powered by NVIDIA RTX Ada Generation GPUs, and Intel’s newest CPUs optimised for NVIDIA Omniverse.

To show the extraordinary capabilities of Omniverse, NVIDIA’s open platform built for 3D design collaboration and digital twin simulation, Huang shared a video showing how NVIDIA Isaac Sim – NVIDIA’s robotics simulation and synthetic generation platform, built on Omniverse – is helping Amazon save time and money with fullfidelity digital twins.

It shows how Amazon is working to choreograph the movements of Proteus, Amazon’s first fully autonomous warehouse robot, as it moves bins of products from one place to another in Amazon’s cavernous warehouses alongside humans and other robots.

The arrival of accelerated computing and AI come just in time, with Moore’s Law slowing and industries tackling powerful dynamics – sustainability, generative AI, and digitalisation, Huang said.

“Industrial companies are racing to digitise and reinvent into software-driven tech companies – to be the disruptor and not the disrupted.”

“Industrial companies are racing to digitise and reinvent into softwaredriven tech companies — to be the disruptor and not the disrupted”

PRELINI UDAYAN-CHIECHI

We speak with Prelini Udayan-Chiechi about Zendesk’s award-winning output in the pandemic and her perspectives on the future of events

A passionate, driven, and team-orientated marketing leader, Prelini Udayan-Chiechi has more than 25 years of experience in the SaaS, IT, telco, and finance sectors.

She is an accomplished public speaker and thought leader, from blue chip and start-up companies through to global, EMEA & APAC roles, she joined Zendesk in 2017, having previously held roles at companies including IBM, Colt Technology Services, and Adobe.

Q. TELL US ABOUT YOURSELF AND ABOUT YOUR CAREER SO FAR

» I started my career in marketing over 25 years ago, and it’s been amazing to see how the industry has evolved since then. With experience in various marketing disciplines at companies such as IBM and Adobe, I’ve been able to recognise the importance of being data-driven and metrics-oriented as a marketer, but also having the skill to balance data with brand and creativity.

As I’ve advanced in my career, I’ve learned the importance of leading while removing obstacles for my teams, balanced with providing the right strategic direction and inspiration, and being involved in the details that matter. As a leader, it’s important to strike that right balance between high level and detail. The more you know and understand, the more you can clear the path causing the greatest angst among your employees.

“I’m forever grateful that the Zendesk Morning Show was brought to life and kept evolving, and we worked together as a team to make it what it became”

The pandemic was a real eye-opener for us all at Zendesk, and it really shifted the way we thought about marketing and how our audience interacts with content, engaging with us as a brand. We evolved our delivery of short-form content to the B2B world – through a TV Series that people could watch on YouTube or Vimeo. We were able to compete with the B2C world, winning Vimeo’s Best of the Year award for Best Livestream event!

In all of this, it wasn’t the award that mattered, but how the team came together to rise above the challenges we were all faced with, finding a new way of working and engaging with our audience. The chance we had to create something different, leading change, driving inspiration, and, ultimately, thriving as one team was the real winner.

Q. WHAT ARE YOUR GREATEST QUALITIES AS A MARKETING PROFESSIONAL?

» You have to be able to be a visionary and think outside the box. I already mentioned the importance of being detail and metricsoriented, but you’ve also got to be experimental and not afraid to fail. I’ve found that failing fast is the best way of learning, as you’re able to constantly update and re-write the playbook.

Relationships are also key in marketing. You have to be empathetic and always think with a ‘customer-first’ mindset. In fact, our recent research, Zendesk CX Trends, showed 62% of UK consumers are more likely to purchase from a business that cares about their emotional state. Working with your teams closely and collaboratively only helps strengthen your relationships with customers, whilst also improving your overall team culture.

The drive to more immersive CX Research by Zendesk found that 70% of consumers are prepared to spend more with companies that offer fluid, personalised, and seamless customer experience.

The company’s CX Trends 2023 report also found that customers have little patience for bad experiences: 73% will leave for a competitor after multiple poor interactions.

Q. TELL US ABOUT THE ZENDESK MORNING SHOW, AND WHAT INSPIRED IT?

» It was the first weekend in March 2020, and I was preparing to fly to Miami for our annual customer event – Zendesk Relate. My manager had sent me a text the night before, raising concerns about the rise of COVID-19 and whether the event should still go ahead. In the morning, I woke up at 6AM to a message saying that I shouldn’t jump on the flight.

That weekend, I watched Apple TV’s Morning Show, and was inspired to think of the B2B world in a new light in how we engaged with our customers. Zendesk Morning Show was born that week, and, with the support, dedication – and commitment of over 200+ employees across the company – we made something special during a super hard time in history.

I’m forever grateful that the idea was brought to life and kept evolving, and we worked together as a team to make it what it became. It took an entire employee base, customers and partners, who believed in the concept to bring it to life.

Q. IN A POST-COVID WORLD, WHAT ARE YOUR PERSPECTIVES ON EVENTS – ARE VIRTUAL AND HYBRID EVENTS HERE TO STAY?

» There is always going to be a need and value for in person interactions. However, the pandemic has changed the way we now think and approach these events. I do believe there is less need for large scale events – it's not great for the environment, carbon footprint, and frankly, not the best use of time with the travel commitment usually required. This is, however, where hybrid gatherings can be extremely valuable.

I believe broadcasting globally, and having smaller-scaled, intentional events and interactions in local locations is key in this economic climate. It's the networking, discussions, and interactions that people are attracted to. And, as long as we are still able to foster environments where we can learn from our peers and engage with industry experts, then I don’t see the problem with reducing the size of these events! Smaller scale could mean 20 or it could be 200.

I’m sure in some instances there will always be a need for the larger events of 5000-plus, but not to the scale it was in the past. So, unless you’re hosting an event and you’re a company whose revenue model is built on events, I believe that large trade shows and traditional conferences will be seeing a big change in the coming years, as we see hybrid continue to evolve and grow.

“The pandemic was a real eye-opener for us all at Zendesk, and it really shifted the way we thought about marketing”

Executives from Appian, AWS, and Xebia share their collaborative efforts and excitement about their partnership in low-code, cloud, and sustainability.

Technology is instrumental to achieving next-level capabilities across industries. But organizations that want to operate sustainably must choose technology that lets them adhere to strong environmental, social, and governance principles.

Appian Corporation, a process automation leader, is a critical piece of the digital transformation and sustainability puzzle. The enterprise-grade Appian Low-Code Platform is built to simplify today’s complex business processes, with process mining, workflow, and automation capabilities.

“By quickly building apps that streamline and automate workflows, organizations are using Appian to make their processes for monitoring and reporting on ESG initiatives faster, simpler, and more effective,” says Meryl Gibbs, Emerging Industries Leader at Appian.

“Both AWS and Appcino are amazing partners of ours,” says Michael Heffner, VP Solutions and Industry Go To Market at Appian. “We have an extremely long legacy engagement with AWS as our trusted, go-to-market partner and Appcino builds “meaningful, business-focused applications on the Appian platform and is amazing in all things ESG.”

Digital transformation in ESG.

As an AWS leader enabling sustainability solutions built on the cloud, Mary Wilson, Global Sustainability Lead at AWS, talks about the partnership with Appian.

“Our objective is to help our customers achieve sustainability goals across their business operations,” says Wilson. “[This means] looking at data availability, meaning access to more data, and enabling actionable insights. “Lowcode, cloud-enabled, technologies will allow organizations to build fast, learn fast, iterate, and continue to improve these insights to drive their sustainability outcomes.”

Tarun Khatri, Co-Founder & Executive Director of Appcino (product part of Xebia), explains just how critical ESG is in the face of digital transformation. “The investment community now considers ESG reporting as a major factor for measuring performance,” says Khatri The collaboration will continually uncover new insights and provides customers the opportunity to accelerate their ESG goals with speed and security.

Supply chain Transformation in the FAS

PRODUCED BY: GLEN WHITE

WRITTEN BY: SEAN ASHCROFT

Automotive Logistics Director Ashley Naughton on how McLaren is transforming at a pace one might expect from the maker of Earth’s fastest road cars

Few companies have the pedigree, history and pure elan of McLaren Automotive, the British manufacturer of luxury, highperformance sports cars and supercars. McLaren was founded in 1963 by Bruce McLaren, a New Zealand-born racing driver, and initially the company designed and built only race cars. In recent years, though, it has shifted its focus to high-performance road cars.

Building McLaren's fast-cardedicated logistics function

Its current lineup includes several models, including the 720S (£227,300/$305,000), and GT (£166,300/$204,990), all of which are midengine sports cars (meaning the engine sits between the axle lines of the front and rear wheels). The company’s latest model is the hybrid-powered Artura (£189,200/$233,000), which was introduced in 2021.

In addition to its road cars, McLaren Automotive also produces racing cars and provides support for various racing teams. McLaren Automotive has been at the forefront of automotive technology, leveraging its experience in F1 to translate this excellence into its road cars. Like other F1 teams (Williams and Mercedes) it is based in

South East England – in Woking, Surrey, – but has a worldwide network of suppliers.

The Woking facility is a state-of-the-art complex that includes design studios, as well as engineering and production facilities

for McLaren’s road cars, including the GT, Supercars and Ultimate cars.

The centrepiece of the Woking campus is the McLaren Technology Centre (MTC). It’s a stunning, futuristic building designed by famed architect Norman Foster, and is the kind of structure one can picture housing a colony of humans on the Moon, or even Mars.

The MTC houses McLaren’s design and engineering teams, home to advanced simulation and testing facilities, including wind tunnels and a driving simulator. McLaren Production Centre sits adjacent to the MTC and is the focus for its supercar operations.

In addition to its Woking HQ, McLaren has a world-class, state-of-the-art

“We make fast cars and have a fastmoving business, and sometimes that’s a bit of a challenge”

ASHLEY NAUGHTON AUTOMOTIVE LOGISTICS DIRECTOR, MCLAREN

McLaren Composite Technology Centre that manufactures its carbon fibre chassis architecture. It is based in Sheffield, in the North of England.

And overseeing all of the logistics holding these operations together is Logistics Director Ashley Naughton, who concedes that the most challenging aspect of the role is – aptly enough, given the dizzying speed of its products – “having to work at pace”.

“We make fast cars and we have a fastmoving business, and sometimes that’s a bit of a challenge,” he adds. But Naughton is battle-hardened on this front, having spent more than a quarter of a century in logistics and supply chain, working largely

ASHLEY NAUGHTON

TITLE: AUTOMOTIVE LOGISTICS

DIRECTOR

COMPANY: MCLAREN

INDUSTRY: AUTOMOTIVE

LOCATION: LONDON UK

Naughton brings over 25 years' global industry experience from aerospace and automotive supply chain.

During his career, highlights include 18 years working for Rolls-Royce PLC holding various operational leadership roles in the UK & USA.

In recent years, Naughton has been focusing on supply chain transformation and digitalisation with some of the UK’s largest automotive

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Capgemini Invent: driving efficiency in McLaren’s supply chain

In today’s volatile climate, Capgemini Invent & McLaren are on a three year path to building a strong and sustainable supply chain to support McLaren’s expansive future.

Capgemini Invent enables CxOs to envision and shape the future of their businesses. It is working all over the world to enable its clients to unleash human energy through technology for a more inclusive and sustainable future.

“We partner with our clients to unlock the value of technology and help them transform their businesses, and support management and stable growth,” says Phil Davies, Capgemini Invent’s Head of Intelligent Industry in the UK.

Davies distils this process into three key stages:

y Using technology to advance the consumer experience

y Accelerating intelligent industry

y Transforming client enterprise efficiencies

Capgemini Invent recently began working with British supercar giant McLaren on

its logistic operations, looking at how it can combine technology, people and processes to drive resilience and sustainability into those operations.

“The world today is much more volatile; supply chains are constantly disrupted,” adds Davies. “We are working with McLaren to implement a strategy to cope and live with that disruption.”

The three main elements of the relationship are:

y Driving efficiency into McLaren’s supply chain

y Supporting McLaren with the transformation of its logistics operation

y Providing a three-year vision

“The three-year vision is really focused on how to create a logistics operation that’s going to thrive in this volatile future,” explains Davies. “Propelling them to unleash the potential of their organisation.

“The aim is to allow them to continue their relentless focus on customer experience and quality whilst building that resilience and visibility they need to cope in today’s volatile world.”

Ashley Naughton, Logistics Director at McLaren, adds: “Capgemini has been an instrumental partner for us. They’ve brought in thought leadership and shared the best industry practices, not only with automotive clients but also other industry sectors, which allows us to learn how other sectors are approaching different problems.”

“I think both McLaren and Capgemini are organisations that really focus on outcomes,” concludes Davies. “So, whilst we’re in the early stages of building the vision, I would say ‘watch this space’ around the next 18 months.”

McLaren: supply chain transformation in the fast lane

in aerospace and automotive, with firsttier suppliers, in either manufacturing or logistics services.

He says the most satisfying aspect of his role at McLaren is “working with our people”.

He adds: “It’s a very passionate organisation, with a rich history in automotive and racing. The innovation and ingenuity of the people is really quite inspiring.

“We also have a very complex product,” he says, “which means we’ve got extremely specialised suppliers, and we are constantly looking to improve the business.”

This, Naughton observes, often means his team has to react super quickly, and concedes this puts pressure on people “to support what the business is trying to achieve”.

Along with logistics chiefs worldwide, Naughton’s ability to support McLaren goals

“Capgemini has been very supportive in helping us to understand the art of the possible”

ASHLEY NAUGHTON AUTOMOTIVE LOGISTICS DIRECTOR, MCLAREN

has not been made any easier by a multitude of shocks and pressures existing today.

Overcoming obstacles with digitalisation, determination & data

Whether that be raw materials shortages, capacity limitations or cost pressures, it all presents challenges. It’s a situation that makes him more determined than ever to future-proof McLaren’s supply chain.

“It’s about mitigating challenges that are as yet unknown,” he says. “Having information early on in our supply chain is very important. We don’t always know what’s around the corner, so it’s about understanding the risks to our business, and making decisions based on that understanding to safeguard ourselves.”

And what of the longest and most painful supply chain shock of all in the automotive manufacturing world: microprocessor shortages?

“In terms of future-proofing against semiconductor shortages, nothing is going to protect us completely. There is no insurance policy that will give us total availability for all the semiconductors we need.

“That said we have done really well with semi-conductors and were very proactive, early on, as that risk emerged. Securing those commodities gave us the breathing space that others perhaps have struggled with.”

Naughton continues: “Moving forward and thinking about a wider scale of the supply chain, we can better protect ourselves by having early information around these risks,

1963

McLaren was founded in 1963 by Bruce McLaren, a New Zealand-born racing driver

which are sometimes in the third or fourth tier of the supply chain.

“So building supply chain maps and then ingesting data using technology is a way to become more resilient, so we can deal with those shocks when they occur.”

It is this climate of uncertainty that prompted McLaren to embark upon the digital transformation of its supply chain and logistics operation.

“If you stand still, you’re actually moving backwards,” Naughton says of the digitalisation programme. “Logistics and supply chain are a core part of our business. We design products, we manufacture the vehicles, but we can’t do that without our supply chain partners.”

Naughton adds that McLaren Automotive handbuilds state-of-the-art super cars in a state-of-the-art facility and is constantly looking to innovate. “The same applies for our manufacturing and Logistics operations,” he adds. “I want that same performance. Agile, communicative, and responsive.”

This is why McLaren is investing heavily in improving its supply chain ecosystem.

“Our suppliers are partners in our business and we need their support to be successful. If we don’t invest in that then we’re being negligent,” Naughton says. “Our supply chain is a key enabler for our business. It’s integral to the way that we do business.”

The strategy on digitalisation “comes down to three Cs”, Naughton says.

“It needs to be connected, collaborative and ultimately needs to be cognitive.”

He adds: “It’s about having data that we can use to make decisions much earlier than we do today. This is how we derive resilience, how we optimise and how we discover efficiencies. We need technology to do this, and we’re on that journey.”

Operationally, Naughton says the benefits of digitalisation derive from breaking down

barriers and silos that “traditionally exist within organisations”.

Such barriers also exist within the supply chain network, Naughton points out, adding that technology can create opportunities for all partners in that ecosystem. “Collaboration and data sharing is quite simple if we adopt Cloud, for example,” he says, adding: “Our inbound operations will hugely benefit from digitalisation and technology, but then that flows into the manufacturing ecosystem, of which I’m part. Similarly, there is also a strong drive for transformation within the manufacturing team and we need to ensure we are synergising.”

Ultimately, he says, the goal of the programme is to transform the business “so our customers get a better quality product and a more reliable service”.

He adds: “At the end of the day, any transformation programme must keep the customer in mind, which is why we’re deeply connected to our customers and how they view our products, as well as how they view the service. Ultimately, we want to be faster, more effective and more trusted, so that we can better deliver on what customers expect.”

Capgemini collaboration is feather in McLaren's cap

Helping McLaren drive the change programme in the right direction is Capgemini, a global leader in consulting, technology services and digital transformation.

“Capgemini has been an important partner for us,” says Naughton. “They’ve brought in thought leadership and have shared industry best practices.”

And not just from the automotive clients with whom Capgemini works, says Naughton “but from other industry sectors”, which he says has been invaluable “because we need

to learn how other sectors are approaching similar and different problems”.

“Capgemini has been important in helping us to understand the art of the possible and to identify those opportunities where technology can help McLaren on its journey.

Naughton admits that there is still much to come “because the company’s logistics transformation is quite embryonic in terms of crystallising what the future looks like”.

He adds that the next phase “will be to begin looking at the specific opportunities and capabilities Capgemini has helped us identify”.

He continues: “We need to consider what’s right for McLaren. We are unique in certain aspects, but we need to adopt standardisation where it makes sense. I am fortunate to have a strong team around me to make the right choices about our future logistics operations. As I said before, it’s about the people. Moving forward, its about understanding the choices we face, and

ASHLEY NAUGHTON AUTOMOTIVE LOGISTICS DIRECTOR, MCLAREN

then making decisions based on those options. We’re not quite there yet, but in the coming months we’ll begin making decisions around the processes and technology, then implement what we see as the biggest opportunities.

“Some of those changes will come from our internal team members and some will come from our partners. We have a really strong team here who have already

developed digital capabilities so we will continue to leverage our skills, but there will be things we need support with.”

Sooner rather than later, Naughton hopes – in keeping with the fast pace of life so fitting for a supercar manufacturer.

“I like to operate at pace,” he says.

“It’s in my DNA and also in McLaren’s, who like to do the right thing, quickly.”

So that’s the near-term. But what about the longer-term future for McLaren? How does Naughton see this shaping up?

“We will move towards being an insightdriven organisation. Network data is key for this to occur. Through collection of such data, this will enable us to become far more resilient. “The need for sustainability cannot be ignored. The majority of Scope 3 emissions

“We derive resilience from having data we can use to make decisions much earlier than we do today”

come from the supply base, so we have a responsibility to improve how we operate our business. This will be our future.”

From fast cars to fast manufacturing, there's a need for speed in the future

Naughton feels that recent changes at the top of the company will shape McLaren’s performance in the next 12 to 18 months.

Michael Leiters joined as CEO of McLaren Automotive in July 2022.

German-born Leiters has held senior positions at Porsche AG, eventually becoming a Product Line Director there. More recently, he was Chief Technology Officer at Ferrari. So he is certainly someone who knows all about fast-moving manufacturing environments.

“I think we’ve got an exciting future, particularly with Michael Leiters joining the organisation,” says Naughton, adding that “there’s also lots of other positive changes”.

Among which, he says, is “a shift-change in the way we approach things, from design through to delivery of product”.

He adds: “It’s one of the reasons I took the opportunity to join McLaren. I’m passionate about driving change and am lucky enough to have a leadership team that supports the need to transform. “It’s an exciting time to be in operations and supply chain logistics in the automotive business. I believe our future is really bright.”

DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION DIGITAL ECOSYSTEMS

Consulting firms play a key role in business transformation, allowing clients to accelerate growth, reduce cost, or simply change the way they operate

WRITTEN BY: MARCUS LAW

Only about 30% of companies navigate a digital transformation successfully. And navigating it in the midst of uncertainty – the new reality – is especially difficult because new behaviours and expectations take shape and evolve at warp speed.

Enter the role of the technology consultant. Offering services across all areas of business – including HR, marketing, IT, and finance – technology consultants provide a wide range of solutions for

enterprises. With technology, consultancy firms advise businesses on how best to use technology to meet their business objectives. In doing so, they play a key role in business transformation, allowing clients to accelerate growth, reduce cost, manage risk, develop talent, or simply just change the way they operate.

The way consulting firms work has changed. Once seen as selling people, time and resources, today consulting firms are embracing technology to help businesses on their digital transformations.

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“The expertise we are bringing to clients leads to greater impact”

As one consulting firm, Boston Consulting Group (BCG), explains, its approach is focused on building what it describes as bionic companies: organisations that blend digital and human capabilities – and apply them to all aspects of their business.

“To achieve its full potential, technology must be combined with the flexibility, adaptability, and comprehensive experience of humans,” the company explains.

“Many of the elements of bionic companies are well-known: artificial intelligence, digital talent, and platformbased software and services, for example. But the formula for putting them all together is neither immediately evident nor easy to implement.”

Tim Smith

TITLE: PRINCIPAL

COMPANY: DELOITTE CONSULTING LLP

INDUSTRY: CONSULTING

LOCATION: NEW YORK

Tim Smith is a principal with Deloitte Consulting LLP and serves as the US leader for Monitor Deloitte’s Technology Strategy & Business Transformation practice. He has more than 20 years of cross-sector technology advisory and implementation experience in the United States and abroad.

LIZ ERICSON PARTNER, MCKINSEY & COMPANY

Susanne Arnoldy

TITLE: PARTNER

COMPANY: PWC DEUTSCHLAND

INDUSTRY: CONSULTING

LOCATION: DUSSELDORF, GERMANY

As a partner at PwC Germany and as Head of Technology/Digital Transformation, Susanne Arnoldy is part of the German Advisory and of the EMEA Consulting leadership teams.

Arnoldy is passionately responsible for PwC’s digital and technology strategy, including its implementation via thorough training programmes for employees alongside the establishment of new data and exchange platforms, a digital accelerator (champions) community, and more standardised, automated business services – including their delivery by shared delivery service centres.

Unlocking the value of digital transformation

Putting technology at the core of a business, digital transformation can reduce operating expenses and inefficiencies. According to analysis by Deloitte, the right combination of digital transformation actions can unlock as much as US$1.25tn in additional market capitalisation across Fortune 500 companies. Alternatively, the wrong combinations can erode market value, putting more than US$1.5tn at risk across Fortune 500 companies – demonstrating the importance of strategically approaching digital transformation.

“Digital transformation is continuous; the scale and stakes are, however, everincreasing. For organisations, finding the inherent value of technology innovations – and not letting it slip away – is crucial

to a company’s long-term growth,” says Tim Smith, Principal, Deloitte Consulting LLP, and Head of Technology Strategy and Business Transformation, Deloitte US.

“What’s make-or-break for leaders is understanding which moves can bolster and which can erode enterprise value. Connecting digital strategy and action is a proven way for leaders to generate a tremendous return for their stakeholders.”

Partnering with the world’s largest tech companies

Through its open ecosystem of alliances and acquisitions department, which comprises more than 500 externalorganisation members and more than 20 acquired companies, consultancy firm McKinsey seamlessly collaborates with cutting-edge technology providers, leading platforms, system integrators,

and implementation experts to bring even greater end-to-end impact to organisations at the front lines of change.

“McKinsey’s open ecosystem of alliances and acquisitions provides an unparalleled offering, and it is one

Digital transformation is never over

WATCH NOW

“Digital transformation is continuous – the scale and stakes are, however, ever-increasing”

TIM SMITH PRINCIPAL, DELOITTE CONSULTING LLP

important ingredient in our ability to partner with our clients for end-to-end impact,” says Peter Dahlstrom , Senior Partner at McKinsey and Company. “The impact our ecosystem has generated is already compelling –and we are accelerating our journey.”

For example, McKinsey worked with AWS to help a global pizza company develop an ecommerce platform and establish a digital team that increased customer conversion by 40%, customer satisfaction by 15%, and reduced downtime to zero. McKinsey also partnered with Google Cloud to help one of its global logistics clients increase their supply-chain forecasting accuracy, building an advanced analytics platform to better predict order volumes.

And, utilising Microsoft’s IoT platform, McKinsey also helped a wireless equipment manufacturer build a “factory of the future”, delivering a usecase strategy, roadmap, and industrial IoT platform in just 16 weeks.

“By combining our own capabilities with those of our alliances and acquisition partners,” says Liz Ericson, partner at McKinsey, “we know that the expertise we are bringing to clients – whether it’s large-scale data transformations, the latest in technology solutions, or paving the way for a net-zero future – leads to greater impact.”

Another consulting firm, PwC, helps organisations and individuals create the value they are looking for by delivering quality in Assurance, Tax, and Advisory services. With offices in 156 countries and more than 295,000 people, PwC supports a number of global clients and is among the leading professional services networks in the world.

US$3.4tn

A report by IDC has found worldwide digital transformation investments could reach US$3.4tn in 2026

“We complement our expertise with strong partners such as SAP, Microsoft, and Workday,” explains Susanne Arnoldy , a Partner at PwC Germany, responsible for digital and technological transformation at the firm. “Together, we develop technological solutions – always in collaboration with a client. Besides this, we also look to collaborate with specialised tech companies that enable us to automate faster. For example, products from UiPath allow us to build bots, which can take care of recurring administrative processes and systems documentation, for example.”

Digital transformation must be employee-driven

As explained by Arnoldy, when it comes to digital transformation, managers must lead the change by example.

“Otherwise,” she says, “the team will not follow. However, it is just as important to allow everyone their say and accept input for change from members of staff. While, in the past, change was traditionally initiated at a managerial level, this responsibility now essentially falls to everyone in the organisation. Today, leadership encompasses all members of an organisation. This also helps ensure that the transformation never strays too far from the actual business.”

“We complement our expertise with strong partners such as SAP, Microsoft, and Workday”

SUSANNE ARNOLDY PARTNER, PWC GERMANY

HENKEL’S SECRET TO SUCCESS:

AMAZING CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE

WRITTEN BY: ILKHAN OZSEVIM

PRODUCED BY: CRAIG KILLINGBACK

customercentric Supply Chain (SC)

It all began with a vision. Henkel, the German multinational chemical and consumer goods company, many of whose goods you surely consume and have done since your childhood, saw that the world was changing. Henkel recognised that they needed to transform, and to be able to do this, they completely reimagined the supply chain.

Unravelling this vision, is Bjoern Neal Kirchner, the Global Head of Supply Chain for adhesive technologies. The goal was to create an amazing customer experience as a competitive edge.

Kirchner explains: “The vision behind the customer-centric Supply Chain (SC) transformation programme emphasised the potential for supply chains to contribute to the top line, in addition to the traditional bottom line.”

“While most supply chains focus on improving cost positions, inventory and working capital – in other words, KPIs established on traditionally internal data –Henkel believes that supply chains can also improve how customers engage with the company itself,” says Kirchner.

“By optimising the many touchpoints that customers have with Henkel throughout the entire supply chain interaction, such as ordering, logistics and planning, Henkel aims to provide a unique customer experience that can set it apart from its competitors.” This is a creative and visionary approach.

Henkel’s

transformation programme is nothing short of remarkable; Bjoern Kirchner shows us how they did it

Inspiration Center Düsseldorf: The state-of-the-art building comprises 30 labs and 4 technology centres for more than 650 Henkel employees

BJOERN KIRCHNER

TITLE: GLOBAL HEAD OF SUPPLY CHAIN FOR ADHESIVE TECHNOLOGIES

COMPANY: HENKEL

Bjoern Neal Kirchner is the Global head of supply chain for adhesive technologies at Henkel.

He is an experienced economist who has studied in both Munich and London. After completing his studies, he opted to travel to China where he was awarded a scholarship to study the Chinese language and immerse himself in the country’s culture. It was during this time that he began his career in logistics, as he sought to better understand China’s supply chain landscape. He secured a position at a logistics company, where he became captivated by the real-world challenges faced by businesses and their employees. From there, he continued to grow within the supply chain industry, holding various positions in different locations, including China, Hong Kong, Switzerland and Germany.

When asked how Henkel approaches establishing an amazing customer experience as a competitive edge, Kirchner explains that the company had to effectively relearn its perspective on customers.

The North Star

Instead of building on its own perception of what is good or effective and then executing on them, Kirchner says that Henkel engaged with customers on an entirely different level.

“So, we identified the values that were important to them in their engagement with us,” he says. “And through this process of value mapping, we identified areas where we may have not been delivering up to our customers’ expectations – in areas such as reliability, speed and innovation. Then, based on these findings, we implemented new programmes to improve the customer experience in all of these areas.”

So what is the guiding light in Henkel’s reimagining of the supply chain – or even more correctly – the value chain? Kirchner says: “We knew that we needed a North Star, and we needed it to guide the transformation and ensure that we were getting better at creating amazing experiences for our customers. This North Star was forged out of our customers’ values.”

As an execution-driven operational team, Kirchner says that Henkel are accustomed to having numbers guide them – making it difficult for something like the customer experience to be effectively measured.

“However, we needed an indicator,” he says, “an indicator that shows us whether we are making progress for our customers, and this is where the North Star shines.

“It is also crucial that, as an indicator, the North Star be connected to the overall

“Digital capability should overcome a purely functionalist view of supply chains”

BJOERN NEAL KIRCHNER

GLOBAL HEAD OF SUPPLY CHAIN FOR ADHESIVE TECHNOLOGIES, HENKEL

Henkel and CAMELOT: A longstanding, trustful relationship

Bastian Kunze, Partner for Supply and Operations at CAMELOT Group, explains how his company became one of Henkel’s most trusted partners

Within any partner ecosystem, trust between organisations is absolutely paramount.

For more than a decade, it’s that exact trust that has enabled Henkel and CAMELOT Group to form a strong and fruitful relationship. CAMELOT has enjoyed 25 years of successful supply chain consulting, leveraging industry expertise in life science, chemicals, consumer goods and industrial manufacturing.

Explaining the firm’s core mission, Bastian Kunze, Partner for Supply and Operations at CAMELOT, says: “We connect people, processes, and technology to enable our global customers during their supply chain transformation journey.

“We are able to do that because we combine management consulting capabilities with enterprise application know-how and digital innovation.”

Trustful relationship at heart of supply chain projects

CAMELOT’S partnership with Henkel began with a supply chain process and solution implementation using SAP APO technology.

Several more projects followed in the ensuing years, mostly in the area of demand, supply and production planning – but always with the aim of innovating Henkel’s supply chain processes.

“We have had to tackle various challenges,” Kunze adds. “These were things like improving the inventory situation or helping Henkel to bring their demand process to the next level. But everything is based on a long-term, trustful relationship. That was always the foundation.”

Recently, the partners tackled a complex supply and inventory project, which saw CAMELOT implement the DDMRP (demanddriven material requirements planning) concept and the innovative Supply Chain Avatar DDMRP module by Elixum. This further improved and positioned inventory throughout Henkel’s entire supply chain network.

Elixum: Home of the Supply Chain Avatar

Elixum is a global software company that was born out of the CAMELOT Group and, in Kunze’s words, ushered in a “new era of operations and supply chain management”.

Its flagship product, the Supply Chain Avatar, is a cloud-based software suite enabling organisations like Henkel to build and plan resilient, sustainable supply chains by combining the best of two worlds. One element of this is next-generation, advanced planning and scheduling functionalities; the other is AI-driven, cognitive decision support during that process.

“With the in-built Hypertrust Platform,” Kunze explains, “the Supply Chain Avatar solutions can be implemented and deployed on any system infrastructure out there in the market.”

Success breeds trust

One thing that clearly helps to build trust between partners is success – and that’s exactly what CAMELOT has consistently achieved. The firm’s proven, market-leading supply chain process experience, combined with deep technology knowledge and global delivery capabilities, has continued to make the difference for Henkel and similar clients.

With its latest project, CAMELOT has increased the visibility of Henkel’s inventory status and projection, using increased automation that facilitates faster decision-making.

Kunze concludes: “We were able to position the inventory in the Henkel network at the right place, with the right quantity, with an overall effect of lower inventories – achieving a greater supply chain resilience.”

strategy of the company, which in our case is to create an amazing customer experience with our technologies. By doing so, we ensure that we are always aligned with our overarching goal, and that every step we take is working towards achieving that goal.”

Kirchner says that it’s important to put this indicator in place to ensure that momentum is not lost as progress is made. “Additionally,” he says, “ the truth is that people need encouragement, and seeing the North Star KPI rising is a clear sign that progress is being made towards the company’s vision. To achieve this, we reviewed our current service KPI and brought in the perfect order measurement.

The perfect order

The difference between the perfect order measurement and other internal data is that with the perfect order, Henkel is able to cast its net much wider, capturing data points from the customer’s perspective as well. By doing so, they are able to take into account the actual time of arrival; what the customer requested initially; and what Henkel have promised to deliver. “By measuring progress against these external data points, we can be sure that our customers will feel the difference,” Kirchner says.

Fixing a kitchen worktop with Pattex

Establish amazing customer experience as a competitive edge

Reimagining the customer-supply chain relationship – 360 degrees Henkel has a philosophy that “digital capability should overcome a purely functionalist view of supply chains”. Kirchner says: “Traditionally, supply chains are viewed as a linear chain of events that transform raw materials into finished goods, with the customer only at the end of the chain.

“However, Henkel believes that new technologies can enable a 360-degree view of the customer, putting the customer at the centre of all functions that interact with them.”

This approach requires a different set of technologies to ensure that everyone in the company has the same view of the customer experience. “For example,” he says, “service cloud technology allows for customer service interactions to be tracked and followed up on, providing insights into customer satisfaction levels.”

Digital capability, in this example, is an enabler to drive towards a new customer experience.

“The vision behind the customercentric Supply Chain (SC) transformation programme emphasised the potential for supply chains to contribute to the top line, in addition to the traditional bottom line”

BJOERN NEAL KIRCHNER GLOBAL HEAD OF SUPPLY CHAIN FOR ADHESIVE TECHNOLOGIES, HENKEL

14% of global market

Across all 60 segments (Adhesive Technologies)

Bjoern Neal Kirchner

Flo Group is the leading OTM implementing specialist from Europe and the developer of new software solutions to optimise logistic processes.

A team of experts in IT, supply chain and logistics solutions worldwide. Every day they implement, develop, integrate, and connect software to solve any supply chain and logistic challenge.

Discover our Services 〉〉

Flo Group delivers OTM with excellence in client-centricity

As the leading OTM implementation partner, Flo Group’s CEO Michiel Keijzer shares how its expert consultants deliver customer-centric strategy and outcome

With circa 250 consultants globally, Flo Group is the market leader for Oracle Transportation Management System (TMS) implementation. With core teams in Europe, India, and South America, Flo is home to many senior experts with more than 15 years of experience driving knowledge around the Oracle product, which is helping support small and large scale businesses.

Built on a people-centric culture, Flo enables its consultants to develop and grow with echoing effects across its team and client base, delivering excellence and a like-minded approach to transport management.

To achieve this, Flo Group’s CEO, Michiel Keijzer, explained how Flo has created

a templated approach upon which its consultants can build to support businesses operating globally.

“The template can subsequently have functionality and locations added to ensure the solution meets local needs where required,” says Keijzer. “We do encourage our clients to keep localisations to a minimum for ease of solution ownership going forward.”

In the early stage of Oracle TMS rollout, Flo is heavily involved in the process to ensure a successful execution, where consultants are able to get clients on board with the solution for their own specific use cases.

“Our consultants will develop the core solution

and then support the global deployment for each regional roll out,” says Keijzer. “During the roll-out stage, we will work with the clients’ own teams as they become more familiar with the solution. After each ‘go live’ during a deployment, we will hand over to the Flo support team that offers 24/7/365 live solution support and is thereby able to support any timezone.”

This client-centric approach inherently puts Flo in a great position to meet and exceed customer expectations, which has been critical to its success and a leading component of its journey to Oracle Transport Management (OTM) stewardship.

“Henkel believes in the outside-in approach to supply chains, taking in the views and the voices of the customer, as well as data points from outside the company, to design and improve its supply chain performance towards customers”

BJOERN NEAL KIRCHNER GLOBAL HEAD OF SUPPLY CHAIN FOR ADHESIVE TECHNOLOGIES, HENKEL

Adhesives production at the site in Düsseldorf

Rechanneling data: from inside-out to outside-in

Kirchner discussed the difference between the inside-out and outside-in approach to supply chains, and where Henkel stands on this.

Kirchner says: “As the term ‘supply chain’ indicates, it is, in essence, a chain of events. We can visualise this as two opposing streams. The first consists of the material flow, which exists from the procuring of raw materials, to producing intermediaries, on to finished goods, and finally out to delivering those goods to customers.

“Then there is the information flow –and this streams in the opposite direction, from the demand of the customer, on to production and procurement.”

The traditional inside-out approach is where a company accesses the information it has inside of its company, and constructs its reality around that. Kircher expresses that as a company matures in the supply chain, they enhance their perception of their needs, and this is where digital capabilities come into play. “You begin to understand that you need to extend your visibility to the data you receive on both ends of your value chain.” Kirchner says: “In contrast, the outside-in approach acknowledges that a company is part of a much larger value stream that includes suppliers, distributors, customers and consumers.

“By taking these perspectives into account, we are able to make decisions that are better aligned with the overall value stream. Henkel believes in the outside-in approach, taking in the views and the voices of the customer, as well as data points from outside the company, to design and improve its supply chain performance towards customers.”

Building the value chains of tomorrow

As a leading value chain consulting and technology company, Bluecrux transforms today’s supply chains into smart, efficient and fully integrated value chains. As a community, that is built on the intersection which they call “the Cutting X”: where problem meets purpose, and expertise meets technology. Where supply chains evolve, and value chains are forged.

Transforming supply chains into the value chains of tomorrow

with purpose. Like no other player in the market, we offer a unique value proposition. One where expertise and technology converges.” Bluecrux focuses on distinct industry verticals, backed by the belief that specialised knowledge is crucial. It focuses on these main clusters:

Schoenmakers.

Founded in 2011, Bluecrux uses an ecosystem approach transforming the value chains of tomorrow. “The time of either providing advice or providing technology solutions is behind us,” says Managing Partner Anouk Schoenmakers: “We work with our customers to go from the initial ideation towards actual implementation and real results, combining consulting services with state-of-the-art technology.”

Across Bluecrux’s diverse customer base, it sees the same elements creating the rising complexity companies need to deal with nowadays:

1. The increasing speed at which business decisions need to be taken.

2. The growing uncertainty that businesses are facing.

3. The digitisation of technological progress that is needed.

4. The looming market disruption behind every corner.

“And while our answer to our customers’ complexities is always different, the elements that make up our offering are typically the same,” says Schoenmakers. “We connect a deep understanding of the problem with solutions

1. Pharma

2. MedTech

3. Healthcare

4. CPG

5. Specialty chemicals

6. Industrial manufacturing

“In our focus industries, we have the ability to help our customers to transform their entire value chain end to end,” says Schoenmakers. “At the heart of Bluecrux is the belief that innovation is born of collaboration. This requires a community approach, building a movement that is called The Cutting X. Where supply chains evolve and value chains are forged.”

Bluecrux’s transformational, collaborative, customer-centric approach is essential to Henkel: “No longer looking from an inside-out perspective, pushing one size fits all standards across the supply chain. Instead, we look through the customer’s lens.” Schoenmakers says: “We share the belief with Henkel that supply chains should no longer be linear, functional and siloed. Hence, we started a transformation journey together, to deliver real customer centricity.”

The key to overcoming complexity and unlocking supply chain value is the convergence of business and technology, says Bluecrux’s Anouk

From vision to reality: crafting the customer CX program

According to Bjoern Kirchner, the first step of building a customer centric Supply Chain (SC) transformation programme at Henkel was to engage directly with customers and ask them about their experience. This was the ‘going broad’ approach.

However, with over 150,000 customers, it was not realistic to cover them all, so Henkel selected customer representatives and engaged deeply with them, performing value mapping and workshops to build a perception of what customers actually thought of the company: ‘going deep’.

The second phase was about creating ideas to fulfil different customer needs, such as innovation capability, quality, reliability and speed. Henkel then gathered teams across all functions to generate ideas on how to improve the customer experience, redesigning crucial touchpoints, such as

shipment experience, track and trace, sampling and complaints processes.

Kirchner says: “We structured the CX programme into three areas, including the differentiators, which were the redesign of crucial touchpoints with customers, the fundamentals, which were the subsystems to enable getting those data points, and the efficiencies, which was about bringing new technology to capture a different efficiencylayers, such as process mining and optical character reading.”

He admits that the transformation was a complex undertaking given the size of the company, but it was powerful for both sides of the equation, and could partially fund new initiatives while continuing to contribute to the bottom line.

Products on display, Düsseldorf

(INSET): TCA: Application of thermally conductive adhesives for batteries of e-cars

(MAIN): Dragon Plant: Henkel is operating the biggest adhesive production facility near Shanghai, China

Henkel’s partner ecosystem Such an undertaking could not be executed without the right partner ecosystem. Just some of the partners involved with Henkel’s projects include Bluecrux, VMware, Camelot Consulting, and Flo Group.

“When looking for a partner to help with our vision of repositioning the supply chain, we needed someone who had experience not only in customer-centricity, but also in supply chain planning. Bluecrux, with its deep supply chain knowledge and customer centricity track record, was a great partner for us to work with,” he says.

Kirchner also talked about their partnership with Camelot Consulting, which helps them with their material master data governance process and quality control. “The other area of our partnership with Camelot is in planning capabilities, where they are implementing demand-driven MRP to drive customer-centricity and outside-in supply planning.”

Flo Group is another one of Henkel’s key partners, and they work together in the logistics arena. Specifically, Flo Group was Henkel’s implementation partner for OTM (Oracle Transportation

13.2% Organic sales development (Adhesive Technologies)

“Henkel believes in the outside-in approach to supply chains, taking in the views and the voices of the customer, as well as data points from outside the company, to design and improve its supply chain performance towards customers”

BJOERN NEAL KIRCHNER GLOBAL HEAD OF SUPPLY CHAIN FOR ADHESIVE TECHNOLOGIES, HENKEL

Management). Kirchner says: “Flo Group’s expertise in implementation is crucial to our undertakings”.

Then there is Salesforce. Kirchner expresses that they are currently implementing Salesforce’s main application – the service cloud – in their customer service and technical teams. “We have been impressed with how professionally Salesforce has been running the program and are happy to learn from them. I believe it was a wise decision to work with a best-in-class company like Salesforce, and to listen carefully to their advice.”

Last, but not least, in Henkel’s pantheon of key partners is Fourkites. Henkel sees T&T capability as a basic customer requirement to shape customer experience. Fourkites is Henkel’s strategic partner to deliver visibility and transparency in logistics services. In the past few years, Henkel managed to cover a significant part of the deliveries with Fourkites’ T&T platform, and there is an ambitious plan to continue the roll out of T&T in the coming year.

The greatest challenges and lessons

Kirchner describes the biggest challenge in their current role as balancing the urgent needs of their supply chain team with the important task of transforming and maturing their capabilities in terms of systems, processes, mindset and people. Henkel needs to make sure that the performance and transformation sides of their teams work in-sync, and don’t develop things independently.

On a slightly philosophical conclusion – but one that has obviously served him well, as can be seen in his overseeing Henkel’s customer-centric Supply Chain (SC) transformation programme – Kirchner tells me that the best advice he has ever received is “to figure out how fast you can be in implementing change – and then go a bit slower – to make sure that people have enough time to absorb and digest it all”. And that’s how you turn visions into realities.

HOW DIGITAL TWINS UNLOCK ENTERPRISES’ SUSTAINABILITY EFFORTS

With sustainability increasingly on corporate and government agendas, over half of enterprises believing digital twin technology is critical to ESG efforts

WRITTEN BY: MARCUS LAW

As our physical and digital worlds converge, digital twins can play a key role in helping society to overcome some of its most urgent sustainability challenges.

A way to model and understand how to reduce energy consumption and emissions so organisations can test scenarios to reach sustainability and climate goals, research from Capgemini last year found that 57% of organisations believe digital twin technology is critical to improving sustainability efforts.

Last year, Lockheed Martin and NVIDIA announced a collaboration to build an AI-driven digital twin of planet Earth, arming the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) with an efficient, centralised approach to monitoring current global environmental conditions – including extreme weather events. The two companies expect to fully integrate and demonstrate one of the variable data pipelines – sea surface temperature – by September 2023.

“Digital twins will help us solve the world’s hardest scientific and environmental challenges,” said Dion Harris, Lead Product Manager of Accelerated Computing at NVIDIA. “The combination of Lockheed Martin’s AI technology with NVIDIA Omniverse will give NOAA researchers a powerful system to improve weather predictions at a global scale.”

How trusted digital twins can unlock sustainability efforts

With increasing adoption of digital technologies across all industry verticals, digital twins can be a company’s most effective tool for improved mitigation strategies and ensuring compliance with their ESG goals.

“Given the increased availability and democratisation of technologies required

Enabling

educators. Empowering students. Explore how we accelerate student discovery, learning and innovation with our Digital Education 3D Experience.

IOT

for building digital twins, it’s a valuable tool for improving business infrastructure, products, and processes – both existing and new – to meet ESG mandates,” explains Dr

Phani

Bhushan Sistu, IoT Solutions Lead at Hitachi Vantara.

Sustainability has been on the public agenda for years with comparatively little progress being made given the risks. The introduction of ambitious sustainability goals by governments around the world have, however, pushed the topic to the top of the corporate and government agenda, adds Kevin Macnish, Digital Ethics Consulting Manager at Sopra Steria.

“While there is no silver bullet to the sustainability issues we’re currently facing, technology, particularly digital twins, has already played a vital role in helping reduce emissions,” Macnish explains. “Digital twins can create sustainable value across a diverse, expansive range of applications and contexts; when it comes to sustainability efforts, they’re already helping reduce the greenhouse gas emissions and carbon footprint of buildings by up to 50%, with

Digital twins market value

With Gartner predicting it to be one of the trends of the decade, the digital twin market will likely reach $183bn in revenue by 2031. Product leaders must build ecosystems and libraries of prebuilt function and vertical market templates to drive competitiveness.

“Given the increased availability and democratisation of technologies required for building digital twins, it is a valuable tool for meeting ESG mandates”

DR PHANI BHUSHAN SISTU

SOLUTIONS LEAD, HITACHI VANTARA

Benefits of digital twins

Not only driving sustainability and the circular economy at speed and scale, digital twins help companies reduce their costs, resource use, and carbon footprint, according to a report by Accenture. The report, written by Simon Bentley and Tony Murdzhev, also states that virtual twins can unlock combined additional benefits of US$1.3tn in economic value and 7.5 Gt CO2e emissions reductions by 2030.

potential to lower emissions across entire road networks.”

Sustainability and digital twins

Digital twins can have a significant impact on goals to reach net-zero by 2030. Nonetheless, to do so they must themselves be sustainable – as Macnish adds: “To have a chance at any lasting impact, digital twin technology must be able to do the work required of it, and must be accepted by the people responsible for, and affected by, this work,” he comments.

This can be looked at in terms of trust. “For example, it makes sense for an individual to trust that if a brick were dropped on their foot, it would hurt,” he says. “It does not make sense that the individual would trust the dropped brick not to fall. At the same time, it makes sense for an individual to trust that someone would not drop the brick on their foot.

“The first use of trust here refers to competence (when the final outcome shares a relationship with reasonable expectations). The second use of trust refers to ethics (a person should act

“While there is no silver bullet to the sustainability issues we’re currently facing, technology, particularly digital twins, has already played a vital role in helping reduce emissions”

KEVIN MACNISH DIGITAL ETHICS CONSULTING MANAGER, SOPRA STERIA

ethically). When it comes to addressing societal concerns, though, both senses of trust are important.

“It is obvious that if a technological solution, such as a digital twin, does not work, it will not be trusted to do the job. For that reason, excellence is required in developing quality digital twins. Alongside this – but perhaps less obvious – is that if a digital twin is not trusted to act in people’s best interests, it will not be trusted to do the job. If the public rejects this technology, the true value of digital twins will never be realised, something that will be detrimental to society and the environment.”

If this is true for digital twins, it is more so for the UK’s National Digital Twin programme, Macnish expands. An initiative started by the British government in 2018, the project serves to set the framework that will empower change and help organisations embrace connected digital twin technology.

“Digital twins, though, risk carrying an aura of mass surveillance when applied to people, and of stealing intellectual property when applied to assets,” he explains. “People will challenge the use of digital twins and companies may not be comfortable with sharing precious data, as a result. Without trust, any attempt to create a digital twin is doomed to failure.”

“Digital twins can, and should, have a radical impact on sustainability should the technology itself also be sustainable and trusted”

KEVIN MACNISH DIGITAL ETHICS CONSULTING MANAGER, SOPRA STERIA

Visualising a Twin Earth in NVIDIA Omniverse WATCH NOW

Digital twins an innovative solution to sustainability problems

“Digital twins can, and should, have a radical impact on sustainability should the technology itself also be sustainable and trusted. But this won’t happen without the willing involvement of the public,” Macnish explains. “There is no quick fix to this – the road to compatible digital twin technology will be a gradual process that will involve learning as we go.”

As governments move to align with a fast-approaching deadline to transition to net-zero emissions, businesses will have to move in tandem to remain compliant. “By harnessing the potential of digital twins, manufacturers can spotlight areas where resources are being used inefficiently

and take appropriate corrective actions to meet their climate reporting and ESG commitments,” Sistu explains. “For instance, digital twins can be utilised to simulate alternate scenarios and implement the one that results in improved efficiencies to meet the Scope 1 purview. Companies will benefit from wider use of digital twins within their own manufacturing processes, buildings, data centres, and logistics.

“Another example could be where a company utilises digital twins to dynamically choose between alternative energy sources, where possible, and reduce reliance on traditional energy sources. This utility is evident in the projected growth of the digital twins market to over 10-fold of what it is today, within the next five years.”

INNOVATING TO SECURE THE WORLD’S LARGEST PRIVATE CLOUD

WRITTEN BY: MARCUS LAW

PRODUCED BY: KRISTOFER PALMER

he use of the cloud has truly taken off in recent years, but as cloud computing increases, so too do security threats. For companies such as SAP, which operates a private cloud, protecting the data of their customers is absolutely critical.

Roland Costea, the Global Chief Security Officer for SAP’s Enterprise Cloud Services, is responsible for running the Global Cybersecurity Program and Strategy for SAP’s Private Cloud.

“SAP is the coolest software company that your friends have never heard of,” he explains. “It puts a phone in every pocket but it's not Apple or Samsung, it puts shoes on the feet of the world, but it's not Nike or Adidas, it gives the world wings, but it's not Red Bull or Boeing.”

SAP’s Enterprise Cloud Services portfolio empowers customers to run a modern, intelligent ERP system in the cloud, enabling them to become cost-effective and sustainable intelligent enterprises.

One aspect of this portfolio is RISE with SAP, a business transformation-as-a-service platform that enables every company to become an intelligent and sustainable enterprise. “This is practically the vehicle to deliver SAP's Intelligent Enterprise Vision,” Costea adds. “It brings together the solutions and services you need, in one package, regardless of where your business stands now or where you want it to go.”

With Enterprise Cloud Services growing exponentially in recent years, SAP is innovating and moving with speed to stay one step ahead of security threats

RISE with SAP enables businesses on their transformation journey

Launched in January 2021, RISE with SAP helps companies seize the advantages of cloud computing in their mission-critical, core systems.

needs for true business transformation is simplicity,” describes Costea. “That means having only one company which is responsible for service-level agreements, operations and issue handling. That comes with the benefit of best-of-breed cloud infrastructure providing a native cloud landscape powered by SAP and our hyperscaler partners.”

is with them on each step of their road to an intelligent enterprise, migrating from the

ROLAND COSTEA

TITLE: GLOBAL CISO - ENTERPRISE CLOUD SERVICES

LOCATION: GERMANY

Roland Costea is a Security Executive and the CISO for SAP Enterprise Cloud Services. He is a high performing security business leader who plays a key role in driving the digital transformation of SAP’s customers into a secured intelligent enterprise using the private cloud. Throughout his career of almost 20 years, Roland lead to success different security business units in companies like Microsoft, IBM, Cognizant or Genpact and he secured and developed the first private cloud in Romania in 2010 when few people were actually talking about cloud.

Wherever your data comes from, wherever it needs to go, Cribl gives you the freedom and flexibility to make choices instead of compromises. You can collect, reduce, enrich, normalise, and route data from any source to any destination to best support your business goals, with Cribl.

"CRIBL GIVES US

OUR DATA HIGHWAYS." OBSERVABILITY

INTO AND THE POWER OF CONTROL, FLEXIBILITY

HOW CRIBL IS UNLOCKING THE VALUE OF ALL OBSERVABILITY DATA

With its platform enabling more choice and control over telemetry data, Cribl is helping SAP Enterprise Cloud Services accelerate its security initiatives

Cribl is on a mission to unlock the value of all observability data so that organisations can provide optimal and secure experiences for their customers.

As Ledion Bitincka, Cribl’s Co-founder and CTO explains, the main problems Cribl addresses in the market originate from an explosion in observability data. “According to Gartner, the amount of data is growing roughly by 25% every year, meaning that in about five years, organisations will have two-and-a-half times the amount of data that they’re dealing with today.”

Cribl’s flagship product in the market, Cribl Stream, is a vendor-agnostic observability pipeline. “It allows organisations to collect and gather this observability, security, and telemetry data and route it at scale in the best format to wherever it makes sense, for alerting, analysis or compliance purposes,” Bitincka says.

Roland Costea, the Global Chief Security Officer for SAP’s Enterprise Cloud Services is responsible for running the organisation’s overall global cybersecurity programme. “One thing that represents our overall cybersecurity strategy is speed: accelerating our end-to-end security processes and services,” he explains. “We also need control and visibility into our own datasets, so that we are able to make intelligent decisions. What excites me most about Cribl’s platform is that it gives us the control, the flexibility, and the power of observability into our own data flows.”

SAP is helping organisations modernise their business processes and become intelligent enterprises. “We are helping our customers to protect their core SAP workloads,” Costea adds. “With Cribl, we are able to spend less time on repetitive processes that can be automated, so that we can free up more time for innovation. When we innovate, we can better deliver on our customer needs, build better solutions, better partnerships, and be there every step of the way to help our customers achieve their goals.”

For more information visit cribl.io

That makes them more resilient, profitable, and sustainable by adopting best practice processes and industry next-generation practices.”

With SAP’s Enterprise Cloud Services continually growing, when it comes to securing the RISE with SAP platform innovation is essential.

“Enterprise Cloud Services growth has been impressive in the last two years, and we look forward to continued growth,” Costea comments. As a result, this growth means onboarding top customers from all industries with the strongest security requirements.

“ We collect and process tens of terabytes of data per day, and that amount of data flows over some big highways in the city of SAP”

ROLAND COSTEA GLOBAL CISO - ENTERPRISE CLOUD SERVICES SAP

“With that in mind,” he adds, “we need to innovate in the automation space in order to become more efficient and faster in processing big amounts of data, in creating detections, in tuning them, in making sure all the security controls are enforced at the deployment level and at the same time offering the visibility and transparency all these customers need.”

Securing RISE with SAP

When it comes to securing RISE with SAP, Security Engineering, Detection, Monitoring and SOAR each play a key role. SAP’s Security Information and Event Management system

is the core of the organisation’s Security Operation Centre, with Costea’s team working with one of the top software security providers to create the platform for SAP’s cloud. “In addition, SOAR components are integrated with our SIEM in order to support our security operations in the most efficient way,” he adds. “But that still is not enough.”

Central to Costea’s approach to security is speed. From that perspective, his team faced five main challenges.

“First,” he explains, “we needed the ability to easily manage data normalisation and enrichment to ensure the security triage

FROM THREATS TO DETECTIONS IN MINUTES

-

"Anvilogic is an innovator in the security space"

Roland Costea CISO - ECS, Executive at SAP

SAP automates detection engineering & hunting with Anvilogic

Anvilogic’s AI-driven platform for threat detection & hunting, unifies security operations to increase visibility & helps to find and combat threats faster

Cybersecurity company, Anvilogic, has a mission to democratise and unify detection engineering and hunting, empowering Security Operations Centre (SOC) teams to better protect organisations from cybersecurity threats with greater efficiency and effectiveness.

“We automate cybersecurity operations, particularly detection, engineering and hunting and investigations,” explains Karthik Kannan, Anvilogic’s Founder and CEO. “By automating the process of observing key capabilities of the enterprise, mapping them on frameworks like MITRE ATT&CK, we can then automatically provide insights and recommendations for what detections need to be put into place and automate that process,” explains Kannan. “From there, we progress into completely AI-led analysis of signals so that we can find revealing patterns for which there may have not been detections at all in the first place.”

As Roland Costea, the Global Chief Security Officer for Enterprise Cloud Services at SAP, explains, Anvilogic enables SAP to move quickly from threat research to building, deploying and then improving the detection process.

By including automation and AI in the security process, Anvilogic is helping SAP be more efficient and optimised, ultimately enabling it to respond faster to threats.

“Anvilogic is an innovator in this space and we are extremely happy with the partnership that will allow us to not only solve and improve ourselves, but also to have a unique approach to protect the private cloud and, ultimately, the data of the most important companies in the world,” Costea comments.

“I really like to work with innovative startup companies,” he concludes. “This brings the excitement that together, we can share insights to help develop the roadmap and how to continue to grow the Anvilogic platform. All of this can not only help SAP, but also help the whole world to address threat detection, investigation, hunting, and triage in a better optimised and, in the end, quicker way.”

team has the proper context and details to make quick decisions.

“Second, we needed a way to consistently measure our ability to detect priority threats across the MITRE ATT&CK framework in real-time and ensure we have a proper understanding of where and how we need to improve.

“Third,” Costea adds, “we had to streamline how detections are managed, deployed, and version controlled, while also improving the time to deploy them.

“Fourth, we had to improve our triage and analysis capabilities by understanding correlation relationships fast. And fifth, we use several tools in our Detection Lifecycle, and we were looking for a way to centralise everything.”

That, Costea adds, is where SAP’s work with the automated threat detection platform Anvilogic comes in, “which helps us to address these five challenges.”

A focus on zero trust

The rapid adoption of cloud services in recent years brings a new focus on Zero Trust principles. Organisations can no longer trust perimeter security alone with an “implicit trust” granted to assets or user accounts based solely on their physical or network location.

Most cyberattacks and data breaches come as the result of a stolen identity, and while more and more corporations are using identity protection solutions, this type of protection is not built into the architecture. Zero trust is designed to solve these shortcomings.

“SAP applications are business-critical applications for many enterprises and all of them think about two main use cases in regard to zero trust: to make connections between SAP solutions zero-trust compliant,

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and to facilitate more secure user access and accelerate migration to cloud solutions from SAP,” Costea explains.

“We work with Zscaler for RISE with SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public or private editions and SAP S/4HANA Cloud, private edition.”

The need for data observability

As Costea explains, when it comes to SAP’s security strategy speed alone is not enough: “We also need to have control and visibility into our own datasets so that we make intelligent decisions.”

Central to this is SAP’s collaboration with observability pipeline Cribl.

“We collect and process tens of terabytes of data per day, and that amount of data flows over some big highways in the city of SAP, and Cribl gives us the control over the lights, over the crossroads, over when do I want to close a highway or not. Because the private cloud is an extension of our customer's network, they feel like we are part of their network, and they want to have a bit more visibility into what this cloud service delivers for them from a security perspective,” Costea explains. “As a result, we decided to create specific data flows for customers interested in getting their log service in a controlled way, with the correct architecture built around what we call Customer Data Landing Zones. Speeding onboarding, enrichment, normalisation and masking features provide us with clean, relevant data on which to build better alerts and have data ready to accelerate incident investigation and response.”

Autonomous

Purple

Teaming.

The highway to cyber resilience.

Your best defence is offensive intelligence. CODA Footprint enables SOC teams to proactively identify exploitable cyber killchains and collaborate internally to disarm them in real-time.

Autonomous Application Exploit Engine as a service

Finding vulnerabilities and managing them in an environment that is already filled with new, emerging, and evolving threats can be overwhelming. The sheer volume of available patches that must be deployed each month is already massive and it continues to grow.

“In the context of SAP Private Cloud, the customer still keeps the ownership and responsibility to secure the application layer,” Costea describes. “That means on one side that the customer needs to cooperate with us in approving specific downtime windows, and on the other hand that they have a role in analysing product-related patches released by the SAP Product Development Teams.”

One of SAP’s new services, RAVEN, which will be launched as a pilot end of 2023, has a component developed with CODA that will allow customers to make decisions with speed and accuracy when it comes to managing risk.

As Costea explains, the service will deliver hyper-contextualised risk signals to customers, allowing them to take the correct and timely decisions when it comes to managing risk across their SAP cloud environments.

“Our goal at SAP is to build solid processes, leveraging bleeding-edge technology in order to help our customers reduce their real cyber risk exposure to nearly zero,” he adds. “And we know this requires continuous effort from all parties involved.”

AI and ML present new risks in the security landscape

The deployment of emerging technologies such as AI and ML are becoming increasingly common in automating and streamlining various processes. However, as Costea explains, these technologies present new risks, as they may become targets for attackers. “New vulnerabilities or zero-day exploits may be identified in these systems,

which must be considered,” he comments. “Another area of concern is the security of the Internet of Things, which has gained momentum in the market in recent years”.

As companies continue to adopt container-based architectures, container security, and Kubernetes-based security in the cloud are also emerging as important topics on the cybersecurity agenda.

“Overall,” Costea adds, “it is important to remain vigilant and proactive in identifying and addressing potential risks associated with these new technologies.

Quantum computing is another emerging trend that presents significant challenges to cybersecurity, with its potential to operate at much faster speeds than current technology meaning that current encryption methods may be compromised. “Encryption algorithms that were once deemed secure may become vulnerable in a matter of days, weeks, or months, rather than years,” Costea concludes. “These challenges require the industry’s attention in the coming years to maintain the security of sensitive data and systems.”

“Our goal at SAP is to build solid processes, leveraging bleeding-edge technology in order to help our customers reduce their real cyber risk exposure to nearly zero”

ROLAND COSTEA GLOBAL CISO - ENTERPRISE CLOUD SERVICES SAP

AI

and blockchain

Combining for the future of data analytics

Blockchain is on the rise, with a recent survey from Deloitte showing 86% of executives believe there’s huge business potential in blockchain technology

WRITTEN BY: MARCUS LAW

No longer solely associated with cryptocurrencies, blockchain technology is now being harnessed in other industries, helping organisations gain insights from mountains of data.

Business runs on information. The faster it’s received and the more accurate it is, the better. According to IBM, blockchain is ideal for delivering that information, providing immediate, shared and completely transparent information stored on an immutable ledger that can be accessed only by permissioned network members.

“A blockchain network can track orders, payments, accounts, production, and much more,” IBM says. “And because members share a single view of the truth, you can see all details of a transaction end-to-end, giving you greater confidence as well as new efficiencies and opportunities.”

Today, businesses and governments across the world are adopting blockchain to fit their needs in everything from welfare management to voting records and tax calculation, with a recent survey from Deloitte finding that 86% of executives believe there’s huge business potential in blockchain technology.

Data and blockchain

A blockchain – as described by McKinsey & Company – is an encoded digital ledger stored on multiple computers in a public or private network, comprising data records, or ‘blocks’. Once these blocks are collected in a chain, they cannot be changed or deleted by a single actor; instead, they are verified and managed using automation and shared governance protocols.

“A blockchain is a database that maintains a set of records that are protected against tampering or revisions,” comments Mo Sahib,

Get reliable network coverage and security protection, fast.

A modern network must be able to respond easily, quickly and flexibly to the growing needs of today’s digital business. Must provide visibility & control of applications, users and devices on and off the network and Intelligently direct traffic across the WAN. Be scalable and automate the process to provide new innovative services. Support IoT devices and utilize state-of-the-art technologies such as real-time analytics, ML and AI. And all these must be provided with maximum security and minimum cost.

This is the power that brings the integration of two cloud managed platforms, Cisco Meraki and Cisco Umbrella. This integration is binding together the best of breed in cloud-managed networking and Security. cisco.com

MO SAHIB CEO, BORDERLESS SECURITY AND FILESDNA

CEO of Borderless Security and FilesDNA. “In its simplest terms, imagine making multiple copies of a document. Each time the document is viewed, moved, or opened, it’s compared with all the other scopes to ensure no changes or errors have been introduced. This all happens automatically without the need for human interaction. If someone attempts to change a document or access

something they should not be accessing, those instances can be easily identified.”

From product identifiers to medical records or land registries, blockchain and distributed ledger technologies are already functioning in many sectors. According to the World Economic Forum, up to 10% of global GDP could be stored on blockchains by 2025.

“We have never lived in a time with so many transformative technologies,” says futurist and business advisor Bernard Marr. “Tech trends like ML, robotics, blockchain, and the metaverse are revamping every business in every industry.”

Data is the lifeblood of successful companies, according to Marr, but this comes with a huge responsibility. “Companies must keep information safe

“Blockchain has only been around for a little over 10 years and, in that time, it has been widely adopted across the financial sector and beyond”

and comply with all applicable security legislation. The companies that succeed in the future will need to have a solid strategy in place that makes the most of their data while protecting partners and customers.”

“Blockchain has only been around for a little over 10 years and in that time it has been widely adopted across the financial sector and beyond,” explains Sahib. “It offers better speed, accuracy, and security than was possible before its inception. Forbes has predicted a continued growth and evolution over the next 10 years. In 2021, the market was worth US$4.9bn; by 2026, this is predicted to grow to US$67.4bn.

“Growth like this has not been seen since the Dotcom boom in the 90s.”

“That’s

Securing IoT data

As IoT growth accelerates, there will simply be too many devices and too much data for human intervention. According to research by IDC, the amount of data generated by IoT devices is expected to reach 73.1 ZB (zettabytes) by 2025. And while big data technology is capable of processing and analysing large volumes of data, it does not provide security and trust.

where blockchain comes in,”

comments Jonas Lundqvist, CEO at Haidrun. “As a distributed database or ledger technology, blockchain stores and manages data in so-called blocks, encrypted and linked together to form a chain. Each block also contains an immutable record of exactly when it was created, which can’t

“AI and ML help automate a lot of timeconsuming manual processes”

Blockchain Explained

WATCH NOW

MO SAHIB CEO, BORDERLESS SECURITY AND FILESDNA

be corrupted, lost, or changed without the network knowing about it.”

With a public blockchain, anyone can download the peer-to-peer client software, view the ledger, and interact with the blockchain. This means that no single party has control over the massive amount of data the IoT devices generate, with Lundqvist claiming this makes it virtually impossible for anyone to compromise or corrupt data records.

“Public blockchains, however, were developed for, and largely associated with, cryptocurrencies and are designed to preserve an individual user’s anonymity, treating all users equally,” Lundqvist explains. “This means that when it comes to enterprise applications – including managing IoT ecosystems – the strength of public blockchains also becomes a weakness and poses several challenges around privacy and control.”

For many enterprises, the idea of allowing every participant to have full access to the entire contents of the database does not sit well. “As a result, a new generation of private blockchain is emerging where a single authority or organisation ultimately retains control, and no one can enter this type of network without proper authentication,” Lundqvist says.

“Some private blockchains can look more like centralised networks but they offer many, if not all, the distributed benefits. Any overall control they do retain helps to improve privacy and eliminate many of the illicit activities often associated with public blockchains and cryptocurrencies.”

Blockchain powered by AI and ML

The foundation of blockchain technology, and the driving force behind its continuing evolution, is AI. The ever-improving fields of AI, coupled with ML, have helped keep

blockchain up to speed with developments in hacking and cybercrime.

As Sahib explains, there are many benefits for businesses looking to move their data to digital storage and transmission systems. With modern document management systems files are easier to access and edit, searchable, automatically backed up and protected against illegal access and interference.

“AI and ML help automate a lot of timeconsuming manual processes,” Sahib explains. “When you scan or upload a document, AI systems can tag, save and store your files across multiple locations on a distributed network. When you want to access your file it will be easy to find, accessible to you remotely, and you can be sure that no unwanted changes have been made.

“AI systems are also capable of screening your documents for sensitive information. Thus ensuring this is properly flagged, secured and not shared unnecessarily,” Sahib concludes. “The software can also be set up to detect and prevent unwanted access to certain files while leaving others open to wider viewing. This helps ensure that only your chosen users have access and helps identify any threats, inside or outside your organisation.”

“When it comes to enterprise applications – including managing IoT ecosystems – the strength of public blockchains also becomes a weakness”

JONAS LUNDQVIST CEO, HAIDRUN

A CULTURAL SHIFT IN IT IS TRANSFORMING DENTISTRY AT VCU

PRODUCED BY: TOM VENTURO WRITTEN BY: HELEN ADAMS

tell us more

Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) School of Dentistry was founded in 1893 in Richmond, Virginia. Its mission is to educate tomorrow’s oral health leaders in a community of service and inclusion by utilising emerging technologies and innovative research to provide comprehensive oral health care for all. As the only dental school in the state of Virginia, it plays a vital role in preserving and improving the oral and general health communities throughout the state. It incorporates state-of-the-art technologies to provide a unique, hands-on educational experience to students in dentistry, advanced dental education, graduate research, and dental hygiene programmes.

One of five health science schools at VCU, VCU School of Dentistry shares a campus with a large, urban academic health system, VCU Health. Functioning much like a hospital itself, the school is home to a robust, fully specialised dental practice that treats more than 32,000 patients each year through 100,000 plus appointments. It has one of the top digital dentistry programmes in the U.S., and its Philips Institute of Oral Health Research is ranked 17th among all US Dental Schools in National Institutes of Health funding.

As dentistry evolves to increasingly rely on advanced technologies for patient care, the information technology team at VCU School of Dentistry is critical to carrying out the school’s mission and serving the oral health needs of Virginia’s communities. Led by Brian Canaday (Chief

Information and Business Solutions

VCU School of Dentistry is at the forefront of a technological revolution in oral health. Brian Canaday, Mike Talley and Brent Idleman

Officer), Mike Talley, (Director of Application Development, Infrastructure, and Business Intelligence), and Brent Idleman (Director of Clinical and Instructional Technologies), the IT team is quick to point out that the school is a unique environment that blends education with patient care, allowing the flexibility and guardrails needed to let technological innovation thrive.

It starts with building a team and a culture Brian Canaday is the Chief Information and Business Solutions Officer at the school. He describes his role as a blend of information technology, business operations and, importantly, someone who sets the team culture and vision.

“I lead the processes, technology and people within our organisation. I ensure that the outcomes that we deliver meet the actual business objectives,” he said.

After graduating college, Canaday started teaching in public schools. He saw this as an opportunity to observe senior level teachers, administrators and athletic coaches in action.

“I picked up on all of the little things that they did, their attention to details, integration of tools and technologies, their focus on structured processes, and their passion for leadership,” said Canaday. “I started exploring technology to see if it could be a tool that I could use to assist with my teaching and coaching interactions. From there, I decided to pursue another degree and moved into the information technology space.”

After earning his M.S. in Information Systems at VCU, Canaday landed a job on the web development team with the City of Richmond. After that, he started his first stint at VCU School of Dentistry as a lead analyst and programmer before transitioning to a director of technology role at VCU School of Pharmacy.

“I missed the health care technology environment at VCU School of Dentistry and was fortunate to return in an expanded role,” said Canaday. “Since I returned, my focus has been to create an entirely new technology team and a new culture, one person and one process at a time. The last three years have been amazing.”

Mike Talley is the Director of Application Development, Infrastructure, and Business Intelligence. He leads a team of developers and engineers responsible for over 50 applications, some of which were developed in-house and some are third-party solutions.

“We’re responsible for the underlying infrastructure of those applications,

including the servers and cloud infrastructure,” Tally explained. “We ensure those applications are constantly up and operating when needed. We are continuously innovating and improving processes to ensure we have the reliability and stability to fulfil our clinical, educational and business needs.”

Talley has been interested in information technology and computers from a young age. “I remember getting my first computer and I took it apart - I knew that's what I wanted to do from that point on,” he said. Talley eventually went to Virginia Commonwealth University and graduated with a degree in information systems.

BRIAN CANADAY

TITLE: CHIEF INFORMATION AND BUSINESS SOLUTIONS OFFICER

Brian Canaday is the Chief Information and Business Solutions Officer, where he is responsible for business operations and setting the team culture and vision.

After completing his M.S. in Information Systems at VCU, Canaday started work in the web development

“My team and I help everywhere that technology and education intersect”

BRIAN CANADAY CHIEF INFORMATION AND BUSINESS SOLUTIONS OFFICER

“I loved the university, especially the culture and diversity that thrives at VCU. When I graduated, I knew one day I wanted to come back and work here,” said Talley. “I got an opportunity to apply for a web developer job here at the school, and I had no idea what I was getting into at the time, but it was terrific! I've enjoyed working here for the past 15 years.”

Brent Idleman is the Director of Clinical and Instructional Technology. He and his team assist everywhere that technology and

education intersect, including hardware and software support and optimisation in clinical settings as well as didactic needs in the classroom.

Idleman credits two personal interests that brought him to this point in his career.

“Music and video games got me here. Yes, as silly as it may seem, I think playing video games has really helped me,” said Idleman. “Gaming is really just software that is manipulated with some type of peripheral. Years of ‘practising’ has allowed me to

“Our students need to understand technology and effortlessly interact with it to be successful here and in their future careers”

MIKE TALLEY DIRECTOR OF APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT, INFRASTRUCTURE, AND BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE

A cultural shift in IT is transforming dentistry at VCU

WATCH NOW

navigate, learn, and test user interfaces and new software, efficiently and thoroughly. By learning every little detail a platform has to offer, all the click paths, all the menus, I can then spread that knowledge to others.”

Idleman is also a lifelong musician, and this is what eventually led him to pursue a career in musical education and become a teacher.

“As a music teacher, I honed my pedagogical skills, which have been instrumental in my current role. I also fell in love with teaching and helping others,” Idleman said. “When I left teaching in public schools, I had to find somewhere that married together my love of technology, love of teaching and my passion to serve others. VCU School of Dentistry is that place.”

“Bringing Brent onboard solved two major issues,” said Canaday. “We needed someone communicative and charismatic that could lead our instructional technology efforts, but we also needed someone who could teach our faculty, staff and students how to use our clinical technology. Brent has a thirst for teaching and an analytical eye toward technology; he was a perfect fit. Mike is a uniquely skilled individual who is great at application and web development, Windows servers, databases, electronic health records systems and more. He is also a certified Project Management Professional, which makes him a perfect fit in his role and allows him to leverage his talents to propel forward new technologies in our environment.”

Technology is critical to fulfilling the mission of the school

Assembling a strong and dedicated team was the first and most important step in establishing a successful and efficient technological environment at VCU School of Dentistry. Next, Canaday, Talley, Idleman and

MIKE TALLEY TITLE: DIRECTOR OF APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT, INFRASTRUCTURE, AND BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE

Mike Talley has been fascinated by information technology and computers from childhood, dismantling his first computer to understand how it worked. Now as the Director of Application Development, Infrastructure, and Business Intelligence, Talley leads a team of developers and engineers in 50 applications. They are responsible for the underlying infrastructure of those applications, including the servers and cloud infrastructure. Tally’s team innovate and improve processes to ensure VCU can fulfil its clinical, educational and business needs.

MODERN IT INFRASTRUCTURE FOR THE CLOUD AGE

Who We Are

We were the customers. We’ve walked the mile in your shoes. Now we are the seasoned vets, with an ideology built upon trust, communication and expertise.

What We Do

We live by a “customer first” mentality, and strive to deliver nothing short of IT excellence. Your IT Vision, Delivered.

Besides IT excellence, at IPDS we’re known for our events.

Our annual IPDS Tech Summit doubles in attendees, sponsors, and prizes almost every year. If you’d like to meet the team, fill out the form on the website and we’ll see you in September.

IPDS helping keep VCU on the cutting edge of technology

IP DataSystems (IPDS) has partnered with VCU School of Dentistry at multiple levels, with the primary focus on modernising the school’s IT infrastructure

Founded in 2007, IPDS works with technology leaders to provide IT and workforce transformation solutions, combining industry-leading technologies with world-class engineering talent to modernise IT infrastructure, enable cloud operations and leverage today’s modern workforce.

“IPDS is a technology integrator that works with our valued clients to help deliver business outcomes through assessing, architecting and then implementing solutions that will cover everything from the beginning, all the way through the ongoing,” explains Michael Kubba, Sales Manager for IPDS’ acquisition team.

As Senior Account Manager Tom Pitera explains, IPDS has partnered with Virginia

Commonwealth University (VCU) School of Dentistry at multiple levels, with the primary focus on the next generation of the school’s IT infrastructure and environment.

“We partnered with the School of Dentistry by supporting their overall infrastructure, technology and environment,” Pitera comments. “We did this with everything from their storage level up to their application level, ensuring that they are consistently running in a manner to always accept patients, and always meet their client demands, whether that’s internal or external.”

With technology always evolving quickly, it is critical for IPDS to remain on the cutting-edge, Pitera explains. “As technology advances, we are doing our due diligence as the system

integrators,” he says, “ensuring that they are always up to par, and that we are answering any challenges that they may have.”

“That is our business model,” describes Kubba. “For us, it’s not about taking a project from beginning to end, it’s about how a project is going to tie into what the future outcomes need to be. When things are slow, if we don’t have an immediate project, that’s where we’re fine-tuning the environment. We’re assessing it, we’re being predictive, putting together roadmaps for what’s coming next,” he concludes. “That, to me, is the differentiator in us as an integrator.”

the rest of the team needed to align their tools and resources to effectively serve the school’s mission.

Realising technology is everywhere and driving many of the priorities of the school and the future of the profession, they immersed themselves in the subject matter in order to better understand their stakeholders’ needs, opportunities and challenges, and provide solutions.

“I always say that this school lives at the intersection of education, health care and research,” said Idleman. “We educate future healthcare professionals, we treat patients, we perform leading-edge research and we build life-long relationships. That's very exciting. Technology is transforming each one of those areas, and our technology team is helping to drive that transformation.”

Dentistry has undergone a digital revolution in recent decades. For example, three-dimensional imaging with intraoral scanners is quickly replacing plaster moulds of teeth, and cone-beam computed tomography allows practitioners to understand their patient’s anatomy and dental needs more than conventional two-dimensional x-rays. However, this technology also creates immense amounts of data and requires careful integration with other systems essential to clinical operations.

In order to graduate dentists at the forefront of their profession, VCU School of Dentistry must be at the leading-edge of dentistry. The team tries to put itself in the shoes of the school’s dental, dental hygiene and advanced education students.

“Our students need to understand technology and effortlessly interact with it to be successful here and in their future careers,” said Talley. “We have multiple units within the IT team that work with those

students and our faculty members to make sure we understand their needs and can provide a clean and successful experience.”

The combination of serving more than 500 patients a day plus supporting the educational needs of students and faculty make for a fast-paced and constantly evolving work environment with complex technical demands.

“The key is aligning the knowledge and skills on our team with the operations of the school and clinics in a thoughtful and proactive way,” said Canaday. “We not only need to understand the goals, objectives and vision of the school’s administration and clinical directors, but we also need to maintain excellent relationships with the many vendors that supply and help us maintain the technology that the school relies upon.”

BRENT IDLEMAN

TITLE: DIRECTOR OF CLINICAL AND INSTRUCTIONAL TECHNOLOGY

Brent Idleman credits his love of music and video games for his success. A passionate musician, Idleman previously worked as a music teacher, where he developed his teaching skills for the VCU. Playing video games also taught him a lot about interfaces and new software.

As the Director of Clinical and Instructional Technology, Idleman and his team manage software support and optimisation in clinical settings and in the classroom.

BIO

“We come from teaching backgrounds, because a teacher’s ultimate goal is to master their subject so they can effectively teach it to others”

BRENT IDLEMAN DIRECTOR OF CLINICAL AND INSTRUCTIONAL TECHNOLOGY

Transforming the Patient Experience: How Intiveo is

Transforming the Patient Experience: How Intiveo is

Revolutionizing Healthcare

Communication

Revolutionizing Healthcare Communication

Better communication means better care.

Better communication means better care.

Enter Intiveo: A patient engagement platform that aims to transform the patient experience through automated messaging. Designed for the entire patient journey, Intiveo optimizes communication at every touchpoint.

Enter Intiveo: A patient engagement platform that aims to transform the patient experience through automated messaging. Designed for the entire patient journey, Intiveo optimizes communication at every touchpoint.

Nowadays, patients expect more personalized communication from their healthcare providers, on top of receiving high-quality care! They want to receive relevant information and appointment reminders delivered in a way that’s convenient for them.

Nowadays, patients expect more personalized communication from their healthcare providers, on top of receiving high-quality care! They want to receive relevant information and appointment reminders delivered in a way that’s convenient for them.

In fact, a 2021 survey revealed that over 98% of patients preferred to recieve their healthcare notifications via text.

In fact, a 2021 survey revealed that over 98% of patients preferred to recieve their healthcare notifications via text.

But while the healthcare industry is traditionally slow to adopt new technologies, one company is making waves with its innovative solutions. As the industry leader in patient engagement, Intiveo aims to automate communication without losing the personal touch. Through features such as automated workflows, twoway chat, and central reporting, Intiveo’s userfriendly solution is certainly a top pick.

But while the healthcare industry is traditionally slow to adopt new technologies, one company is making waves with its innovative solutions. As the industry leader in patient engagement, Intiveo aims to automate communication without losing the personal touch. Through features such as automated workflows, twoway chat, and central reporting, Intiveo’s userfriendly solution is certainly a top pick.

With over a decade of experience in innovative dental solutions, we spoke to Owen Ingraham, Intiveo’s Chief Technology Officer, about the future of healthcare communication.

With over a decade of experience in innovative dental solutions, we spoke to Owen Ingraham, Intiveo’s Chief Technology Officer, about the future of healthcare communication.

“At Intiveo, we’re not just keeping up with the latest technologies - we’re pioneering them. Our research and development teams are driven by one goal: to provide real-world value for our clients. ” Owen tells us, “We were ahead of the curve when we introduced appointment-specific SMS communication years ago. We continue to innovate with our robust chat system, which constantly improves. And now, we’re thrilled to be exploring the potential of AI platforms, which will bring even greater convenience to our clients.”

“At Intiveo, we’re not just keeping up with the latest technologies - we’re pioneering them. Our research and development teams are driven by one goal: to provide real-world value for our clients. ” Owen tells us, “We were ahead of the curve when we introduced appointment-specific SMS communication years ago. We continue to innovate with our robust chat system, which constantly improves. And now, we’re thrilled to be exploring the potential of AI platforms, which will bring even greater convenience to our clients.”

Intiveo’s team has focused on enabling “smart” patient communication for years, but finding the perfect fit hasn’t always been easy.

Intiveo’s team has focused on enabling “smart” patient communication for years, but finding the perfect fit hasn’t always been easy.

“That’s why we’re so excited about ChatGPT. With its high-quality communication capabilities, it’s a potential game-changer for the future of patient communication,” Owen explains. “As we enter the AI age and patient needs evolve, we’re committed to finding workflows that benefit our clients without adding headaches. So, stay tuned - the future of patient communication looks very bright!”

“That’s why we’re so excited about ChatGPT. With its high-quality communication capabilities, it’s a potential game-changer for the future of patient communication,” Owen explains. “As we enter the AI age and patient needs evolve, we’re committed to finding workflows that benefit our clients without adding headaches. So, stay tuned - the future of patient communication looks very bright!”

It’s no surprise that the patient experience has become increasingly important as the healthcare industry evolves.

It’s no surprise that the patient experience has become increasingly important as the healthcare industry evolves.

When asked for specific examples, Canaday points to their relationships with LM Dental, IP Data Systems, Intiveo, Medicorp Imaging and VCU’s central Technology Services unit as models of success that are driving innovation at the school.

Transforming the educational experience in classrooms and clinics

Once they had the right people in the right roles, the team then worked to identify areas to increase efficiencies through process improvement and automation wherever possible.

“One thing you’ll notice is quite a few of us come from teaching backgrounds. This was intentional, because a teacher’s ultimate goal is to master their subject so they can effectively teach it to others,” said Idleman.

“Next we began working on our relationships with faculty, staff and students, and inserting ourselves in committees and workgroups where it made sense. They are our clients, and we need to understand each one individually. Sometimes, we also get the opportunity to interact and support our patients to truly appreciate the technology’s impact.”

One example of success came from the implementation of a new exam platform. It’s able to automatically grade students, and it utilises artificial intelligence to detect cheating. The feedback from faculty has been very positive so far.

Another example comes from a need for better tracking of equipment and materials used in patient care and clinical education. The solution came from working with LM Dental and the school’s Instrument

LM Dental Tracking System™

The LM Dental Tracking System™ (DTS™) is the first commercially available system in the dental industry to efficiently track and monitor dental instruments and materials from different manufacturers using RFID technology.

Management Services (IMS) team to leverage technology to increase efficiencies and capture more useful data. The team installed LM Dental cabinets, which allow faculty, staff and students to swipe their ID cards and check out the equipment they need, when they need it. This involved close coordination with the Assistant Director of Compliance, Training, and IMS to reduce touch points by his staff and automate the equipment check-in/check-out process. LM Dental was instrumental in helping the team design workflows and select the appropriate amount of technology to streamline processes. The web-based system allows them to manage everything from instrument kits and intraoral sensors, and scanners to laptops, and classroom technology kits.

“Imagine having to write down every single piece of equipment or enter parts into a spreadsheet when you check something out as a student provider or dental dispensary employee. Prior to integrating

the LM-Dental Tracking System, the student and dispensary workflow used outdated technology and involved lots of steps,” said Idleman. “Now, using RFID technology, most items, like dental materials, instruments, implant bags, laptops and classroom technology tools are tagged, checked-out, and tracked automatically.”

The technology allows students to easily use their ID badge to check equipment out and then return it by placing tagged equipment on an RFID scanner for easy check-in processing. This drastically reduces the amount of manual hand-offs and tracking.

It also allows IMS managers to run just-intime reports to see who has an instrument kit or piece of equipment. An implant bag can be tracked from the dispensary to a clinic and quickly documented in the electronic health record system seamlessly because of the LM Dental Tracking System. The tracking capabilities help manage

the supply chain and inventory better, something that has gotten more challenging since the pandemic.

“Before, we had to manually check out items, like dental devices, dental equipment, and classroom supplies,” said Canaday. “Now, we don't have to do any of that. A person walks up to a cabinet, taps their badge, and they check out whatever they want. We can run reports on essentially anything and even monitor how many times an instrument kit is sterilised to help us determine its useful lifespan.”

All of this automation leaves time to focus on other tasks that require more attention, like teaching and training.

The team has also turned their attention to the architectural foundation of the school’s IT environment by assessing and upgrading infrastructure.

“We’ve been working in step with the university to transition to a hybrid model that leverages the cloud where appropriate but also keeps many resources on premises,” said Canaday. “It was not an all or nothing strategy, a lot of thought went into making our infrastructure reliable with as little downtime as possible.”

Canaday emphasises their relationship with VCU colleagues. The university has a well-supported data centre on premise, and it is in the process of building a newer, better one. He also points to IP Datasystems (IPDS) as a reliable external partner who has helped to select, configure, optimise and help run equipment in the data centre.

“For the things that we do well, we decided to keep them on-premise. For instance, the traditional Windows servers, SQL and Oracle databases and the third party systems that run on those servers,” said Talley.

“The IT team that work with students and our faculty members make sure we understand their needs and can provide a clean and successful experience”

MIKE TALLEY DIRECTOR OF APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT, INFRASTRUCTURE, AND BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE

The VCU School of Dentistry infrastructure team manages over 25 virtual servers that support the administrative, clinical, instructional, and research operations at the school. Like all hardware, it eventually reaches the end of its useful life.

“Since we had already identified what systems needed to remain on-premise, we needed to scope out an appropriate infrastructure environment that could be optimised for our unique needs, especially our EHR system, which runs on an Oracle database backend, and our picture archiving communication system(PACS) that expands daily,” said Talley.

IPDS helped provide a solution that could grow with the school over the next five years.

“They were great partners helping us in evaluating and analysing our environment and assisting us with procuring and configuring the new equipment,” said Canaday.

Another move proved invaluable as the school and rest of the world grappled with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. The team had made it a priority to increase their usage and attention to virtualisation in 2020.

“VCU was one of the first dental schools to go paperless. We started exploring virtual desktop infrastructure technology for clinical purposes over a decade ago, and we were one of the first to leverage this technology,” said Talley. “This and remote access enable the unification of workflow across our clinical operations to enhance the employee and student experience.”

During the pandemic, the team replaced everything in the clinical operatories with Wyse thin clients that connect to Citrix infrastructure managed by our University, to improve the delivery of the clinical desktop experience to our students, providers, and support staff. The strategy has served them well over the last three years; however, they recently upgraded the backend environment with the help of IPDS. The new solution still uses Wyse thin clients, but it runs on Dell VxRail Hyper Converged Infrastructure while leveraging Citrix cloud services.

“Ultimately, this means every VCU School of Dentistry student has a consistent, reliable desktop environment when they go into the clinic, and they can also connect after normal business hours remotely using the laptops provided through our student laptop initiative,” said Canaday. “Since we are leveraging VDI, we can be platform agnostic, and so, for the first time, we’ve switched to Macbook Airs from DELL XPS devices for our students.”

These decisions also help the infrastructure team when deploying software updates or making changes in the environment. Experiences can remain consistent throughout all clinical spaces, and changes can be integrated once rather than deploying updates to client equipment one endpoint at a time.

Investing in VDI early helped the School of Dentistry during COVID-19, because when everybody had to go home, students, staff, and faculty were able to access their clinical environment and research environments remotely, with little confusion or effort.

“It would've been very difficult for us to transition to a remote or hybrid work environment,” said Canaday. “But because we had already made an initial investment, we were able to build on that foundation to allow people to work at home through either the browser or through the Citrix workspace app without starting from scratch to develop a solution.”

The disruption caused by the pandemic also ushered in another technological solution to patient relations. To help reduce the workload for front-office staff and improve the appointment reminder experience, the school partnered with Intiveo.

1893

Founded in Richmond, Virginia

VCU School of Dentistry is one of five health science schools at VCU

“Prior to our relationship with Intiveo, there was a lot of manual work involved in patient communications,” said Canaday. “A front desk administrative staff member had to call or email a patient to confirm that they're coming in, remind them of appointments, handle cancellations, and reschedule appointments. Intiveo replaces all of that for patients signed up in our EHR system for automatic appointment reminders.”

Patients can now also automatically confirm or cancel appointments quickly from their mobile phone. It has also allowed them to optimise appointment scheduling. Front-office staff can now quickly scan

the appointment book to see if chairs are available the next day or the remainder of the week. Considering there are over two hundred treatment pods within the school, this helps keep them filled which ensures the school provides care to as many community members as possible which translates to valuable clinical experience for students and residents.

“The automated communication saves dentists time, clears up space for front-office workers, and helps in reducing the level of no-shows or cancellations,” said Canaday. “This is especially important because we have a large community of patients to take care of and having an empty chair isn’t good for them or us.”

Ultimately, Canaday brings it back to culture and relationships. He has worked to build and establish a culture within his team that values the importance of internal and external relationships to finding and implementing technological solutions needed to fulfil the mission of the school. This has led them to become integrated within all aspects of the school’s operations.

“We've really integrated ourselves into our environments. We meet regularly with finance and human resources, clinical operations managers, instrument management staff, administrative leadership and even our Dental Implant Committee to gain understanding and create value within each group,” said Canaday. “It’s about the people and the processes, and also the data created in each area. When you combine the data with relationships built on communications and understanding, you can accomplish incredible things and bring a lot of value to the table.”

RPA DRIVEN BY MACHINE VISION BECOMING CRUCIAL FOR BUSINESSES

Increasing efficiency and accuracy, leveraging RPA is increasingly crucial for businesses in the face of the ongoing skills crisis and sustainability goals

WRITTEN BY: MARCUS LAW

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is a rapidly growing technology that can help businesses automate repetitive and manual tasks, freeing up valuable human resources to focus on more strategic initiatives.

Despite becoming a common theme in technology, manufacturing, and other industries, RPA has yet to seep into the sphere of stragglers hesitant about dipping their toes in the AI pool. A form of software automation, RPA – as its name suggests –uses bots to perform repetitive, routine tasks like data entry, document processing, and customer service queries with speed and accuracy, which is why it’s hard to believe it hasn’t been snapped up everywhere.

Nevertheless, there are many benefits of RPA that businesses can leverage to drive efficiency and productivity across their organisations, with a report by McKinsey finding that 60% of jobs could save around 30% of their time by utilising business process automation – leading to the global RPA market being forecast to reach around US$19bn by 2030, according to research by ReportLinker.

“RPA lets software robots take away the boring and repetitive tasks from your key business processes,” says automation software company UiPath. “Mundane work becomes fast, error-free and automated.”

Automation technology is becoming increasingly crucial for organisations, describes Ebru Binboga, Director of Data, AI & Automation at IBM UK & Ireland, as they work to reduce costs, overcome a skilled labour shortage, meet sustainability goals, and maximise the value of their employees’ time and talents.

“Intelligent automation – the combination of AI and automation technologies – is a core part of our client offering,” she explains. “IBM has the tools, insights, and expertise to

help organisations identify and execute highimpact automations to get better outcomes, enabling teams to focus on areas that are uniquely human.”

Machine vision powering automation

As Tony McCandless, Chief Technology Officer at SS&C Blue Prism, explains, optimising processes and systems with advanced automation has the potential to improve efficiencies, supporting companies as they look to not just survive but thrive in

a volatile environment. But, as he describes, machine vision is the key to unleashing automation’s full potential.

“Machine learning (ML), AI, and RPA are all terms we frequently hear when discussing the value of advanced automation,” he says. “Machine vision, however, is a key part of unleashing the full potential of these technologies – yet it is rarely included in the automation conversation.”

Automation adoption has accelerated in recent years, according to a report by McKinsey, becoming essential for businesses to remain competitive across industries. While organisations are prioritising these investments, they are also facing increasing cost pressures, with the aftershocks of the pandemic, supply chain disruptions and geopolitical events all having an impact.

“Machine vision is a key part of unleashing the full potential of RPA –yet it is rarely included in the automation conversation”

TONY MCCANDLESS CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER, SS&C BLUE PRISM

Robots aren’t coming to take your job, study finds

The rise of robots at work is no reason to panic, according to a study that found people are prone to exaggerate the rate at which robots will “take their jobs”.

Brigham Young University Sociology Professor Eric Dahlin found robots aren’t replacing humans at the rate most people think while researching his report, published in Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World. In fact, his research found only 14% of workers say they’ve seen their job replaced by a robot, and those who have experienced job displacement due to a robot overstate the effect of robots taking jobs from humans by a factor of three.

The report follows research by PwC, which suggested that 30% of jobs could be at potential risk of automation by the mid-2030s. As a result, governments and businesses need to work together, says PwC, to help adjust to new technologies through retraining and career changes.

A culture of adaptability and lifelong learning will be crucial for spreading the benefits of AI and robotics widely throughout society, says the report.And improved STEM skills will be important in allowing people to take high-technology jobs that will arise from AI and robotics.

“Documents, images, and computer screen-based information are obliquitous elements of the work organisations need to do,” comments Blue Prism’s McCandless. “Because of this, the use of computer vision has exploded – a significant parentage of front and back-office processes involve dealing with visual information, whether that be documents, video, or objects like text boxes, scroll bars, or buttons on screens. In many businesses, if you want to automate at scale, you will probably have to process image data of one form or another at scale as well.”

As he describes, one of the most common uses of machine vision in automation is in document processing. “Machine vision combined with machine learning are the active ingredients of what is referred to as intelligent document processing (IDP): automatically processing and classifying documents, extracting printed or handwritten data and then deciphering the content for further automated processing,” McCandless explains.

IDP is particularly useful when automating document qualities at scale. For example, technology is transforming traditionally

“Automation technology is becoming increasingly crucial for organisations, as they work to reduce costs, overcome a skilled labour shortage, and meet sustainability goals”

DIRECTOR OF DATA, AI & AUTOMATION, IBM UK & IRELAND

paper-heavy and process-driven sectors

– like the financial services industry – by minimising the need for people to be involved in certain processes that might typically have required extracting data from large numbers of documents. Even during the peak of the pandemic in 2020, when most were relying on screens and working from home, an estimated 2.8tn pages of paper were printed.

Machine vision automation is not just about scale, though – it’s about accuracy and improving the work humans do as well: “The tedious repetitiveness of these tasks contributes to significant error rates and leads to low satisfaction and high levels of turnover, particularly when dealing with handwritten documents which are processable with IDP,” McCandless explains.

“Machine vision-based technologies are even becoming central to the creation of automations themselves. For example, instead of relying on human workers

to describe processes that are being automated when designing automations, recordings of the process to be automated are created, and then machine vision software, combined with other technologies, is used to capture the process end-to-end, providing the input to automating a lot of the work needed to program the digital workers (bots).”

RPA: saving energy and boosting efficiency

As Binboga explains, intelligent automation solutions like RPA can help businesses address challenges ranging from improving customer services to automating repetitive, low-value tasks for workers. “For example, businesses that need to cut costs can use IBM Robotic Process Automation to drive efficiencies and reduce team workload, allowing staff to focus on other priority work that does require human input, increasing productivity,” she explains.

What is RPA? WATCH NOW

EXECUTIVE BIO

TONY MCCANDLESS

TITLE: CTO

COMPANY: SS&C BLUE PRISM

INDUSTRY: RPA

LOCATION: SCOTLAND UK

Tony McCandless is a global technology and business executive with an exceptional track record of optimisation, profit growth, benefits realisation, and transformational change delivery for global, regional, and national organisations.

“Investing in RPA is also wise from a sustainability standpoint. In the area of enterprise asset management, for example, we’re embedding RPA and machine learning to make those processes more energy efficient and effective. Those innovations – developed and used internally – are now being shared with our customers. RPA and Process Mining allow us to do data-led innovation across multiple levels of the enterprise. In basic analysis, within a workflow, and even across ecosystems contributing to new levels of sustainability.

“Technologies like Process Mining open up entirely new opportunities to accelerate targeted and insight-led experimentation and innovation. You can then use RPA to automate processes that eliminate errors and waste in those areas. Not only does this identify where resources can be saved, but it also identifies how businesses can apply those saved resources to more strategic priorities.”

EXECUTIVE BIO

EBRU BINBOGA

TITLE: DIRECTOR OF DATA, AI & AUTOMATION

COMPANY: IBM UK&I

INDUSTRY: SOFTWARE

LOCATION: UK

Ebru Binboga has a proven 15-year track-record with experience in sales, strategy, business design, and leadership during international assignments across Europe, Middle East, and Africa, as well as global roles.

“We speak a lot about empowering employees to do more fulfilling work; as we move forward, it’s going to be about giving people the opportunity to live more fulfilling lives in and outside work,” comments McCandless. “Not only can machine vision unlock more opportunities for people to thrive, but it can also enable businesses to successfully navigate an evolving landscape, reduce costs, and increase efficiencies – no matter what challenges and uncertainties lie ahead.”

AI-embedded resilience inside RPA

“We are embedding RPA and machine learning to make processes more energy efficient and effective”

EBRU BINBOGA DIRECTOR OF DATA, AI & AUTOMATION, IBM UK & IRELAND

OPTIMISE MANUFACTURING WITH DIGITAL AND INDUSTRY 4.0

AD FEATURE

WRITTEN BY: TOM SWALLOW

PRODUCED BY: JAMES WHITE

Venkata ‘Raj’ Parchuri, AVP of manufacturing, explains HCLTech’s digital readiness frameworks and leveraging partnerships for industry 4.0 technology insights

Organisations want productivity, particularly in the manufacturing industry where quality, efficiencies, and increased capacity utilisation are high on the business agenda. But there is more to this than mere standardisation: manufacturers require agility in the wake of industry 4.0. Digital technology goes hand-in-hand with industry 4.0, and HCLTech is committed to showing firms exactly how combining the two can provide benefits that exceed the confines of their production equipment. Digital solutions offer businesses better ways to optimise their manufacturing processes through the use of data and artificial intelligence (AI), along with other products that can be implemented to minimise downtime and increase their potential.

One of the major challenges of digitalization is implementation. And HCLTech prides itself on being one of the leading providers of digitalization solutions and consultation. But what makes the IT firm stand out from the rest are its vast applications of digital technology in the manufacturing landscape as well as other industry verticals. Focusing particularly on the implementation of digital services and cloud, Venkata ‘Raj’ Parchuri, AVP of Manufacturing at HCLTech, explained to me how the organisation’s strategy is aligned with client needs, changing the way they look at digital transformation.

A critical offering of HCLTech is its MVision—a framework that aids the client’s digital journey and showcases the financial benefits, starting with their bottom-line income.

STRATEGY TO SUCCESSFULLY INTEGRATE DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY WITH INDUSTRY 4.0

“What is HCLTech’s manufacturing industry strategy?”

RP: “HCLTech’s manufacturing industry strategy encompasses everything from infrastructure modernization to building hyper connected enterprise of the future. Our strategy helps manufacturing companies navigate the current dynamic landscape to deploy cutting-edge solutions that help them innovate and ensure profitability by improving the bottom line and creating an avenue to increase the topline.

“Supporting our manufacturing strategy is HCLTech's MVision framework, which is built for organisations preparing for the future. We are building hyper-connected enterprises by helping them re-imagine, remain resilient, and continuously reinvent, while being resistant to embrace any future uncertainties.”

“What does industry 4.0 look like from HCLTech’s perspective?”

RP: “From HCLTech’s perspective, industry 4.0 is the foundation built to empower the manufacturing clients so they can benefit from unprecedented levels of digital adoption for scaling effectively and becoming data-driven and insightful organisations.

“Manufacturing clients have set forward actions to rapidly adopt industry 4.0 technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT), immersive technologies like Augmented Reality (AR) or Virtual Reality (VR), AI and machine learning (ML), cloud, and 3D printing. The goal is to not only effectively collect, but to analyse and act on vast troves of data coming in from both physical and business systems. Manufacturers are also looking to use these technologies to improve on current

“ESG HAS BECOME A CRUCIAL MEASURING FACTOR FOR ANY ORGANISATION'S SUCCESS AND, MORE IMPORTANTLY, IN THE MANUFACTURING SEGMENT”

VENKATA PARCHURI AVP OF MANUFACTURING, HCL TECHNOLOGIES

EXECUTIVE BIO

VENKATA PARCHURI

AVP OF MANUFACTURING

IT SERVICES AND CONSULTING

UNITED STATES

Joining HCLTech as its AVP in 2019, Venkata ‘Raj’ Parchuri previously worked with NTT Data as well as many big names in the retail sector, including Costco, Levis Strauss & Co., and motoring brands Harley davidson and Toyota. Bringing his experience to the role at HCLTech, Parchuri is responsible for a variety of workloads, spanning IoT, Digital , Digital IT roadmap, Business Process, Business Process Design, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), IT Strategy, and Data Warehousing.

Leading up to his career, Parchuri studied in India in 1997 at the Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University where he obtained a Bachelor’s Degree in Technology, Electrical, Electronics, and Communication Engineering.

processes and optimise further to become more competitive, productive, and profitable while ensuring business continuity.”

“What does the future look like for digital and industry 4.0?”

RP: “Digitisation of the end-to-end value chain leads to greater productivity, growth, and sustainability. Digital and the industry 4.0 technologies are helping our manufacturing clients redefine their products and the process of making them. The way manufacturing clients design & engineer products, how products are sourced and supplied, how products are manufactured, and how products are serviced and renewed are changing with digital and industry 4.0.”

“Overall, industry 4.0 and digital are paving the way for increased revenue through higher productivity while ensuring the quality of the products—and all this is achieved by improved resource utilisation, higher employee throughput and reduced

overall costs. This helps manufacturers take advantage and stay ahead of the curve.”

From this discussion, it seems organisations are yet to discover the benefits of digital transformation in relation to their productivity, as well as the overburdening sustainability agenda that businesses care to address.

The MVision framework, which is powered by MVision Nucleus, allows manufacturers to be ahead of the curve by leveraging services like Digital Foundation, Digital and Analytics, Digital Process Operations, Products and Platforms, and Cybersecurity, to name just a few and becoming data-driven organisations.

These solutions can be tailored towards a diverse range of different manufacturing processes. Enabling cloud services allows companies to utilise data and perform functions that keep them one step ahead of their operations. Meanwhile, the same services facilitate real-time adjustments

optimise

manufacturing with digital and industry 4.0

to companies’ processes to maintain quality and productivity in the wake of new operational circumstances.

An example of this is predictive monitoring and analytics. Digital and cloud services create a real-time data stream— often in the form of digital twins—sharing insights such as machinery output, condition, and data to optimise performance. The ability to access these insights will not only alleviate immediate production issues, but also ensure that companies remain resilient in the face of any unforeseen and uncontrollable changes.

TAKING INDUSTRY 4.0 TO THE CLOUD

“How is HCLTech helping enterprises realise their digital potential?”

RP: “We help design and build key platform components of clients’ digital technology footprints to power their digital transformation journeys.

“Our team of design-thinkers and industry-process experts help our clients break down barriers by combining deep knowledge of business processes with user centric design principles—to truly visualise the potential of digital technology. HCLTech brings its entire gamut of expertise—from consulting to implementation—to ensure clients become digital-ready from shop floor to the top floor.”

“What are the digital trends you are seeing among your clients?”

RP: “HCLTech’s clients are adopting digital and are building on a nucleus of industry 4.0 technologies to deploy profitable and innovative cutting-edge solutions. Examples include smart manufacturing, where asset management is a core aspect of smart manufacturing, transforming this process through remote monitoring control, and predictive analytics serving as the foundation for operational resilience.

“HCLTECH'S MVISION FRAMEWORK IS BUILT FOR ORGANISATIONS PREPARING FOR THE FUTURE OF HYPERCONNECTED ENTERPRISES”

VENKATA PARCHURI AVP OF MANUFACTURING, HCL TECHNOLOGIES

AWS, Microsoft, Google, and other partner technology OEMs.”

RECOGNIZED BY THE EVEREST GROUP AS A LEADER IN TALENT READINESS AND DIGITAL TALENT CAPABILITY”

VENKATA PARCHURI AVP OF MANUFACTURING, HCL TECHNOLOGIES

“Supply chain resilience allows our clients to react more quickly to both internal and external events, speeding up ‘time to recovery’ for larger disruptions as well as product and service innovation. With this, the offerings that our clients can bring to market are transforming as well. A top focus for many clients is the incorporation of digital technology into products and the development of new value-added services.”

“How is HCLTech strategically placed to prepare clients for digital?”

RP: “In 2021, HCLTech was recognised by the Everest Group as a leader in talent readiness and digital talent capability. HCLTech was recommended for its robust strategy and ecosystem of digital talent development, structured go-to market and branded offerings for talent related themes, investments in building agile workspaces, full employee lifecycle, and identifying next generation IT skills.

“We have 20,000 employees trained on the latest SAP S/4 HANA intelligent ERP. We also provide experts that are trained and certified with our hyperscale partners

As mentioned by Parchuri, the ability of HCLTech to understand the ‘ins’ and ‘outs’ of its partners’ solutions gives the organisation a competitive advantage and it also provides a large, skilled workforce for managing client demands in these areas. Credit must be given to HCLTech’s extensive work maintaining strong partnerships with providers like SAP, AWS, Microsoft, Google, and many others. These long-term collaborations help leverage HCLTech’s products and deepen the understanding to optimise them for manufacturing purposes.

“HCLTECHWAS

PARTNERSHIPS TO MAXIMISE DIGITAL PRODUCTS

“What benefits do you gain working with partners?”

RP: “Our partners are really critical in our journey to help our clients achieve their digital goals and become cutting edge manufacturers that take advantage of industry 4.0 solutions.

“Partners give us a leg-up and allow us to be ahead of the curve on the latest technologies and trends, which ultimately helps us maximise our industry depth and deliver value to our clients through innovative solutions and frameworks.”

“How important is ESG when choosing business partners?”

RP: “ESG has become a crucial measuring factor for any organisation’s success, especially, in the manufacturing segment. First of all, we publish our ESG scores. We've been rated the highest among all service providers based in India and, for some time, HCLTech has been engaging with its clients across manufacturing, automotive, mining, healthcare, and life sciences as a digital sustainable partner.

“To achieve our ESG goals, it’s important that our partners are also aligned to them so we can gain a powerful insight into making more sustainable sourcing decisions and enable proactive supplier engagement. We continuously monitor, engage and incorporate suppliers’ own sustainability goals.”

As HCLTech continues to highlight the great achievements to be made with digital solutions and the opportunities available to its clients, the main opportunity that Parchuri envisions lies in the use of data. Data can be used for ESG transparency, revitalising manufacturing processes to make them more adjustable to changes and supply chain disruptions, and to share the latest products and services with industrial clients to optimise their performance.

Sustainability is not only a driver of change but can also facilitate the necessary changes in organisations to achieve higher production outputs and reach unforeseen revenues. HCLTech is well-versed in digital trends, formalising business-ready frameworks to make adoption a seamless process.

SOFTWAREAS-A-SERVICE PROVIDERS

As the cloud becomes ubiquitous, more tech providers are pivoting into the SaaS space. Here, we highlight those Software-as-aService providers going above and beyond

WRITTEN BY: MARCUS LAW

Forecast to be worth approximately US$254bn this year, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) has become a veritable gamechanger, allowing businesses to access powerful software tools without the need for expensive hardware or extensive IT infrastructure.

With the increasing demand for cloud-based solutions, many companies have ventured into the SaaS market. In this article, we'll take a look at the top 10 SaaS providers globally. From enterpriselevel solutions to small business tools, these SaaS providers have been recognised for their ability to deliver high-quality software that can improve productivity, collaboration, and overall business performance.

Workday 10

Workday is a leading provider of enterprise cloud applications for finance, HR, and planning. Founded in 2005 and based in Pleasanton, California, Workday delivers financial management, human capital management, and analytics applications designed for the world’s largest companies, educational institutions, and government agencies.

Workday’s Enterprise Management Cloud SaaS solution currently includes solutions for finance, HR, planning, and spend management.

ServiceNow 09

ServiceNow is an American software company based in Santa Clara, California that develops a cloud computing platform to help companies manage digital workflows for enterprise operations.

A comprehensive cloud-based software platform, ServiceNow provides a suite of applications to help organisations manage their IT operations. It is a Softwareas-a-Service (SaaS) platform that enables organisations to automate their IT processes, streamline their operations, and improve their customer service.

Atlassian Corporation is an Australian software company, founded in 2002, that develops products for software developers, project managers, and wider software development teams. Its global headquarters are in Sydney, Australia, with US headquarters in San Francisco.

Atlassian’s Cloud Enterprise SaaS solution is specifically designed to meet the needs of today's enterprises. It is the most advanced cloud offering for Jira Software, Confluence, and Jira Service Management.

Atlassian Intuit

Intuit Inc. is an American business software company that specialises in financial software and is headquartered in Mountain View, California. Intuit's products include some of the most well-known in the business, with tax preparation application TurboTax, personal finance app Mint, the small business accounting programme QuickBooks, the credit monitoring service Credit Karm, and email marketing platform Mailchimp all part of its remit.

Shopify Salesforce

Shopify Inc. is a Canadian multinational ecommerce company headquartered in Ottawa, Ontario. It offers a fullservice SaaS for ecommerce platform where users can create and host ecommerce stores, add multiple payment options, translate stores, handle shipping, and market their business, amongst other functions. Its platform powers millions of businesses in more than 175 countries and is trusted by prestigious brands such as Allbirds, Gymshark, PepsiCo, Staples, and many more.

Salesforce is an American cloud-based software company headquartered in San Francisco, California, providing a suite of applications and cloud services for organisations. Its services include specialist analytics, application development, and marketing automation tools. A leading SaaS provider with its flagship CRM platform, available exclusively online, it also offers SaaS platforms for marketing, service, and the Internet of Things

Currently, Salesforce has more than 150,000 business users, a share that renders it the most widely-used global CRM system.

Amazon Web Services 04

According to data released in 2017, AWS owns 33% of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (Iaas) and Platform-as-a-Service (Paas) cloud computing services. An initial purveyor of the space, it has long dominated the global cloud sphere, and its solutions are used by over a million people worldwide.

The AWS cloud provides a broad range of resources and tools for organisations at any stage of the SaaS transformation, while its SaaS Factory Program helps AWS Partners at any stage of the SaaS journey, helping users accelerate delivery of SaaS solutions on AWS.

Adobe 03

Adobe Inc is an American multinational computer software company incorporated in Delaware and headquartered in San Jose, California. Its muchlauded Creative Cloud suite is a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offering that gives users access to a collection of software developed by Adobe for graphic design, video editing, web development, photography, and cloud services. As of 2022, Adobe has more than 26,000 employees worldwide.

Microsoft

From its headquarters in Redmond, Washington, Microsoft is best known for the Windows line of operating systems, the Microsoft Office suite, and the Internet Explorer and Edge web browsers. Its Azure platform offers IT organisations around 200 industry-leading products and cloud services, which have been designed in the Azure cloud platform. These include managed NoSQL and SQL data services. Azure provides a range of SaaS solutions through its marketplace, fully-managed app service, serverless computing service, and workflow automation service. These offerings enable businesses to quickly and easily build, deploy, and manage their own SaaS solutions, or leverage existing third-party solutions available in the marketplace. In fact, according to Statista, almost 70% of organisations across the entire world use Microsoft Azure for their cloud services. It also offers its Office 365 in a SaaS model, such as Microsoft Office, which features various productivity tools for businesses.

Google

Founded in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google’s offerings range from online advertising and its search engine technology to cloud computing, quantum computing and AI. The Google Cloud Platform, launched in 2008, enables users to build better SaaS products, scale efficiently, and ultimately grow their businesses.

From a network that spans the globe to innovative solutions that transform organisations, Google Cloud has SaaS built into its DNA. Its platform enables users to build, modernise, and scale their business with differentiated technology that extends beyond infrastructure. Google Kubernetes Engine lets users easily deploy products across a global network so anyone anywhere can access them, while the platform’s developer tools and SaaS services speed up dev and deployment cycles.

Meanwhile, Google’s SaaS Google Workspace application includes Google’s suite of productivity apps, Gmail, Calendar, Google Docs, Sheets, and other Google cloud-based productivity and collaboration tools.

Mike J. Walker at Microsoft empowers pharma supply chain innovations

WRITTEN BY: SEAN ASHCROFT

PRODUCED BY: JAMES BERRY

Mike J. Walker, Executive Director, Global Health & Life Sciences Strategy at Microsoft

Mike J. Walker heads up Microsoft’s life sciences supply chain practice, and explains why industry advisory drives business value

Supply chain is a complicated industry that typically requires highly trained engineers to oversee, but pharmaceutical (pharma) supply chains take complexity to another level.

As well as the usual litany of supply challenges, pharma has distinct requirements on the handling of materials like a cold chain element, and also faces the perils of product recalls and compliance issues, because the field of medicine is just about the most regulated sector there is.

And then of course there’s the added pressure of how catastrophic any delays might prove, because the medicines being shipped are critical for ensuring patients have access to the medicines they need to maintain their health, or even keep them alive.

While there is a variety of permutations, the most prevalent today is the small molecule pharma supply chain. This chemical-based drug will typically begin with the sourcing of raw materials – active pharmaceutical ingredients – used to manufacture drugs. The manufacturing process involves several stages: formulation, quality control, packaging and labelling. Once the drugs are ready, they are shipped to warehouses or distribution centres, from where they are distributed to healthcare providers, pharmacies and hospitals.

For other forms, like biologics or vaccines, the supply chain is required to keep these volatile medicines stored at the right temperature and humidity, with tracking shipments to prevent counterfeiting and diversion.

Pharma supply chains turning to digital technologies

To address such challenges, pharma companies are adopting digital technologies such as cloud, blockchain, artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things (IoT) to enhance transparency, traceability and efficiency in their supply chains.

One company that is helping pharma firms digitally transform operations is Microsoft,

“My role is about being a trusted business advisor to empower our top global customers with expertise and proven practices to accelerate their digital strategy”

MIKE J. WALKER EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR GLOBAL HEALTH & LIFE SCIENCES STRATEGY, MICROSOFT

and at the forefront of its offerings is Mike J. Walker, Executive Director, Strategy, Health & Life Sciences.

In his role, Walker is the strategy leader for Microsoft’s supply chain and manufacturing point of view on pharmaceuticals, med-tech and biopharmaceuticals.

“My role is about being a trusted business advisor to empower our top global customers with expertise and proven practices to accelerate their digital strategy,” he says. “Ensuring that these conversations are business-led with a keen understanding of the pharma business along with the external market risks. As with all industries, technology is always part of that conversation, but the key is to ensure that

EXECUTIVE BIO

TITLE: EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, GLOBAL HEALTH & LIFE SCIENCES STRATEGY

LOCATION: UNITED STATES

Mike J. Walker is an entrepreneur, futurist, digital strategist, podcast host, global keynote speaker and a best-selling author with a specialty in helping business executives stay relevant in the digital economy.

Walker brings paradigm-shifting digital transformation by leveraging leading innovation practices through experiences with Fortune 500 leaders around the globe.

He has found success in driving pragmatic approaches to large scale problems, an ability to break down large complex challenges into something manageable, along with an insatiable need to bring teams together.

Currently at Microsoft, Walker leads a team focused on life science supply chains and manufacturing.

He acts as a trusted advisor to executives, helping them with some of their toughest challenges. This includes how pharma organisations digitally transform using digital ecosystems, digital twins, AI, IoT and blockchain.

those technology conversations are focused on how strategically relevant they are to your businesses long-term goals. Once we know that, we can have a conversation on how to maximise the value potential of those technologies. That is what really matters for my client’s executive teams.”

Typically, Walker partners with “decisionmakers” – C-suiters both on the business and technical sides of pharma organisations.

The most challenging aspect of the role, he says, is “the pace and the sheer amount of change happening”. He adds: “When you peel back the onion you find each has subtly different business drivers, different cultures, different personalities and leadership styles. It requires you to employ a level of emotional intelligence to your approach. ‘This is the right answer’ is something that never flies.

Microsoft helping pharma supply chains navigate change

‘I am like a counsellor, only without the couch’

“Instead, provide the executive with a framework to work within and let them drive the conversations based on the guided journey and lots of questions. I am there to shepherd them through proven practices, almost like a counsellor, only without the couch.”

Another challenge stems from the nature of the pharma industry itself.

Walker says: “What most needs changing in pharma supply chains is the legacy mindset and a culture of risk aversion. These organisations fall into the trap of thinking they can’t do something because they’ve always done it that way. With this mindset they don’t ask the right questions.”

Questions, he says, such as: How do we create this experience within the bounds of the rules? Will the market dynamics change that would make this a viable solution? What is the level of risk tolerance we are willing to take? How can we partner with the regulatory bodies to influence change?

On the latter point, Walker says that, in his experience, regulatory bodies like the FDA are “very willing to hear you out if you've got a compelling approach to solving industry challenges”.

As for barriers to digital transformation, Walker says that here things are playing out just as they have in other sectors.

Barriers to transformation take time to overcome

“I see lots of barriers other industries have gone through and have overcome,” he says. “It just takes time. The nice part of having a cross-industry background is I've seen how other supply chain organisations have dealt with this level of change.”

This is why Walker likes to take biopharma clients to visit Microsoft customers in other fields, such as consumer goods. He has also taken them on visits to brewing giant ABinBev Anheuser-Busch.

“Brewing beer is very similar to what a biologics organisation does,” he explains, “so showing them what is possible in a less complex environment is a worthwhile thing to do.”

Technology obsolescence is another hurdle, 65% of manufacturing environments run outdated operating systems, he says.

“Even though the intent is to update technology and software, if you’ve got manufacturing equipment running Windows XP on devices supporting your biologics

manufacturing lines, you can’t just shut it down and replace it because that could impact the entire batch worth millions of dollars.”

He adds that from a strategy perspective the challenge is “to not only fix the current problem, but to create an evergreen model that prevents obsolesce from happening to begin with”.

Of course, some of the barriers to transformation in pharma differ to other sectors, particularly around regulation. The FDA’s Drug Supply Chain Security Act (DSCSA), a single federal framework for tracing prescription medications through the supply chain, is challenging the pharmaceutical sector to reach data transaction targets by November 2023.

“We need visibility across the entire value chain, and you can't do that in a sequential, linear, compartmentalised way”

MIKE J. WALKER EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR GLOBAL HEALTH & LIFE SCIENCES STRATEGY, MICROSOFT

“There is much less scrutiny on manufacturing a beer versus a vaccine,” says Walker. “Medicine is treated very differently not only from a supply chain perspective but also from a manufacturing and a sourcing perspective.”

Pharma regulatory environment is unique

He adds: “The entire supply chain looks a little bit different, and the regulatory environment is unique. In an automotive company's supply chain, for example, they don't necessarily have to tell a regulatory body the specific specs of the machines that they will use to make that product.“

And of course, like all businesses across all sectors, pharma organisations are getting

hit from all sides. There’s a rising need to be more sustainable, materials cost more, increased energy costs – especially in Europe – which drives the impetus to do more with less cost. They're also getting hit from a geopolitical perspective, like the war in Ukraine but also, says Walker, economically from a global trade and tax perspective.

“In China for example, there is an increase in operating costs of doing business in China, especially for manufacturers with aspects like minimum wage increasing between 30% and 65% in recent years. Tax rates are also higher across the board due to a unified corporate tax, and with China’s new cybersecurity and privacy regulations, they

have the potential to transform how pharma companies conduct business in China. The most pressing question I hear from pharma executives is, should we stay or should we go.”

Walker also points out that the pharma industry is being disrupted by smaller biotech firms, along with tech-savvy companies. He likens what’s happening here to how Uber and Lyft have changed the taxi business.

“It’s the same in the pharma industry, where you've got countless small biopharmas that, from an R&D perspective, are pumping out way more patents than the traditional players.

“A lot of that has to do with their ability to be nimble and they also leverage technology at its fullest. With the bigger organisations you've got a big ship to turn, and you've got a lot of moving pieces.”

Technology is a conversation for later in the relationship

Technology is vital, but Walker says it is “always a conversation I have later in the relationship”. But it is very much a conversation that needs to be had, because many supply chains as they stand are simply ill-suited to being digitally transformed.

“Supply chains can be very linear,” he says. “The connections between the ecosystem of partners can be brittle and fragile, and there is a growing need to make sure supply chains are modular, dynamic and provide transparency across the entire value chain –and you can't do that in a sequential, linear, compartmentalised way with technology.”

He adds: “You have to do it in a way now that is much more decentralised than what it was before. There's a significant amount of processes around reconciliation of data that is introduced because of that.”

“

Many of my customers are regional ecosystem hubs that serve specific markets”

MIKE J. WALKER EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR GLOBAL HEALTH & LIFE SCIENCES STRATEGY, MICROSOFT

Walker observes that this requires “an ecosystem approach” – supported by a common “data fabric” that allows organisations to digitise their supply chains in a meaningful way.

On this note, Walker has partnered with Kinaxis, a ‘visionary leader in supply chain’ solutions, according to analyst firm, Gartner.

Walker believes that leveraging the power of the Microsoft Azure cloud platform together with Kinaxis' solutions will provide pharma organisations with an agile and autonomous supply chain platform,

which are essential in today's rapidly changing business environment.

He says: “This combination of capabilities enables a digital ecosystem platform for pharma supply chains that uses advanced analytics and artificial intelligence to analyse data from across the supply chain, including suppliers, customers, and internal systems.

“It can also integrate with other systems, such as ERPs, MES, CRMs, and logistics systems, to provide a comprehensive view of the entire supply chain.

Walker recounts a past conversation he had with a pharma company.

“They were talking about how one of their key priorities is to digitise all instances of paper use,” he says. “On the surface

“But I asked if this meant putting scanners into their factories at each process-step to make sure that all paper was scanned, and then entered into a document management system.

“Then I asked if they wanted instead to solve the root problem, which was fundamentally how to reinvent the business process and how data is handled.” This, he says, requires a rethink of the organisations’ relationship with data

Digital twins can co-exist at different

Walker says he knows of pharma organisations that are leveraging digital twins for an end-to-end view of their supply chain. But does this tick all the boxes that need to be ticked, even? Probably not, he feels.

“When you look at these digital twins there's different levels and types. You have layers of digital twins that coexist within an organisation. Some represent the asset itself. Some represent the people and the interaction. Some represent the process, and others represent the facility or the

Walker says that what is needed, and often lacking, is a strategy around creating “a common data platform that is able to create digital threads to connect all of this data”, and “a full genealogy of everything that was involved in the creation of all these layers of digital twins”.

What makes Microsoft unique is our commitment to industry specific standards

and communities, such as the Open Manufacturing Platform, the OPC Foundation, the Digital Twins Consortium and our innovative partner ecosystem, coupled with composable and extensible solutions that seamlessly connect people, assets, workflows and businesses processes. Our technology is giving businesses more intelligence and visibility than ever before and making operations more adaptable.

Looking at the bigger geopolitical picture, Walker says pharma companies are changing the shape of their businesses, by stepping away from globalisation.

“I've heard from four very senior executives in the pharma supply chain that globalisation as an approach is dead,” he says. “Now it's more about de-globalisation and modularity. Many of my customers are creating an ecosystem of ecosystems strategy whereby they are regional ecosystem hubs that serve specific markets. However, each one of these is still loosely connected and provides a level of autonomy but also flexibility.”

Walker references McDonalds here because “they solved this problem in the fifties with the franchise model”.

He adds: “Why make every one of your factories unique and bespoke when you can create a franchise model that provides speed, modularity, and flexibility through a common set of methods and standards? For example, maybe it would be possible to take an oral solid dose drug and make the manufacturing and supply chain 90% standard across all applicable factories.

“This also gives you a level of nimbleness and agility in the marketplace that you won't have in linear supply chains with bespoke factories.”

Digital technology & data is transforming cancer care

WRITTEN BY: HELEN ADAMS

PRODUCED BY: TOM VENTURO

Lesa O'Brien, Interim Executive VP of Digital Strategy & Technology at the Canadian Cancer Society, shares how digital technology & data impacts their work

Cancer has a significant impact on Canadians living with the disease, their caregivers and the healthcare system. About half of all Canadians are expected to be diagnosed with cancer in their lifetime and about one in four are expected to die from it. The cost of cancer care in Canada is in the billions and is steadily rising. The Canadian Cancer Society plays an essential role in saving and improving the lives of people affected by cancer.

Lesa O'Brien is the Interim Executive Vice President of Digital Strategy and Technology for the Canadian Cancer Society. She has been with the Canadian Cancer Society for six years and in the not-for-profit space for 25 years.

“I am responsible for enterprise-wide digital, data and technology strategies, products, and solutions across the organisation,” she explains.

What led O'Brien to this industry was a lifelong passion for healthcare. She started her career at SickKids Hospital in 1998, one of the largest global paediatric hospitals based in Toronto.

“I was working on the implementation of a new clinical lab system at the time and also working on this new thing called the internet.”

Lesa O'Brien, Canadian Cancer Society

While she was there, O'Brien learned all aspects of website creation, from designing and building websites to web server administration and database application development.

“I loved working on projects that digitally transformed the hospital and making information and services accessible to people anywhere. Then, after a few years, I moved over to the foundation side of the hospital where I was responsible for supporting digital fundraising, ecommerce, email marketing, and our online presence.”

O'Brien has enjoyed helping to lead the digital transformation and online growth for large scale not-for-profits in Canada over the course of her career.

“Through funding the best cancer research in the country, we can help advance cancer prevention strategies so fewer people get cancer”

LESA O'BRIEN INTERIM EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT OF DIGITAL STRATEGY AND TECHNOLOGY FOR THE CANADIAN CANCER SOCIETY

The Canadian Cancer Society is a national charitable organisation and the largest national cancer charity in Canada.

“We work with donors and volunteers to improve the lives of people affected by cancer and we do that in three ways, through funding world-class cancer research, providing compassionate support programmes, and advocating to governments to shape health policies aimed at improving cancer prevention and supporting people affected by the disease.”

The purpose of the Canadian Cancer Society is to help to unite and inspire all Canadians to take control of cancer.

“Through funding the best cancer research in the country, we can help advance cancer prevention strategies, so fewer people get

LESA O’BRIEN

TITLE: INTERIM EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT

INDUSTRY: HEALTHCARE

LOCATION: CANADA

Lesa O’Brien is the Interim Executive Vice President, Digital Strategy and Technology at the Canadian Cancer Society. She is responsible for enterprise-wide digital, data and technology strategies and solutions across the organisation to drive digital transformation.

Lesa has over 25 years of experience in the healthcare and charitable sectors. She has held senior leadership roles at several large scale not-for profit organisations in Canada leading the development and implementation of multi-year strategies to drive digital transformation.

She holds a Master of Science in Nutritional Sciences from the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada.

cancer,” says O’Brien. “We can help develop better treatments so more people survive and live longer, healthier lives with or after cancer.”

Through the Society’s cancer information and support programmes, people are provided with accurate and trusted cancer information, online communities where they can feel support, hope, and a safe space where they don't have to face cancer alone.

“Through our advocacy work, we can help address gaps in cancer care and work with governments to shape policies that result in fewer people getting cancer and having an improved quality of life with cancer.”

The future of digital healthcare and technology

With digital healthcare and technology, change is inevitable and evolution is quick, opening up opportunities for businesses to

“We advocate to governments to shape health policies aimed at improving cancer prevention and supporting people affected by the disease”

LESA O'BRIEN INTERIM EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT OF DIGITAL STRATEGY AND TECHNOLOGY FOR THE CANADIAN CANCER SOCIETY

use digital technology in new, exciting and meaningful ways to transform their business.

“Looking at ways to personalise and customise the user experience and the user journey really excites me, especially for people whose cancer journeys are so personal,” says O’Brien. “Looking at ways to apply evolving technology like AI and machine learning to be more efficient, to be more data-driven, to reach more people, and to provide our audiences with a more meaningful personalised and easyto-use digital experience to support them in their cancer journey, and to deliver that experience where and how they want it — that's what really excites me.”

The Canadian Cancer Society has been a national charity for over eight decades. In that time, the organisation has transformed its approach to digital tools and technology.

“Over the last 85 years that we've been in existence, it's easy to say that technology has completely changed,” says O'Brien. “For many decades, we relied on grassroots communications, conversations over tea, pamphlets in hospitals and medical offices, community gatherings, and we continue to rely on many of those tactics today.”

Now, the Canadian Cancer Society relies more heavily on digital tools and technologies to drive their fundraising strategies, improve delivery of mission programmes and services, engage, inspire, and inform audiences, and empower internal teams with the tools and resources they need to do their job effectively.

“We've evolved our communication strategies,” says O’Brien. “We rely heavily on digital technology, both with our internal staff through digital tools

and virtual meetings, to using digital communications tools such as email, SMS, live chat, and push notifications to reach external audiences.”

O’Brien and her team have created safe and supportive spaces for their online communities, both on social media channels and with their online support programmes, cancerconnection.ca and parlonscancer.ca, which have enabled them to reach more people and strengthen their relationships.

“Digital is key to all our fundraising strategies. We're an organisation that relies primarily on the generosity of our individual donors,” says O’Brien. “So, we need to

make sure that we provide donors with an easy-to-use online experience, and easyto-use online tools to set up their own fundraisers, sign up for one of our signature events, or give a donation online, and then provide them with the digital tools to share those fundraising initiatives with family and friends to raise more money.”

The Canadian Cancer Society has managed the change in adoption of digital transformation by accepting that change is always a challenge for any organisation.

“Change in adoption of our digital transformation is an area that we continue to work on. But our approach has always been to be inclusive and collaborative,

to bring key stakeholders together for the discussions, decision making, and journey, for our colleagues to see that digital, data and technology teams are strategic partners with them.”

There have been several moments that have had the most significant impact on the Canadian Cancer Society's digital and technology strategies.

“We've had four key moments that have really shifted Canadian Cancer Society's digital and technology strategies,” says O’Brien. “We've nationalised our organisation, we've had two mergers and then the COVID-19 pandemic.”

“We work with donors and volunteers to improve the lives of people affected by cancer”

LESA O'BRIEN INTERIM EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT OF DIGITAL STRATEGY AND TECHNOLOGY FOR THE CANADIAN CANCER SOCIETY

Eight years ago, the Canadian Cancer Society transitioned from 10 provinciallyled organisations to a national model, which allowed them to operate more efficiently and as one united team.

“We had to bring together systems, processes, data, and teams, and that was a significant undertaking,” says O’Brien. “In 2017, we led the consolidation within the cancer charity sector to bring together two of the largest national health charities in an unprecedented merger when we joined with the Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation.”

In 2019, they did it again when they amalgamated with Prostate Cancer Canada.

As a result of these significant organisational changes, the Society has had to modernise its IT structure, prioritise the centralisation and consolidation of technologies, and unite disparate digital systems, data, resources, processes and digital ecosystems.

“This change included implementing new solutions like our Salesforce CRM solution, which allowed us to centralise and secure our constituent data into one solution from 18 different databases,” explains O’Brien. “We've also had to align our brand into one organisational website, consolidate our fundraising platforms, and transition our social media audiences to our CCS channels.”

A year later, when the Canadian Cancer Society thought they'd made great progress, COVID-19 happened. That created an immediate disruption to fundraising programmes, services and the workforce.

“Like many organisations, we had to accelerate our digital transformation as we shifted our business to digital and virtual solutions.”

Using digital technology and data to modernise the Canadian Cancer Society's mission work

Modernising its mission work through digital, data and technology is an essential part of the Canadian Cancer Society’s digital transformation.

“Over the last few years, we've made several changes to evolve our mission delivery and communication with people affected by cancer,” explains O’Brien.

“Data and insights are key for us to better understand the needs of people we serve.”

Over the pandemic, the Society conducted multiple national online surveys to better understand the needs of cancer patients and caregivers.

Unlocking the potential of technology for nonprofits

Our work with Canadian Cancer Society is one example of how we guide large organizations through complex planning and solution implementation.

Our boutique firm helps nonprofits implement a clear technology strategy to fuel their missions long term. LEARN MORE

Creating better tomorrows for all with the Canadian Cancer Society.

“The data we collected informed our decisions on the type of information people needed to support them through the pandemic. That led us to create specific online resources, including webinars, to support people affected by cancer. But the data also informed our advocacy work, and that led to several campaigns that we have running nationwide.”

One virtual advocacy campaign is called ‘Get Better’, which rallies people across the country to call on the Canadian government to make cancer care better.

“It encourages people to share their stories and cancer experiences through an online portal. Then, we're bringing those voices forward to our government and calling for more improvements for cancer care.”

O’Brien is also currently using digital and technology innovation in the Canadian Cancer Society's fundraising strategies.

“Digital is such an important part of our fundraising strategy. Everything we do

from a fundraising perspective involves some digital or social media component. So, it's always exciting for us to try new and innovative ways to inspire and engage people to donate or fundraise.”

During the pandemic, O’Brien had to transform fundraising events into an entirely virtual experience. For one of their signature events, the CIBC Run for the Cure, they offered participants virtual avatars which they could customise and share on their personal fundraising pages to help deepen engagement and increase participation.

“To promote fundraising, we added more sophisticated gamification to unlock incentives such as sunglasses, t-shirts, balloons, and capes that you could add to your avatar when you reached certain fundraising milestones. We enabled activity tracking on our app and website that was integrated with smartphone and wearable technologies so people could record their training activities and their walk or run on the actual event day.”

The biggest challenge facing the Canadian Cancer Society today is staying competitive, relevant and finding new ways to reach audiences while retaining existing ones – all with the lens of driving the most impact for people affected by cancer.

“Digital technology plays such a critical role in helping to build and retain that trust through the delivery of secure and integrated technologies, improving our cybersecurity posture, data governance and policies, data-driven processes to provide reliable, timely, and accurate information across any touchpoint.”

In its journey, the Canadian Cancer Society has partnered with Salesforce, Heller Consulting and Slalom, among others, each of which O’Brien describes as ‘instrumental’ in helping the Society realise its vision.

“We're extremely fortunate to have such wonderful partners. They've collaborated with us to create many of our key digital, data and technology strategies, and they've been our implementation partners as well. That's been critical to our success.”

The Society has been a customer of Salesforce since 2009, but in 2018, they selected Salesforce for the one CRM platform.

“We underwent one of the most significant digital transformation projects where we consolidated 18 separate CRM systems and centralised our constituent data into that one CRM platform. We worked with Heller Consulting as our implementation partner for this multi-year project, which was successfully launched in 2020. We also used Salesforce's Marketing Cloud for mapping out our customer journeys and targeted email marketing campaigns. Slalom worked with us on the implementation of our donor journeys in Marketing Cloud, and our data strategy and continues to work with us to

implement data analytics dashboards in Tableau and Datorama.”

The Canadian Cancer Society’s vision when it comes to digital technology is to provide a more personalised digital experience for audiences.

“We want to provide a seamless, easy to use experience that helps people to accomplish what they need to do. We want to be a supportive partner in their cancer journey,” says O’Brien. “Having a fully integrated enterprise-wide architecture where stakeholder data is centralised and data is driving our business decisions is part of that overall vision.”

For Canadians with cancer and their caregivers, leveraging tools and technologies to improve support for all the people O’Brien and her team serve is important to achieving their vision.

“We can help find better treatments so that more people survive and live longer, healthier lives with or after cancer”

LESA O'BRIEN INTERIM EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT OF DIGITAL STRATEGY AND TECHNOLOGY FOR THE CANADIAN CANCER SOCIETY

IS

SECURING DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION IN THE PHILIPPINES

WRITTEN BY: SCOTT BIRCH

Artist impression of ePLDT VITRO Sta.Rosa to go live by early 2024

PRODUCED BY: STUART IRVING

It has been an eventful 12 months for Victor S. Genuino. Since becoming President and CEO of ePLDT – the leading enabler of digital transformation in the Philippines – on 1 April 2022, he has overseen the company’s own dramatic realignment.

That shift in business focus means an even greater emphasis on data centres, as Genuino doubles-down on the company’s pioneering commitments – they built the first data centre in the Philippines, and are currently adding an 11th to the portfolio.

VITRO Sta. Rosa will have an initial power capacity of 14MW in early 2024, which will increase to 50MW when fully operational, making it the largest and most advanced data centre in the country.

Leveraging on the telecommunication infrastructure of the PLDT Group, ePLDT is best placed to deliver customised ICT services through its suite of multi-cloud and data centre solutions, which in turn enable enterprises in the Philippines to achieve their digital transformation goals.

“It's been a hell of a rollercoaster ride,” says Genuino. “When I entered ePLDT we were into a lot of businesses that had low growth or low margin and it was an opportune time to rationalise these.

“We have to focus on where we think growth is going to come from and, more importantly, offer and provide solutions to customers to make the services of PLDT and ePLDT stickier for them.

The leading enabler of digital transformation in the Philippines, ePLDT is building and securing critical digital infrastructure for a brighter future

“Hence the focus on cloud, cyber security and our data centre business, so it's been a very good year in the sense that we were able to clean house and focus on growth for the next 5 to 10 years.”

Genuino says this shift in priorities gave the organisation clarity of purpose and allowed ePLDT to expand its partner ecosystem, focusing on hyperscalers like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Palo Alto Networks and the like, as well as establishing partnerships both in the Philippines and the wider region that further enhances ePLDT’s existing multi-cloud capabilities.

PLDT is the dominant telco in the Philippines and behind the wireless brand Smart. They also provide home and enterprise fibre and an international connectivity business serving enterprises, SMEs and the public sector. This background has powered ePLDT to

VICTOR S. GENUINO PRESIDENT AND CEO, ePLDT

“We feel the Philippines will be primed as a regional hub in the next few years”

ePLDT VITRO Cebu

a leading 65% market share in terms of domestic data centre capacity.

“One of the main advantages of ePLDT is our relationship with the PLDT parent,” says Genuino. “Being part of the dominant telco in the Philippines allows us to build substantial infrastructure that will future-proof our operations for years to come.

“We have the largest international submarine cable systems linking the Philippines through the rest of the world to the US, to Japan and through Southeast Asia. And our domestic fibre rollout has reached 1,000,000 square kilometres. We are easily three to four times bigger than the next best player in the market in terms of fibre footprint and connectivity.”

VICTOR S. GENUINO

TITLE: PRESIDENT AND CEO

COMPANY: ePLDT

INDUSTRY: IT & SERVICES

LOCATION: PHILIPPINES

“I've worked professionally for close to 30 years now. I have been involved in both local and international companies and have worked in Hong Kong and Singapore for the likes of Philips Electronics, Siemens Mobile, and Shell Oil. Because of that experience and opportunity, I was able to work for PLDT Global, which is the international arm of the Group based in Hong Kong.

From there I moved to a sister company called Meralco – the biggest electric distribution company in the Philippines – and I worked there for 10 years before moving back to PLDT.

First, I was the head of our digital office in charge of transformation, before being assigned to run ePLDT as

Genuino talks about the importance of public-private partnerships when it comes to building transport infrastructure in the Philippines but also the need for a similar approach to digital infrastructure. He believes that in two years, ePLDT will have the capacity to transport massive amounts of data and traffic to and from the Philippines.

Geopolitical tensions in the region and a moratorium on new data centre builds in Singapore, he says, could force some hyperscalers to look for alternative sites to ensure available capacity for the growing data demands of customer.

“We feel the Philippines will be primed as a regional transit hub in the next few years and we are working very closely with the Government, with the Department of Trade and Industry, to be able to make Philippines

ePLDT is securing digital transformation in the Philippines

WATCH NOW

VICTOR S. GENUINO PRESIDENT AND CEO, ePLDT

“Being part of the dominant telco (PLDT) in the Philippines allows us to build substantial infrastructure that will future-proof our operations for years to come”

the next hyperscaler hub of Asia,” says Genuino.

“We are also working very closely with the government to ensure that we build out this infrastructure to be able to promote economic inclusiveness. We're working very closely with schools, with executive branches of government, and with SMEs to help fuel their digital transformation.”

65%

Securing the cloud

Alexis Bernardino is cyber security Evangelist/Customer Field CISO at ePLDT, and he says it is not simply a question of if an organisation will experience a breach but when.

“The $1,000,000 question really is, is your organisation ready to respond and recover?” says Bernardino.

Driving digital transformation is all well and good but, as many organisations and governments learn too late, that also means increased risk in terms of cyber security. The COVID-19 pandemic was in some ways a gift to cyber criminals who were only too happy to take advantage of the sudden rush to move business operations to the cloud.

“At ePLDT, how we adapt to this current cyber landscape is by veering away from the conventional ‘preventive, detective, reactive’ cyber security approach and we move the needle to a predictive and responsive mode of proactive cyber.”

We operate on an “assumed breach mode” acting as if we have been already breached. With this strategy, we are already

Market share of ePLDT in domestic data centres

ePLDT VITRO Makati Cooling Tower

responding to and mitigating any attacks in our infrastructures. Moreover, the mindset of paranoia and vigilance is being inculcated in the culture of the entire organisation.

Digital transformation is the name of the game in business today, with organisations embarking on a journey of convergence and cloudification, each with their own strategy and approach. However, caution is required,

and Bernardino says organisations should never undermine or downplay security.

“Cyber security is the most critical and crucial component to ensure the success of any digital initiative,” he says.

“Most organisations right now are evolving in the three best practises and trends in the industry today. Number one is convergence, number two is cloudification, and number three is zero trust – and ePLDT is well positioned to provide our customers with expertise with the facilities and the technology.”

Many commentators believe that the role of the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) has changed significantly since the onset of the pandemic. Long seen as a backroom function or someone the C-suite would only take notice of when there was an IT problem, the role

ALEXIS BERNARDINO CYBER SECURITY EVANGELIST /CUSTOMER FIELD CISO, ePLDT

“Cybersecurity is the most critical and crucial component to ensure the success of any digital initiative”

has been rebooted for 2023. Now, cyber security (and that means cloud security) is right at the top of the agenda, and CISOs have a new voice within the organisation. Bernardino is quick to agree.

“The role of a CISO has evolved today from a purely operational focus to a business focus,” he says. “The business has demanded somebody with cyber security subject matter expertise and a strong operational background to be in front of the customer –evangelising cyber best practices. It's a very unique skill set and proposition, trying to balance the technical and business aspects of cyber security and how it impacts the bigger picture of digital transformation of any organisation.”

The malasakit difference

Being in front of customers day in, day out, ePLDT hears the actual needs and requirements that they have in the field and, as the leading and powerhouse data centre, multi-cloud and cyber security service provider in the Philippines, ePLDT is guiding its customers and clients as their trusted advisor and business ally.

Cloud can be a crowded and sometimes confusing environment for businesses taking their first steps, and that is why so many organisations in the Philippines turn to a local, trusted solution from one of the country’s most respected brands.

CEO Genuino agrees but thinks there is an extra X-factor that sets ePLDT apart – malasakit.

ePLDT VITRO Makati Server Rack

“When people ask what sets us apart compared to foreign consulting companies and systems integrators that we compete with here on a daily basis in the Philippines, I think it's a Filipino term called malasakit ,” says Genuino.

“It's hard to translate this into English, but it means extra attention and extra care for what the customer needs. It's a combination of care and empathy, and I think that's our advantage. We have been a strong partner of most of these enterprises through some tough times, and what we’re doing now is adding another layer –cementing the partnership.

“With the strength of the PLDT organisation behind us, the infrastructure that we've

ALEXIS BERNARDINO

TITLE: CYBER SECURITY

EVANGELIST/CUSTOMER FIELD CISO

COMPANY: ePLDT

INDUSTRY: IT & SERVICES

LOCATION: PHILIPPINES

“I actually started not in cybersecurity but rather in IP networking, so I'm an electronics and communications engineer by education, and I started my career as a field network engineer. But after a few years in the industry, I started thinking about what the next big thing would be to hit the tech market in the next three to five years, and I decided to shift to cybersecurity.

After that, doors were opened up to a lot of opportunities because cybersecurity skills are in very high demand here in the Philippines. That brought me to my current role as a

created and by hiring the right people to support our growth, I think customers should be able to look at us with a certain level of trust and confidence that we can deliver all of the digital requirements they're looking for.”

That’s one reason why ePLDT won Microsoft Country Partner of the Year Award in 2022, and testament to the hard work that has been put in to build the digital ecosystem, and validating the approach that ePLDT is taking. Awards like this are also important when it comes to attracting and retaining talent as it shows they can compete with the best-of-breed in the Philippines.

Genuino says his aim is for ePLDT to become not only the premier partner of Microsoft and Google, but also of Amazon and Salesforce and the rest of the cloud provider ecosystem.

“We have the capability, we have the infrastructure, and we have the customer relationships, given our 94-year legacy in the Philippines,” he concludes. “I think if you put all of these ingredients together, it makes a very strong position. Customers can look at ePLDT as a one-stop-shop for all their connectivity and cloud transformation requirements.”

“The $1,000,000 question really is, is your organisation ready to respond and recover?”

ALEXIS BERNARDINO CYBER SECURITY EVANGELIST /CUSTOMER FIELD CISO, ePLDT

WHY BIZERBA PRIDES ITSELF ON BEING ‘STRONGER TOGETHER’

WRITTEN BY: TOM CHAPMAN

PRODUCED BY: KRIS PALMER

For more than 150 years, Bizerba has been a pioneer in the food industry with its world-leading weighing, slicing and labelling technologies.

Underpinning the German firm’s everyday operations is the motto ‘stronger together’, which is adhered to and embraced by every team, from sales to human resources.

The IT department, containing around 150 employees in locations across the globe, is no different.

Heading up this function is Dr Christian Hürter, Director Global IT, who joined the company just over two years ago in February 2021.

Dr Hürter leads the talented team of IT specialists, around 100 of whom are based at Bizerba’s headquarters near Stuttgart, Germany, with the other 50 spread all over the world.

Revealing his approach to the role, Dr Hürter said efforts to “lift IT to the next level” at Bizerba could be broadly summarised by two pillars.

“We want to reach the next level in terms of standardised architecture, enabling a stable development application-wise,” adds Dr Hürter.

Christian Hürter, Director Global IT at Bizerba, discusses how the company is overcoming new challenges in a rapidlyevolving digital landscape

“With one pillar we are really working to global IT standards, so we are not reinventing the wheel. We are working closely with Gartner to establish those standards.

“On the other side, we have six strategic initiatives which help us bring Bizerba to the next level. These are things like the introduction of business relationship management, as it’s very important for us to be business-centric; another initiative is IT performance management which means being transparent in what we are doing and shifting focus from running IT towards growing and transforming business with IT.

“And so, with those two pillars, we are evolving as a global team step by step.”

Bizerba: A company ‘stronger together’ Dr Hürter cannot emphasise enough the importance of staying ‘stronger together’. So endemic is the mantra that it has actually extended to Bizerba’s customers through the ‘MyBizerba’ initiative.

Given the business’ multiple areas of expertise, MyBizerba allows clients to benefit from an entire portfolio of services, tailored to their own specific set of requirements. This includes full technical training and extensive maintenance and support packages.

“Our claim of MyBizerba means we create unique solutions for unique people, combining functionalities like advisory services, hardware and software products, accessories, services and financial services together in this ‘stronger together’ thinking,” says Dr Hürter. “Because we are a global company in several different countries, our people must work together to come up with a working solution for our customers.

Why Bizerba prides itself on being ‘stronger together’

Christian Hürter

TITLE: DIRECTOR GLOBAL IT

COMPANY: BIZERBA

INDUSTRY: IT

Since 2021: Director Global IT (CIO) at Bizerba

2018-2020: Co-Founder and

“Because we are a global company in several different countries, we all must work together to come up with a working solution for our customer”

CHRISTIAN HÜRTER DIRECTOR GLOBAL

We see this in every aspect of our work, especially in IT.

“I already mentioned we act businesscentric, so what matters most to IT is what our customer needs, and then we make that happen in a joint effort together at Bizerba.

“Being a large, mid-sized business, and given the scale of our products and global footprint, it’s all about taking this asset we have as an advantage and combining different people and knowledge to come up with solutions. That’s our daily business.”

Overcoming new challenges

Evidently, key to Dr Hürter’s role –and that of his IT department – is to try and respond and adapt to rapidlyevolving business requirements.

He highlights sustainability, digital transformation and the digital skills gap, which he refers to as the “war for talent”, as just some of the biggest challenges to overcome.

“We are seeing some important changes around us and I think it’s important that, in IT, we are grasping what’s happening on the market,” says Dr Hürter. “We have influences like sustainability which is just taking off and that is something we need to take care of everywhere in the company and of course in IT, too.

“We have this war for talents that is definitely affecting us in the IT organisation; we need to continuously ensure that we have

IT, BIZERBA

“We are seeing some important changes around us and I think it’s important that, in IT, we are grasping what’s happening on the market”

CHRISTIAN HÜRTER DIRECTOR GLOBAL IT, BIZERBA

the right capabilities and stay ahead of our competitors in the market.”

New innovations within the food and retail industries are also presenting new hurdles, as are ever-evolving business models.

Unmanned supermarkets and selfcheckout capabilities are becoming increasingly common, while the way in which clients are paying for services is changing, too.

“For example,” adds Dr Hürter, “Bizerba is partnering with a start-up called SuperSmart, which is coming up with brilliant solutions for supporting selfcheckout for large bunches of products, as well as for small product bunches.

“Ever since the cyber attack, we are progressing faster than we ever thought we could. We are learning and improving massively on every aspect”

“Parallel to the traditional selling of products, we have more and more users willing to pay only when they use services. So we are experiencing more of this type of subscription business model.”

Bizerba’s push for digital transformation falls under its I&T operating model, which has been coined by Gartner to express that the scope extends beyond the boundaries of the IT organisation.

While digital transformation may once have been a department in itself, emphasis now is on this drive being part of an entire company’s DNA – another example of being ‘stronger together’.

Bizerba ‘building back better’ after cyber attack

Dr Hürter does not shy away from the fact that Bizerba has been in recovery mode, having suffered a severe cyber attack in June last year.

While basic functions were restored after a few weeks, the establishment of a new IT landscape took several months.

However, the experience served as an opportunity for the company to learn and ‘build back better’, reinforcing its global infrastructure including networks, server, cloud and security.

“Actually, we weren’t bad before and were performing pretty well,” explains Dr Hürter.

Opening up opportunities with the cloud that comes to you. Wisely done.

Open up opportunities across edges, colos and data centers when you complete your hybrid cloud with HPE GreenLake, the open and secure edge-to-cloud platform.

“But, we were hit and now we are learning from that and improving massively on every aspect. We are at a very good point – much better than we were a year ago, even though we had a good level. Now, ever since the attack, we are progressing faster than we ever thought we could.”

In fact, Dr Hürter grows discernibly excited when the topic of security is brought up, even admitting it is his “favourite” part of the job.

He uses the analogy of security being like a fence surrounding Bizerba, with a need to ensure it reaches the same height all the way around.

“The risk appetite that our shareholders define is the fence height, and our shareholders want it pretty high,” says Dr Hürter.

“Our duty in IT is to ensure we have the same fence height everywhere in the company, and it’s the duty of my colleague, the Chief Information Security Officer, to watch over and inspect the fence.”

The importance of GPOs and IT-BRMs Bizerba’s Director Global IT is unequivocal in his assessment that his team must contribute to the value being added to business processes.

Facilitating this is the global process owner (GPO), defined by Deloitte as an individual who “owns an end-to-end process across functional silos, geographic and business unit boundaries.”

Dr Hürter calls this “absolutely crucial” and says his team is working closely with Bizerba’s GPO through an IT Business Relationship Manager (IT-BRM), established at the beginning of last year.

He adds: “The important thing is that the GPO and IT-BRM are in close contact, so the IT-BRM can understand and fulfil the needs of the GPO, and consult the GPO on their way of digitally transforming the business.”

CHRISTIAN HÜRTER DIRECTOR GLOBAL IT, BIZERBA

“Our strategic partners like HPE and All for One are bringing us to the next level, technology-wise, in our global ecosystem”

1866 Year founded

4.5K+ Number of Employees

€800 mn Annual revenue

CHRISTIAN HÜRTER DIRECTOR GLOBAL IT, BIZERBA

“Our partnerships go longer because that’s the way we need to work together”

A strong partner ecosystem

Bizerba’s IT function does, of course, have a whole host of partners with which it works closely on various production and transformation processes.

Once again, this epitomises the ‘stronger together’ ethos which extends beyond the company’s four walls.

“I think today you cannot compete in the transformation and production of an IT organisation when you need to invent everything on your own,” says Dr Hürter. “It would be a stupid approach, not taking into account the multiple experiences and sometimes the overarching size of partners in the marketplace. These are important value partners with many more resources or many more specialisations.

“So, it’s absolutely crucial and, again, a case of ‘stronger together’ when you have these long relationships with partners.”

He also points out the growing trend in establishing enduring partnerships to ensure long-lasting stability and fruitful relationships.

“We are investing and concentrating on a few very good partners, and I think that’s a trend in the market as well,” Dr Hürter continues.

“Our partnerships go longer because that’s the way we need to work together.”

All for One Group is one of the key partners within Bizerba’s ecosystem, supporting the company in its transition to SAP’s S/4HANA enterprise resource planning software.

“For this transition, we chose All for One as our favoured partner,” adds Dr Hürter. “All for One has always been our partner for basic support. Above all, they are now our project and transformation partner who are making our transition to S/4HANA happen. And why? All for One understands

our needs and can advise us individually in our specific situation, but they also have a broad market experience and offer us guidelines and best practices to navigate through business transformation.”

Another important partner is Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE).

“HPE is supplying us with storage and computing for our data centre but,

CHRISTIAN HÜRTER DIRECTOR GLOBAL IT, BIZERBA

“It’s more important to choose the right path and to make the right migration decisions”

moreover, they are infrastructure problem solvers and precious advisors on our journey to hybrid cloud transition,” Dr Hürter says.

He describes hybrid cloud transition as Bizerba’s “stepwise move from processing data in proprietary data centres to a hybrid cloud”, provided and managed outside Bizerba.

“We are not in a hurry during this transition phase,” concludes Dr Hürter. “It’s more important to choose the right path and to make the right migration decisions, because mistakes are very expensive. And HPE is helping us avoid such mistakes.”

GLOBAL SWITCH LONDON, A BLUEPRINT FOR A GREENER FUTURE

WRITTEN BY: MARCUS LAW

Global Switch’s London Campus located in the Docklands, the capital’s premier connectivity hub, is home to the world’s leading networks and cloud on-ramps

Global Switch is an owner, operator and developer of large-scale, carrier and cloudneutral, multi-customer data centres across Europe and Asia-Pacific. Founded in 1998, today Global Switch is one of the highest credit-rated data centre companies in the world with investment-grade credit ratings from Fitch Ratings, Moody’s and S&P Global Ratings.

Global Switch’s portfolio compromises 13 world-class data centres that house a myriad of organisations seeking high-specification technical data centre space for their mission-critical equipment.

“We have around 430,000 square metres of floor space and are occupied by a broad range of customers, global and national, large and small including government organisations,” says Matthew Winter, Global Switch’s Chief Design Officer.

“The company's focus is on highly resilient, central, low latency, network-dense locations in prime city centre locations and internet hubs close to customers on the edge of financial and business districts,” he adds. “Our data centres operate exclusively in the Tier I markets of Europe and AsiaPacific and provide an ‘Always On’ service, serving our growing customer base across the two regions.”

GLOBAL SWITCH

Global Switch’s stateof-the-art London campus

Global Switch’s London campus is a stateof-the-art data centre environment located in the heart of the city’s connectivityrich London Docklands, with access to an abundance of carriers and cloud providers.

The original home of London’s internet, and in close proximity to Canary Wharf and the City of London, the Docklands area continues to attract global businesses seeking resilient, highly connected data centres, with Global Switch central to this hub.

The Global Switch London campus was established in 1999 with the redevelopment of the historic Nick Grimshaw-designed former Financial Times newspaper printworks, creating the London North data centre, explains Adam Eaton, Global Switch’s Executive Group Director for London.

“The campus grew in 2002 with the launch of the 12-floor, purpose-built London East data centre with over 65,000 square metres of space,” he says. “The campus is fantastically positioned, only a stone's throw from the financial district of Canary Wharf and located on the site of London’s earliest network and connectivity hub.”

While other data centre hubs have sprung up in other London locations, the Docklands area is still the capital’s premier connectivity hub with the largest availability of networks and cloud on-ramps, Eaton comments. “The Docklands hub continues to see significant data centre development and has available power, unlike Slough and other areas west of London where new power coming to market is already reserved,” he says.

“In terms of performance, Global Switch has operated data centres on the London campus for nearly 25 years,” Eaton assets, “developing a wealth of knowledge and experience that has permeated through

an operations team that has a pinpoint focus on health and safety and operational performance.”

Extending and expanding the London campus

Global Switch’s London campus, which enjoys allocated power in excess of 125MVA and has, for a number of years, purchased 100% renewable electricity to cover Scope 2 emissions, is currently in the midst of a redevelopment programme.

Both London North and London East are in the process of redevelopment that will deliver additional highly energy efficient, low

MATTHEW WINTER

TITLE: CHIEF DESIGN OFFICER

Matthew joined Global Switch in 2014 and has held several roles, including Engineering Director and Group Projects Director before being promoted to Chief Design Officer in 2020. He started out as a design engineer in 1990 working in leading engineering consultancy practices, and holds a Master’s degree in Intelligent Buildings as well as a Bachelor’s degree in Building Services Engineering Design & Management. He is also a Chartered Member of CIBSE and an accredited Uptime Tier Designer. Since joining Global Switch Matthew has extensively been involved in the design and engineering of Global Switch data centres. As Chief

“In terms of sustainability, it is better to redevelop, reducing unnecessary emissions of alreadybuilt forms than replace them with new”

MATTHEW WINTER CHIEF DESIGN OFFICER, GLOBAL SWITCH

power usage effectiveness (PUE) suites. The campus has been built to support a variety of different customers, from hyperscale multi-megawatt deployments through to enterprise and single rack colocation.

Furthermore, the campus will be further extended and enhanced with the planned development of a third data centre on the campus, London South, which is expected to come online in the next few years.

“We started the redevelopment programme with London North and upgraded space within the data centre to provide high-density technical suites with increased IT power,” Winter comments. “These spaces reflect our reference design principles with no raised floor and flooded room cooling, delivered by a fan wall product. These initial spaces are already contracted to a global Enterprise customer. The completion of the Phase 1 redevelopment will see the delivery of additional high-density suites.”

Similarly, in London East, Global Switch has a power densification programme which will see existing suites refurbished to provide higher power density. “This commenced with a singlefloor feasibility study which was immediately let to a hyperscale customer,” Winter comments. “Through this first phase, we have extended the study to look across the whole data centre to offer further improvement in terms of PUE and high-density space.

“While London North and London East are focused on continuous improvement, we also have our planned new development London South which will sit alongside our other data centres as a part of a single campus but with diverse utility and connectivity services,” adds Winter. “This state-of-the-art data centre will complement the other data centres on our campus and expand upon the IT power and services that we can offer.”

“The campus is fantastically positioned, only a stone's throw from the financial district of Canary Wharf as well as the City of London, and is located on the site of London’s earliest network and connectivity hub”

ADAM EATON EXECUTIVE GROUP DIRECTOR, GLOBAL SWITCH

Redeveloping a working Grade II* listed data centre

Originally designed by Sir Nicolas Grimshaw for the Financial Times as a printing press facility, and opened by then-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in 1988, Global Switch’s London North site was converted into a data centre in 1999, transforming the building from communication in the printed form to one of digital communication.

With the building named a listed building in 2016 by Heritage England on account of the standing of the architect, there were a number of challenges faced by Global Switch when it came to redeveloping a live data centre in a historic building.

ADAM EATON

TITLE: EXECUTIVE GROUP DIRECTOR, LONDON

Adam joined Global Switch in 2022 having previously owned and lead his own cloud and managed hosting provider. As Executive Group Director, Adam is responsible for maintaining a best-in-class operational environment for the London Campus while continuing to drive business development, new initiatives and new developments, including the redevelopment of London North and London East and the development of a third data centre on the campus, London South which will increase the campus by

FanWall: modular efficiency, maximum power

FanWall HBCV: chilled water or direct expansion versions for high density hyperscale Data Center

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HiRef S.p.A. is an Italian company born in 2001 which offers air conditioning solutions for technological, industrial and service environments designed to go beyond standard concepts.

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Global Switch London, a blueprint for a greener future

2030

Target to purchase 100% renewable electricity across all of Global Switch’s data centres

“Redeveloping existing data centres means that they are generally operational and so the works need to be meticulously planned to avoid any consequential downtime,” Winter explains. “This means that projects can sometimes take more time to complete when compared to new builds.”

“With London North, it meant that we could not modify the façade nor a spine wall inside the building, which gave us some challenges adding to the complexity of the project. Nonetheless, the data centre has been upgraded to a high standard including the entrance.”

One of the most significant challenges when redeveloping the site was strengthening the floors which required additional structural foundations to be installed in an operational environment, all while restricting vibration.

“Great care has been taken to look at the plant loadings on the roof while replacing the two historic cooling systems with a new system of free-cooling chillers,” Winter describes. “In all, we have received very positive reviews of the already-let new space that has been created that will ensure the building continues to be suitable to meet current and future demands.”

Energy efficiency programmes at the London campus

Sustainability is a fundamental part of Global Switch’s business, which is continuing to reduce its carbon footprint across its global portfolio. All new European developments target a minimum of BREEAM ‘Very Good’ with a PUE of less than 1.2 and all Asia-Pacific developments target a minimum LEED ‘Gold’ with a PUE of less than 1.4, as well as other local sustainability certifications.

Global Switch’s London campus, in particular, has been subject to a number of

energy efficiency initiatives, which are also being rolled out to Global Switch’s other sites, starting with its other European data centres.

“In London North, we replaced the two legacy cooling systems with one common system comprising free-cooling chillers,” Winter explains. “We also replaced all the CRAH units within technical suites and elevated the temperature of the water that is used as the medium to circulate cooling to the suites while also raising the leaving air temperature from the computer room air handlers to the servers under a supply air control strategy to reduce energy consumption; the data centre had historically been developed with return air control.

“In the redeveloped spaces where we have fan walls installed, the design has been validated by CBRE meaning they calibrated

JAEGGI’s hybrid dry coolers combine efficiency and sustainability

The benefits of air-cooled dry coolers and closed evaporative cooling towers in a single product. The result? Minimal noise, and low water and energy consumption.

their virtual twin of the infrastructure using the Romonet software against the installed plant which will at full load achieve an annualised PUE below 1.3.

“As part of this European-wide programme we aim to power intensify vacant suites as the power requirements of customers today are often much higher than they were 5-10 years ago: 10kW racks are not uncommon and equate, depending on their layout of up to 3,000 watts per square metre.

As Winter explains, Global Switch is embracing redevelopment rather than solely focusing on new builds that are also underway, reducing unnecessary emissions and helping the company meet its sustainability goals.

“In terms of sustainability, it is better to redevelop, reducing unnecessary emissions of already-built forms than replace them with new, which is why redevelopment should be showcased instead of just the new

builds,” he says. “In this respect, we have been piloting a new BREEAM scheme for the fit-out of our data centres, which has in the past only been applied to new builds.”

A number of steps have been taken to meet Global Switch’s targets of reducing carbon emissions and environmental impact.

“We have set a target to purchase 100% renewable electricity across all our data centres by 2030 for both our infrastructure and the customer IT load and in 2022, we purchased 78% of renewable energy against our total electricity consumption,” says Winter. “We are presently reviewing a science-based target with the aim of limiting temperature to 1.5° based on an ICT sector methodology for Scope 1 and 2 to achieve a near-term target for 2030 and so we are well on our way to achieving this. Our next challenge is to further understand our Scope 3 emission reduction and we need to work closely with our partners to achieve this.”

Key partners helping enable sustainability goals

When it comes to enabling these sustainability ambitions, Hi-Ref and Jaeggi have been key partners for Global Switch, supplying critical cooling equipment in its new data centre in Frankfurt and beyond.

“Both Hi-Ref and Jaeggi have been key partners who have supplied critical cooling equipment in our new Frankfurt North data centre and their partnership will continue with the expansion of new developments and our ongoing redevelopment programme,” Winter describes. “The Jaeggi hybrid coolers are a key workhorse in our cooling reference design and help us to achieve potential free-cooling for over half the year. Hi-Ref, while supplying CRAH units in Frankfurt North, has also been assisting us in the analysis of raising the chilled water temperature in our existing data centres through the redevelopment programme.”

To achieve its Scope 3 goals, Global Switch’s partners are key to achieving its goals. “The supply chain represents the majority of our Scope 3 with Fuel and Energy Related Activities (FERA) also being a key proportion,” Winter adds. “We are aiming to work closely with our partners to identify where the embodied carbon savings can be made while still achieving the objective output. I have been encouraging partners

“We have set a target to purchase 100% renewable electricity across all our data centres by 2030 for both our infrastructure and the customer IT load and in 2022, over 75% of our data centres had achieved this”

MATTHEW WINTER CHIEF DESIGN OFFICER, GLOBAL SWITCH

through our briefs that they provide Environmental Performance Declarations (EPDs) but accept there is a transition period for these to become common practice.”

Global Switch to help drive future connectivity needs

These are exciting times for Global Switch, with a sale process underway and significant developments planned and ongoing across the global footprint.

“In 2022, despite the macro volatility as a result of the war in Ukraine, the energy crisis and broader geo-political concerns, Global Switch demonstrated the resilience of its business model, which stands us in good stead for the next 12 to 18 months,” Eaton explains.

Significant growth in the sector of data and cloud computing and the growing adoption of applications from SaaS, PaaS and IaaS to mobile payments and gaming and video streaming will continue to drive significant data centre demand.

“Furthermore,” Eaton adds, “the growth of data-generating devices, such as smart meters and autonomous vehicles, as part of the Internet of Things, and 5G system deployments are new sub-sectors that will undoubtedly require vast volumes of data. ‘Always On’ data centres and high levels of connectivity, both of which Global Switch is well known in the market for, are critical components to deliver that demand.”

Global Switch is continuing with its proven strategy of redeveloping and densifying existing data centres and building new data centres in existing Tier 1 markets, in particular, adjacent to existing data centres. “This,” Eaton adds, “will deliver the required capacity to support growth in our existing customers as well as the forging of significant new relationships across the Hyperscale and Enterprise sectors.”

With increasing scale, Global Switch continues to evolve and the near future will see an even greater focus on ESG responsibilities. “We continue to evolve our operational processes to drive an everevolving ESG strategy and our comprehensive development and redevelopment programmes will ensure that, over the next period, the business focuses on many of the topics that are front of mind in the world.”

Significant developments driving data adoption

From new technologies to more integration

with local communities, there are significant developments in sectors new to the industry which are driving data adoption and enterprise architectural challenges.

“New technology often requires greater cooling capacity and we are seeing this with the growth of liquid cooling, however, any development will require a laser-sharp focus on environmental impact,” Eaton comments. “As our industry matures, I believe governance levels will increase and all that we do as an industry will become more public and under greater scrutiny. New developments will require more

“Global Switch has operated data centres on the London campus for nearly 25 years, developing a wealth of knowledge and experience that has permeated through an operations team that has a pinpoint focus on health and safety and operational performance”

ADAM EATON EXECUTIVE GROUP DIRECTOR, GLOBAL SWITCH

integration with local communities and an understanding of how the buildings integrate with the surrounding areas in which they exist will be paramount. We must explore how we can utilise our waste heat more effectively and to a greater good, for example utilising our waste energy to deliver local heating benefits.”

Innovative technologies such as AI and automation will also be used to drive changes in data centres globally, Eaton predicts.

“Operationally we will become smarter, utilising AI to drive changes to the maintenance regimes in the data centre campus and

delivering more proactive, condition-based maintenance programmes that will extend the life of equipment while reducing the environmental impact of maintaining for the sake of maintaining,” he concludes.

“Automation within the campus will increase and we will become smarter at managing the infrastructure, allowing for greater operating temperatures, improved efficiency and reduced environmental impact.”

INNOVATION AS A SOURCE OF VALUE IN CREDIT MANAGEMENT

AD FEATURE WRITTEN BY: TOM CHAPMAN

PRODUCED BY: BEN WIGGER

Terry Franklin, Executive Vice President, Products and Markets at QUALCO, explains the importance of delivering value to clients and the community

When it comes to delivering significant value for credit and financial players worldwide through AI-powered solutions that transform legacy practices and streamline operations, QUALCO is nothing less than a leader in the field.

Launched in Athens in 1998, the tech firm has been meeting the needs of leading banks, financial institutions and other high-profile organisations for a quarter of a century. Today, many of the company's original employees continue to apply their vast business expertise to the credit market — including founders Orestis Tsakalotos and Miltos Georgantzis.

QUALCO, the technology arm of QUALCO Group , has a team of well-established professionals who leverage the latest tools and technologies to develop and implement solutions for clients in the credit risk space and beyond.

One of those responsible for looking after this side of the business is Terry Franklin, Executive Vice President for Products and Markets. QUALCO’s primary function, Franklin explains, is to deliver value for clients in what is a rapidly evolving sector.

“What we’re really focused on is delivering leading technology solutions to a range of industries that help within the credit tech space, and beyond,” he says. “Ultimately, we're here to deliver value for our clients.

TERRY FRANKLIN

TITLE: EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT, PRODUCTS AND MARKETS

INDUSTRY: SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT

LOCATION: UNITED KINGDOM

Terry Franklin is the Executive Vice President, Products and Markets at QUALCO. Franklin joined QUALCO in 2020, having spent the previous 20 years of his career in credit management, collections and debt recovery across various industries.

Franklin’s current role is to oversee the operations of QUALCO Technology, ensuring its personnel deliver marketleading credit risk and collection tools.

“We’ve got clients and partners in more than 30 different countries; we help them to establish and deploy innovative technology solutions that enable them to optimise their credit management operations, make informed decisions and drive growth. We empower our clients to unlock value and transform their businesses through our operational platforms, data insights, digital experiences and industry expertise.

This helps our client partners fulfil critical business activities through automation, managing risk and supporting growth without increasing resources and costs. Typically, we're looking to give our clients a return on investment within 12 months.”

QUALCO offers a robust credit tech suite QUALCO provides several expert portfolio management tools, enabling businesses to adapt swiftly to market needs and maximise their performance in recoveries.

In the data-driven decision-making space, QUALCO Data Driven Decision Engine (D3E) helps clients at any stage in the customer journey – whether it be acquisition, customer management or collections – to combine data from various sources, analyse it and look for patterns of behaviour.

“By identifying those behaviour patterns,” adds Franklin, “using machine learning and AI, clients can deploy predictive models that determine the most appropriate way

“WE’RE REALLY FOCUSED ON DELIVERING LEADING TECHNOLOGY SOLUTIONS TO A RANGE OF INDUSTRIES THAT HELP WITHIN THE CREDIT SPACE”

TERRY FRANKLIN EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT, PRODUCTS AND MARKETS, QUALCO

to engage customers. This allows them to unlock value at various stages of the credit risk journey.”

The company’s best-selling product on the market, the QUALCO Collections and Recoveries platform, is dedicated to the management of collecting and recovering any accounts receivable portfolio. The system manages cases from the predelinquency stage, aiding the identification of customers who are about to become delinquent and helping relevant businesses to interact with them accordingly, through to late-stage recoveries.

QUALCO Loan Manager, offers an efficient way to manage the loan administration process end-to-end across the loan servicing lifecycle. Loan origination journeys can be simplified using QUALCO’s business

process management tooling, which pulls data from various sources to verify fraud risk and affordability assessments, allowing clients to sanction loan changes quickly and seamlessly.

It's digital banking solution, QUALCO Scalefin, supports financial institutions in their digital transformation journey, enabling them to enhance their digital capabilities and achieve strategic goals quickly and efficiently. This leads to streamlined operations, improved customer experience and business growth.

Tech solutions are also offered in the Supply Chain Finance area, underpinning the entire journey. QUALCO ProximaPlus and QUALCO Kyberas allow buyers and sellers to establish innovative ways of financing the supply chain and manage the dynamic discounting process, which, in turn, improves cash flow and helps their businesses to grow rapidly.

Moreover, QUALCO offers a complete suite of customised and secure enterpriselevel IT solutions and services, utilising advanced digital and cloud technologies.

QUALCO IT Services reshape businesses’ IT infrastructure, ensuring cyber security and peace of mind, enhancing operational efficiency and driving business growth.

Harnessing the power of data

The growing importance of data to businesses as they look to grow, transform and thrive is well-documented – and the same can be said of QUALCO’s clients. Data and the application of analytics is used to establish actionable insight and achieve better outcomes.

Franklin points to data from customer interactions as being highly valuable. This

“WHAT’S VERY IMPORTANT IS FINDING A PARTNER THAT OFFERS HUGE VALUE TO THE ENDCUSTOMER, UNDERSTANDING HOW WE CAN INTEGRATE WITH OUR OWN TECHNOLOGY STACK AND MAKE IT A REALISTIC, DAY-TODAY, USABLE PIECE OF FUNCTIONALITY”

TERRY FRANKLIN EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT, PRODUCTS AND MARKETS, QUALCO

may include the channel customers prefer to use, the time of day they are most likely to communicate or the probability of them rolling from one state of delinquency to another.

He says: “By combining those pieces of analysis through a system like QUALCO Collections and Recoveries, you can coordinate the timing, messaging and channel you want to use to make that connection with the customer, increasing the success rate and achieving a desired outcome more efficiently.”

QUALCO Data-Driven Decisions Engine (D3E) enables this practice, ingesting data quickly, applying analytics and capturing snapshots over time to create new variables to quickly and systematically build predictive models. For example, it might assess how often a customer has been delinquent in a fixed timeframe and automatically generate new characteristics that can be deployed in future models. These characteristics will be evident in an explainable model, allowing businesses to articulate why certain decisions were made.

“WE WANT TO MAKE SURE WE CAN ACCURATELY PREDICT CUSTOMER CIRCUMSTANCES AND PREFERENCES AND THEN USE THAT KNOWLEDGE TO BUILD BETTER SOLUTIONS THAT ENGAGE THE CUSTOMERS”

TERRY FRANKLIN EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT, PRODUCTS AND MARKETS, QUALCO

“The good thing about D3E is it does all the analytical processing itself, so you don't need an army of analysts to do the work,” adds Franklin.

Data also has its place in the supply chain finance side of QUALCO’s offering. Embedded machine learning and AI is used to look at unusual behaviour patterns within the trade receivables, flagging any trades that could represent a fraud risk to businesses or lenders.

QUALCO’s intent on creating value

Dedicated to thoroughly understanding its client’s needs and conducting complete business assessments, QUALCO prides itself on creating and delivering value for clients, employees, business communities and the wider society. This is made possible via tailor-made solutions that meet business needs and ensure the organisations' competitive advantage in their respective markets.

“There are areas of improvement that relate specifically to technology,” explains Franklin, “but during our engagements there may be other areas where clients can make some improvements that aren't necessarily related directly to our tech. We’ll share those recommendations because it builds trust, and our clients can see we’re here to help, strengthening the overall relationship and partnership.”

Once comparisons and recommendations have been made, QUALCO effectively produces a transformational plan. Clients can challenge any suggestions and ensure all elements ring true before the plan is inspected with a fine-tooth comb and approved at the board level. The goal is to set out in detail why this is an investment worth making.

“If you can benefit as many individuals as possible, you're also benefiting communities,” adds Franklin. “And, if we provide solutions that allow investors to make sensible decisions from an ESG perspective, it generally helps the wider society. We see this as an important overarching ethos for our solutions.”

Delivering value extends to the partner ecosystem

To deliver its highly-valued services, QUALCO cannot go alone; instead, it requires a quality ecosystem of partner organisations.

HOW QUALCO HELPS CLIENTS ACHIEVE ESG GOALS

Clearly, ESG has become a massive topic of discussion at organisations of all sizes in recent years. QUALCO has been working hard to support banking and finance clients in achieving their ESG goals, particularly in the supply chain finance space.

“We can help them understand where they can choose a factoring or invoice discounting market in the relative industries,” says Franklin. “By investing to discount or factor in particular industry sectors, they can demonstrate a greater commitment to supporting ESG and a greater level of corporate responsibility.”

Another essential solution – one falling into the governance bracket – is end-to-end visibility. QUALCO’s supply chain finance tech achieves full transparency from the supply point to the end-delivery point.

Franklin adds: “Anybody in the trade finance space will have full governance and full visibility of what happens at the point of a sale as well as the point of selling final products into the marketplace.”

Over the last 12 months, the business set up a partners-and-alliances function to identify and onboard sales, technology and delivery partners and make the vision a reality. Technology partners become incumbent elements of the QUALCO ecosystem that is delivered to clients.

“On the sales partner front,” says Franklin, “we’re really interested in working with organisations that are out discussing with clients how to improve and drive efficiencies, and then they would introduce us as a component part to deliver those business benefits and cost savings.”

Franklin also states the importance of partnering with effective technology players to engage customer communications and automate management tasks throughout the credit risk, collections and recovery journey.

“What’s very important is finding a partner that offers huge value to the endcustomer, understanding how we can integrate with our own technology stack and make it a realistic, day-to-day, usable piece of functionality,” he explains.

In the digital portal space, QUALCO works with tool providers that allow customers to fulfil their income and expenditure analysis and initiate payments or set up arrangements.

The road ahead

Franklin describes QUALCO’s growth plans for the next five years as “ambitious”. There’s a clear desire to build on the company’s already-strong reputation and become the go-to expert for client organisations.

He continues: “We’re creating a broader set of services because we want to be able to offer clients an end-to-end technology stack they can utilise as a whole or in component parts. And, over time, as clients witness the value we can unlock, they want to invest more of their resources in our solutions. It's essential for us to have demonstrable success stories.”

“IF YOU CAN BENEFIT AS MANY INDIVIDUALS AS POSSIBLE, YOU ALSO BENEFIT COMMUNITIES”

TERRY FRANKLIN EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT, PRODUCTS AND MARKETS, QUALCO

Another aim for QUALCO is to achieve success in different regions. The firm already has a broad footprint among clients with a presence across EMEA, but the plan is to ramp up its direct sales to organisations within new regional markets.

Unsurprisingly, Franklin says QUALCO’s growth strategy also outlines an intention to evolve its offerings, stay relevant and respond to the changing needs of clients adding: “Ultimately, the demands and needs of clients and their customers is what feeds into our product roadmaps, then our solution engagement models and then our go-to-market strategy.”

It also seems inevitable that AI and machine learning get a mention when looking ahead to the future, and Franklin sees this as an area that will continue to evolve at QUALCO.

“We want to make sure we can accurately predict customer circumstances and preferences and use that knowledge to build technology solutions that better engage customers, creating that one-toone feeling,” he says. “By better serving our clients’ customers in the manner that they prefer, we build enduring solutions that will deliver value for many years to come.”

The leader in luxury electric vehicles

Barely a decade into the popularisation of electric vehicles, Faraday Future is launching the first ultra-tech luxury electric vehicle: meet the FF 91

WRITTEN BY: CHARLIE KING

PRODUCED BY: TOM LIVERMORE

Prashant Gulati is the esteemed Vice President of Strategy at Faraday Future. Now in his seventh year with the company, he handles the entirety of its strategic roadmap, which includes overseeing the business plan, mobility initiatives, manufacturing strategy, and directing fundraising efforts.

Fundraising is a key part of Gulati’s role: “My proudest professional achievement has been co-leading the public offering, which helped the company raise more than $1bn through a listing on NASDAQ,” he says.

With over 20 years of success in the technology and automotive industries, Gulati is an accomplished executive with a track record of scaling businesses. He has successfully led a public offering and held leadership roles to drive growth and expansion at several companies globally. In recognition of his industry contributions, Gulati was selected for the coveted Business Insider list of EV Industry Power Players.

Gulati holds a bachelor's degree in computer science and an MBA from the Indian School of Business.

Having grown up in India, Gulati has always had a deep affinity for the environment. This draw of environmental stewardship was heightened when Gulati and his wife were expecting their first child. “I had a sense of urgency to contribute to technology that could help slow climate change and create a better world for our children to grow up in,” he explained.

“I explored numerous fields, including renewable energy, smart grids and energy storage, before focusing on EVs and finding

Faraday Future. I immediately clicked with the company as it had such a bold vision and fit the environmentally-focused technological approach I was seeking. My journey into the auto industry has been quite unusual – almost accidental.”

Faraday Future: driving the EV industry

“Climate change is the defining challenge of our time, and transportation is one of the largest contributors to it,” says Gulati. “At the same time, the world cannot slow down. We need more growth, more productivity, more time to commit to our passions. So, at Faraday Future, we've been working on the intersection of these problems - of clean mobility and climate change on one

“We were founded with the mission to help people live, move, and breathe more freely – and that's one of the things that drives a lot of us”

PRASHANT GULATI VICE PRESIDENT OF STRATEGY, FARADAY FUTURE

hand, and helping people lead productive, connected lives on the other.”

Faraday Future has taken the first step towards achieving that mission by building the FF 91, which Gulati believes is the most connected, comfortable, and technologically advanced electric car in the world. The company achieved start of production of the FF 91 in California and plans to sell it through a direct sales model in its dual home bases of the US and China.

“The vision of the company is much more than building and selling electric cars, though,” Gulati tells us. “We want to engage our users, build a community, and offer internet and AI services throughout the vehicle lifecycle.”

PRASHANT GULATI

TITLE: VICE PRESIDENT OF STRATEGY

INDUSTRY: MOTOR VEHICLE MANUFACTURING

LOCATION: UNITED STATES

Prashant Gulati is the esteemed Vice President of Strategy at Faraday Future. Now in his seventh year with the company, he handles the entirety of its strategic roadmap, which includes overseeing the business plan, mobility initiatives, manufacturing strategy, and directing fundraising efforts.

With over 20 years of success in the technology and automotive industries, Gulati is an accomplished executive with a track record of scaling businesses. He has successfully led a public offering and held leadership roles to drive growth and expansion at several companies globally. In recognition of his industry contributions, Gulati was selected for the coveted Business Insider list of EV Industry Power Players.

Gulati holds a bachelor's degree in computer science and an MBA from the Indian School of Business.

BRINGING IDEAS TO LIFE FROM CONCEPT TO CONSUMER

WE DESIGN. WE ENGINEER. WE MANUFACTURE.

Achieve your product goals with JVIS

Our advanced electrical and lighting, battery storage, and thermal management solutions are the key to turning your ideas into reality. Trust us to provide smart solutions for your global technology needs and deliver results beyond your expectations.

Contact us today and let’s bring your product vision to life together.

JVIS USA: BRINGING IDEAS TO LIFE IN THE EV INDUSTRY

In an exclusive interview, Jason Murar, President and CEO of JVIS USA, discusses how JVIS is pioneering the EV industry while supporting Faraday Future

JVIS USA is a world-renowned manufacturing leader boasting unrivalled proficiency across both design and engineering. Blending state-of-the-art technologies with vertically-integrated processes, the company guides a concept from the initial sketch to the final product launch, and everything in between.

By prioritising innovation, JVIS has established itself as a leader in the continuous shift towards electric vehicles (EVs). It specialises in delivering technology and components uniquely optimised for EVs, continuously seeking out novel concepts, technologies, and procedures.

JVIS has also played a vital role in supporting Faraday Future (FF) to unveil their vehicles to the market. Jason Murar, President and CEO of JVIS USA, explains:

“We’ve assisted FF in almost every facet, from the initial product development – where we identified key product innovations for their consumers – all the way through to the actual testing and validation, in compliance with automotive standards for those components and the continuous supply of critical components used in their vehicles.

Advancements in the EV market

Armed with impressive electrical solutions, JVIS employs the latest technology, such as capacitive touch surfaces and smart panels.

Murar says: “In the EV market, you see a lot of change with smart panels, which are now highly integrated into both the exterior and interior of vehicles.”

JVIS is committed to leading the development of the EV industry, particularly as it plays a large part in the company’s growth. “Our customers see how we’re taking static panels and turning them into functional panels, giving expanded use of the vehicle,” Murar explains. “These components include sensors and software to increase the user’s experience, such as soft-close doors and ambient lighting.

“JVIS’s continued investment in innovation and growth will enable us to make significant contributions to this dynamic field. If you are looking to turn your product ideas into reality, contact us today to learn more about how JVIS technology can help.”

Throwing out the rule book in electric vehicle development

Faraday Future started from scratch, taking a “clean sheet approach” to building electric cars. Faraday Future’s technology innovations include its proprietary Variable Platform Architecture (VPA), propulsion system, and Internet, Autonomous Driving, and Intelligence (I.A.I.) systems. The company has approximately 660 patents across these areas.

“So far, the company has invested billions of dollars in creating industry-leading product and technology,” recounts Gulati. “Building cars is a capital-intensive business, and we've had our ups and downs.

“The way I would describe the ethos of the company is one of perseverance and tenacity; one of never, ever giving up in the service of our mission.”

FF 91: A new species reformatting the future of mobility

The FF 91 has been designed as an all-ability car, possessing the handling of a sedan, the space, reliability, and comfort of an SUV, and the top-level performance and driving dynamics of a sports car.

“A lot of people liken it to a Rolls-Royce, with increased comfort, connectivity, and performance ” Gulati tells us – and the statistics certainly speak for themselves.

video conferencing, and watch movies or live sports without driver distraction”

“There's a lot that has gone into developing and thinking about the design, driving experience, and the overall user experience” says Gulati who is incredibly passionate about the vehicle.

“There is no electric car in our segment right now – competing with Rolls-Royce,

Bentley, Maybach – so we're quite excited about being the first EV of our kind, and we think it's going to redefine industry standards. The first ultra-tech luxury electric vehicle.”

Faraday Future: the leader in luxury electric vehicles

WATCH NOW

“We are building what we believe is the most connected, most comfortable, most technologicallyadvanced electric car in the world: we call it the FF 91”

PRASHANT GULATI VICE PRESIDENT OF STRATEGY, FARADAY FUTURE

The technology under the bonnet Faraday Future describes the technology behind the FF 91 within three pillars:

1. Variable Platform Architecture

“Think of it like a Lego,” Gulati explains: “You can change the size of the platform and build different vehicles of different sizes for different purposes. You can put different motor and powertrain configurations. This skateboard-like platform approach enables us to build multiple vehicles on the same platform, reduce time to cost, time to market, and more.”

2. In-house Propulsion Technology

Faraday Future has developed a proprietary inverter design and propulsion system. The drive units are fully integrated with the inverter, and transmission and control unit to enable leading horsepower, efficiency, and acceleration.

3. Internet, Autonomous Driving, and Intelligence (I.A.I.)

“Our software, internet, and AI development is the most important of these pillars,” says Gulati. “That's where the company shines compared to all of our competition.” Faraday Future’s commitment to these technologies supports the user experience in the car, both practically and luxuriously, ensuring seamless user experience through different elements, one of which is advanced voice control to manage complex queries without driver or passenger distraction.

FF 91

The FF 91 has:

• 3 motors

• 1,050 horsepower

• 0 to 60 in 2.27 seconds

• Class leading EPA and CARB certified range of 381 miles

• Charge Time (20-80%): 25 min @ 200kW DC Fast Charge

• Overall length: 5,250mm/ 206.7in

• Up to three 5G modems and a newly developed operating system, allowing customers to use apps and stay fully connected

• Industry-leading 49 inches of rear seat legroom

• 60-degrees rear seat recline in NASA-inspired, zero-gravity seats

Supply chain management

Faraday Future invested a lot in creating its own technology. “Some companies basically source parts and build a car, essentially becoming assemblers,” explains Gulati. “At Faraday Future, we've invested a lot of time and capital on creating our own technology.”

Faraday Future has strong partnerships with, and relies on, key suppliers to ensure the FF 91 is completed in a timely manner and with the high quality its users will demand. The company was affected to a lesser degree by supply chain issues during the pandemic because of planned low volumes at launch, and because many of the parts are created by suppliers uniquely

for the FF 91, and so we don't compete with others for those. Notwithstanding, the company has taken lessons from that period and gotten even more diligent about planning and ordering across the supply chain.

In terms of scale, Faraday Future employs 590 people across the US and China, and with its production plant in California the company will ultimately be capable of producing approximately 10,000 vehicles per year. The current manufacturing setup is asset light, and the supply chain is built with expansion in mind: if needed, the company has a contract manufacturing partner for this anticipated expansion, allowing early-stage flexibility.

What does the future hold for Faraday Future?

“The company's DNA is completely global,” Gulati says: “We've designed and defined the product with an abundance of cutting-edge technology to cater to a global audience.”

The company is headquartered in Los Angeles, where much of the engineering and manufacturing takes place, but it also has roots in China – home to a Faraday Future engineering centre. The FF 91 will be initially launched in the US, followed by China, before being launched globally.

Distribution and beyond

“Looking to the next 18 months, we are very focused on the FF 91 production, sales, and

“Climate change is the defining challenge of our time, and transportation is one of the largest contributors to it”

PRASHANT GULATI VICE PRESIDENT OF STRATEGY, FARADAY FUTURE

deliveries,” Gulati explains. “We're going to be scaling our operation, ramping up supply chain – that's the key focus area making the FF 91 successful.

Gulati believes that the value chain disruption we’re seeing now is going to continue, not only accelerating on the product and technology front, but on the sales side, too, as industry sales volumes increase.

“In the distribution model, quite a few OEMs have expressed a desire to sell directly to customers” Gulati explains.

“For the industry, this transition away from ICE (Internal Combustion Engine) vehicles is going to impact sales economics. Today, auto dealers mostly earn margins from selling auto parts and services, and financial services, and that's going to change. Maintenance and parts and services replacement in EVs is far less than ICE vehicles. So, we expect to see changes on the business side as well as on the product and technology side.”

Despite this value chain disruption and anticipated global economic slowdown, Gulati himself doesn’t forecast a slowdown for Faraday Future, citing research from McKinsey that shows the luxury vehicle market (vehicles $150,000 and above) is projected to grow significantly over the next 10 years.

FF 91: The mould for the future

Looking to the longer-term future, Faraday Future has ensured built-in capability to add further models to its Variable Platform Architecture.

“We have plans for our next model –we call it the FF 81 – which will share 60% commonality of parts with the FF 91,” Gulati says. “Although, of course, such future developments are dependent on a number of things, including fundraising.”

What is the future for the electric vehicle industry?

To promote long-term growth and success within the electric vehicle industry, Gulati says the focus is – and should remain –on batteries, reducing cost of materials, recycling, and developing new chemistries.

“Since 2010, the price of batteries has dropped significantly – until about 2019,” Gulati recounts. “In the last few years, battery and raw material prices have risen again because of supply chain disruptions, due to the pandemic.”

The second focus that Gulati expects of the industry is in EV infrastructure.

“We are seeing significant regulatory support to promote the transition to electric vehicles,” he says. “Governments are allocating a lot of capital and policy support towards education, charging infrastructure, and local sourcing of electric cars, so we anticipate that will continue.”

The future is on its way – and it looks electric.

“We need more growth, more productivity, and more time to commit to our passions”

PRASHANT GULATI VICE PRESIDENT OF STRATEGY, FARADAY FUTURE

NYCBS electronic records and robot processes help heal humans

WRITTEN BY: GEORGE HOPKIN

PRODUCED BY: TOM VENTURO

Sean Riley,

Chief

Information Officer of New York Cancer & Blood Specialists (NYCBS), talks about how technology can help save lives and build a business

Acreative attitude to technology and growth has helped New York Cancer & Blood Specialists (NYCBS) expand its state-of-the-art services to communities in Long Island, the five boroughs of New York City, and Upstate New York. Ongoing work with electronic medical records (EMRs) and Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is allowing the health company to automate tasks and reduce costs as they improve and enhance their multidisciplinary approach to healthcare.

NYCBS is a world-class, patient-centred cancer care practice dedicated to bringing medical care to communities close to home. The practice’s multidisciplinary team of physicians, surgeons, nutritionists, social workers, and other health specialists work together to provide personalised care plans that focus on the mind, body, and soul. With convenient locations across Long Island,the five boroughs of New York City, and Upstate New York, patients are always close to their support network.

The practice’s commitment to providing the best possible patient experience is at the heart of its philosophy. The staff is dedicated to delivering care with kindness and compassion, and is always striving for a world free of cancer and blood disorders. With over 50 clinical trials and state-ofthe-art technology services, the practice is dedicated to advancing medical knowledge and finding new cures.

NYCBS electronic records and robot processes help heal humans

NYCBS’s Chief Information Officer Sean Riley has been a key player in the practice’s journey to provide the best possible patient experience through technology. He joined the company when a single person represented the IT department. Since then, he has witnessed the department’s growth and says, “technology has evolved from a nice-to-have to an essential component in patient-centred care.”

The company has experienced tremendous growth and has gone on to form partnerships with hospital systems, effectively turning their competitors into allies and contributing to their combined growth.

“ONBOARDING NEW STAFF OR PATIENTS IS A GOOD EXAMPLE OF A PROCESS THAT CAN BE AUTOMATED”

SEAN RILEY CISO, NY CANCER & BLOOD SPECIALISTS

SEAN RILEY

TITLE: CIO

LOCATION: UNITED STATES

Sean Riley is Chief Information Officer. He is in charge of all of the company’s information technology systems and Integrations. Sean has been part of the rapidly growing company since 2014. Prior to his role at New York Cancer & Blood Specialists, Sean was a former technician/digital marketer for Developmental Disabilities Institute (DDI). Sean graduated from SUNY New Paltz, where he majored in Computer Science with a minor in Mathematics. Sean is currently enrolled in the CTO Program at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

Sean is an accomplished volleyball player and has won several gold medals in the National Champions and the Empire State Games.

“When I joined, the IT department was one person, two days a week for seven locations,” says Riley. “We now have 96 locations and an IT staff of 20. In the beginning, I was the Director of Digital Marketing and took over IT. We had older equipment and devised a game plan for each office based on size and infrastructure. We’ve been able to scale with this model, which has been helpful as we’ve grown.”

On-site services prioritise safety and convenience

NYCBS ensures patients come first, offering a wide range of on-site services prioritising safety and convenience, all provided by

EXECUTIVE BIO

SEAN RILEY CISO, NY CANCER & BLOOD SPECIALISTS

a team of skilled caregivers. They believe everyone deserves access to the medical care they need, which is why they offer financial solutions to those most in need. Their physicians, nurses, and support staff are dedicated to delivering the best care without any barriers or bureaucracy, working around the clock to ensure patients receive the help they need.

A multidisciplinary approach is taken to cancer treatment, which often includes surgical, medical, and/or radiation oncology. With numerous clinical locations throughout their network, patients can receive all their

treatments in one place, making their cancer journey as smooth and stress-free as possible.

Over 50% of cancer patients will undergo radiation therapy; the experts at NYCBS use the latest high-energy radiation beams to destroy cancer cells effectively. They offer various forms of radiation, and their radiation oncologists have the knowledge to choose the best therapy based on the patient’s specific needs.

To help patients throughout their entire treatment journey, NYCBS has created the Patient Health & Wellness Program. This programme provides patients with the tools to improve their mental, nutritional, and physical health – including psychology, nutrition, social work, chronic care management, physical therapy, and occupational therapy.

“PEOPLE FEAR JOB LOSSES, BUT WE SEE IT AS A WAY TO FREE UP STAFF TO TAKE ON NEW TASKS”

The NYCBS lab is an independent, full-service clinical and anatomical pathology laboratory that provides diagnostic excellence. Their staff of experienced, board-certified pathologists and technologists use the latest state-ofthe-art technology to provide world-class care to their patients.

Research advances the field of medicine

NYCBS’s clinical research focuses on advancing the field of medicine to better provide for the medical needs of patients in the future. A clinical study is either a privately- or publicly-funded clinical research project whereby people volunteer to participate and, in doing so, contribute to our understanding of medicine.

There are two types of clinical research studies: a clinical trial is clinical research that focuses on evaluating the effectiveness and/or safety of medical devices, diagnostic procedures, products, and medications in addressing the medical needs of people. An observational study is an investigative effort to collect data on health-related participant outcomes.

In an observational study, as opposed to a clinical trial, people are not assigned specifically to an intervention – or interventions – such as a specific treatment regimen. Instead, participants receive routine medical care.

Community oncology means ensuring patients receive medical care of the highest quality, making medical care accessible and affordable to them in their own communities. By conducting clinical research in the community setting, NYCBS has a unique opportunity to give patients not only the individualised attention of their care team but also to give them the additional resources that come with a specially-trained

Patchogue machine

research team to attend to their needs and guide them through their treatment journey.

Clinical research in a community setting provides the best of both clinical research and community-based medicine; that is, opportunities to access the most cuttingedge therapeutics while maintaining the convenience of allowing patients to remain close to their homes, families, and larger support networks in the process.

Automation frees up staff to take on new tasks

A key aspect of the practice’s approach to technology is the use of electronic medical records (EMRs), which all clinicians use to store patient clinical information. The practice uses Flatiron’s OncoEMR, which is flexible for oncology and has all the different pieces of information needed for the treatment of various diseases.

“All clinicians use electronic health records applications to store clinical information for patients. Oncology-focused EMRs like Flatiron’s OncoEMR are used by more than half of private practices,” says Riley. “OncoEMR provides flexibility for oncology and has all the different pieces of oncology, as it’s not just one organ, and there are different treatments for different diseases.”

OncoEMR helps relieve daily pressure for oncologists and care teams through intuitive workflows, accessible data, and by automating tasks. This frees up staff so they can do their best work. NYCBS also uses Flatiron’s research tools, including OncoTrials and the OncoEMR Research Tab, to support research operations. Powered by clinical data and machine learning algorithms, these tools help research-focused practices like NYCBS integrate research into everyday care and reduce the operational burdens of running clinical trials. These tools also help by

NY CANCER & BLOOD SPECIALISTS

finding trial-eligible patients more easily and improving data management practices.

The practice has also adopted Robotic Process Automation (RPA) to automate certain tasks and reduce costs. Riley believes that RPA is the first step to freeing up staff to take on new tasks and reducing costs. The practice follows HIPAA rules and regulations and has measures to ensure patient data security, such as yearly security risk audits and two-factor authentication.

“I THINK IT’S IMPORTANT TO COME UP WITH SOLUTIONS BY THINKING OUTSIDE THE BOX”

SEAN RILEY CISO, NY CANCER & BLOOD SPECIALISTS

“AI is a trend everyone is talking about, and is a crucial trend for companies seeking to reduce costs and free up staff for new tasks so they can instead focus on patient care”, says Riley. “Although some people may fear job losses, RPA can automate tasks such as data entry and onboarding new staff. It is estimated that around 15% of jobs can be automated, making RPA a valuable tool for streamlining operations.”

Digital patient engagement has become increasingly important in the delivery of patient-centred care. By leveraging technology, NYCBS can provide a supportive environment that helps patients and their families through every step of their journey.

“The big hospital systems have all the pieces in place, including a patient portal and a system that collects demographic and clinical information,” says Riley. “Small healthcare facilities or private practices may use different companies for practice management and EMR. However, digital patient engagement is becoming more important, and patients expect to have access to their information and be able to communicate with their healthcare provider through a patient portal.”

Data security is important, especially in medical work, and Riley says there are many measures in place, such as following HIPAA rules and regulations, yearly security risk audits, and knowing where the data is going.

“EMRs and practice management systems are mostly in the cloud these days, so data security is not completely in our control,” says Riley. “Security has become a big part of HIPAA, and with the rise in cybersecurity prices due to breaches, it has become even more important.”

Though Riley comes from a digital marketing background, he says some qualities and experience have been useful in his new career in technology management. “Solving problems creatively has been helpful,” says Riley. “I think it’s important to come up with solutions by thinking outside the box. There are always problems, but if you can work on figuring out how to solve them, it’s tremendous.”

Transforming a digital media landscape

WRITTEN BY: ILKHAN OZSEVIM

PRODUCED BY: BEN MALTBY

Fabrizio Campanale is Senior Director of Entertainment and In-Home Connectivity at Sunrise.

In this role, he’s responsible for the video and connectivity platforms and services for Sunrise customers, serving over 1.5mn TV users and leading the deployment of new products in the Entertainment and In-Home connectivity domain.

Campanale’s role involves managing – alongside his team – the local video network infrastructure, which consists of the engineering and operations that cover the collecting, processing, and distribution of video signals over the entire network, all the way up to the end of the value chain where it lands in the home of their customers. This in-home connectivity suite comprises the physical set-top-box or the app used by smart device customers.

Each element of the above falls in the remit of Campanale and his team, who are also accountable for the in-home connectivity hardware and software products, including all modem and Wi-Fi extenders used by their customers through multiple types of network – all aiming to have optimal Wi-Fi or internet experience – as well as the best interoperability between TV and in-home internet services.

Professional Journey

Campanale’s professional journey at Sunrise began 10 years ago in UPC, when he led several innovation programmes in Switzerland’s video and connectivity domain, such as the introduction of one of the first television “replay” services in Europe, the full analogue-to-digital TV switchover in Switzerland, and the introduction of the first 1Gbit/s modem, also in Switzerland.

Sunrise, the largest private telco provider in Switzerland, recently underwent a fundamental transformation; Senior Director Fabrizio Campanale reveals all

He attained responsibility of the engineering department as VP for Network Engineering, and then for the Entertainment and In-Home unit – the latter being the function he retained in the newly-designed organisation following UPC’s merger with Sunrise, leading the integration of the video and in-home platforms for the two merged customer bases.

Over the years, Campanale has had the opportunity to manage both commercial and organisational transformational initiatives, broadening the understanding of the business value chain alongside the customer journey and experience.

Before the UPC-Sunrise merger – except for a brief spell in a small, dynamic Swiss telco enterprise – Campanale spent the rest of his career in semiconductors at Philips, NXP, and STMicroelectronics.

Sunrise’s services

Sunrise is the largest private telecommunications provider in Switzerland, strives to be the most innovative, customer-friendly telecoms company in the country.

“A superior customer experience is our obsession”

FABRIZIO CAMPANALE SENIOR DIRECTOR ENTERTAINMENT AND IN-HOME CONNECTIVITY, SUNRISE

As you would expect from a telco, they cover the full range of telecommunications – the key difference is the quality and integration of multiple connectivity services. Providing award-winning mobile voice and data, landline voice, landline internet, and IPTV (internet protocol television) services to residential customers, business customers, and other carriers across Switzerland, it utilises an integrated nationwide landline network and its Swiss mobile network.

The company is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Liberty Global, a world leader in converged broadband, video, and mobile communications that provides over 85mn connections – fixed and mobile – to customers in various countries, readying its networks for 10Gbps and beyond.

FABRIZIO CAMPANALE

TITLE: SENIOR DIRECTOR ENTERTAINMENT AND IN-HOME CONNECTIVITY

Fabrizio Campanale is responsible for the

EXECUTIVE BIO

Entertainment and In-Home Connectivity platforms for Sunrise, managing with his team the product deployment as well as the infrastructure and operations, serving more than 1.5 million TV and Connectivity users and aiming for the best connected-entertainment customer experience in Switzerland. Leading the In-Home connectivity, he drives also the introduction and operation of Modems and Wi-Fi extenders and the adoption of cloud operated dynamic Wi-Fi, keeping the optimal Interoperability between TV and In-Home internet services. In his former role as VP Engineering in UPC Switzerland he has a track record of product launches including 1Gbps modem and the first RDK settop-box in Switzerland. Before joining UPC/ Sunrise he held various roles in the telecommunication, electronics and semiconductors industry and he is author and co-author of 16 patents.

Sunrise: Transforming a digital media landscape

What’s the relationship between UPC Schweiz GmbH and Sunrise GmbH?

Sunrise and UPC became one company in 2021 through one of the largest mergers in recent Swiss history. The two are now perfectly placed to meet the changing habits of their customers, perfectly complementing each other as customers benefit from the fastest 5G network from Sunrise combined with the extensive fixed Gigabit network of UPC.

“We are a leading provider of communication and entertainment with a focus on innovation, untethered connectivity, personalised entertainment and digitisation,” says Campanale. “We offer a wide range of broadband, TV, mobile, and telephony services to almost two million customers.”

“The usage of AI – or, more appropriately, ML and big-data – is definitively taking-off as part of the industry transformation”

FABRIZIO CAMPANALE SENIOR DIRECTOR ENTERTAINMENT AND IN-HOME CONNECTIVITY, SUNRISE

WATCH NOW

“This includes an extensive range of TV channels, seven days of replay, and thousands of films and series available on-demand, plus the MySports channel and online platform esports.ch, which offer the best sports entertainment.”

Sunrise’s transformation journey

The last time Mobile Magazine spoke to Sunrise was two years ago – at the beginning of their integration. There’s been a substantial volume of change and challenges in the period since.

Campanale says: “In these two years, we have undergone a successful transformational journey, which, no doubt, also came with its fair share of difficulties.

“The challenges, as in every transformation, lie in the relationship

between integration and customer satisfaction, and in ensuring continuity of business and operations.”

Since the beginning of the merger, Sunrise set and embraced clear and ambitious targets to boot-strap the new company in the best way possible without losing momentum, while doubling-down on the competitive advantage brought about by the corporate unification.

“And we are keeping our promises in moving our customers towards the best-inclass platform. It’s challenging, but we keep growing and fulfilling this ambition.”

As an example of these challenges, Campanale points to Sunrise accompanying customers in their journeys towards the new product portfolio, all while maintaining the

value – inspired by people

Harness the power of the CROWD

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Customer specific use cases:

• User Experience Tests

• Load and Performace Tests

• Functional Tests

• Evaluation

• User Experience Monitoring

company’s promises of quality as a leader and provider of both telco services.

“A superior customer experience is our obsession,” says Campanale. “We are aware that asking our customers to adapt to a new product, even if with more value, can prove to be cumbersome.”

“Equally, bringing the two organisations together and ensuring that they work as one team; merging different systems, processes, and cultures is also no easy feat. This was even more difficult during the pandemic lockdowns, since there have been teams that only met physically for the first time a few months ago, following almost two years of working together remotely.”

Collaboration platforms and the digitalisation of the company processes had been key in this phase. “Our IT did an incredible effort to sustain this need – but not without a good degree of flexibility from all the teams to navigate the turbulent period.”

Campanale points out that, during these operations, it was paramount to harmonise the network infrastructures, service platforms, and product. A concrete example he gives concerns the migration of all Sunrise customers into the Liberty Global/UPC entertainment platform.

“We introduced a new TV set-top-box, which is ‘Full-IP’ and catered for those Sunrise customers who didn’t have the traditional cable/hybrid access connection beforehand.

“In this way, this new customer base can now benefit from more mature technology, and Sunrise can have a single harmonised middleware and back office serving the entire base. This not only brings state of the art technology to the new customers, but also allows for a more efficient operation and customer support, providing them the same in-home technology.”

“Sunrise and UPC became one company in 2021 through one of the largest mergers in recent Swiss history”

FABRIZIO CAMPANALE SENIOR DIRECTOR ENTERTAINMENT AND IN-HOME CONNECTIVITY, SUNRISE

These mergers bring revised infrastructure, capacity, planning, and scaling opportunities, forcing even more attention in change management and operations. This helps to circumvent network interventions that could have a detrimental effect on the customer experience.

“It is impressive for a country like ours,” says Campanale, “to be able to eventually connect and operate millions of customers. Every single mistake or operational hiccup could potentially leave a significant number of customers impacted. For us, it’s a constant focus, while investing in increasing the network performances, to keep the infrastructure

FABRIZIO CAMPANALE SENIOR DIRECTOR ENTERTAINMENT AND IN-HOME CONNECTIVITY, SUNRISE

“It is impressive for a country like ours to eventually be able to connect and operate more than a million customers”

constantly stable and conceive the customer support in as smooth a manner as possible.”

At Sunrise, experts and entire teams work day-in and day-out to check, fix, and improve every single case; to train agents; adjust processes; conduct call-backs; and support customers through their entire journey. Sunrise not only takes the customer experience seriously, but throws it up in their firmament as the guiding light of their operations.

Adapting to a world of digitalisation

“The world of technology and entertainment is constantly evolving, and it’s important for us to keep up with the changes.”

Sunrise runs an infrastructure-based business that provides also third-party services, particularly in the entertainment domain.

“However, the TV service consumption model is transitioning from traditional to a more advanced, making us an increasingly prominent aggregator of media content, streamlining the consumer experience.”

“That’s why the need of strong bundled offers in the FMC (fixed mobile convergence) market and the value of a competitive entertainment offer as part of the bundle, to drive the actual uptake.”

Increased consumption of OTT content & video-on-demand driving IPTV growth

The global IPTV (Internet Protocol Television) market is expected to reach US$150bn by 2025.

As a telecoms operator, Sunrise is playing a key role in its growth, offering bundled packages of voice, video, and data services to their customers. The business pressure is multifaceted coming from big tech providers, DTC streaming services as well as the growing importance of Smart TVs and streaming devices as viewing gateways for OTT (over-the-top media services).

Partnerships between service providers and content libraries are also contributing to the growth of IPTV services. The IPTV sector is witnessing mergers and acquisitions as a relevant opportunity of this expanding market, as for instance Sunrise's collaboration with CH Media.

In other words, media consumption is increasingly digitising and moving netward. “Aggregation has become both an opportunity and competitive at same time,” says Campanale, “Due to the shift of the pay TV market toward a supermarket model.”

Retailers agencies and value-added services

In the traditional Pay TV model, service providers get licence content from suppliers and offer it to customers through predefined packages.

However today, operators are transforming more in a supermarket for third-party apps embedded in the set top-box and platform.

“That’s why the value-added service is fundamental,” says Campanale. “The more products are bundled, the more we are offering good value for money to consumers. Another example is the development of AVOD (advertising video on demand) – or personalisation in general.”

Campanale says that on the technology side, the challenge surrounds the evolution of the platform: “We are strong on RDK, but it doesn’t mean we don’t look at the evolution of Android or SmartTV (such as Tizen and WebOS).

“The increase in Smart TVs and streaming hardware devices is putting pressure on technology and innovation, as well as Big tech companies such as Amazon, Google and Apple on the home ecosystem.”

Campanale says: “We are facing these challenges adopting for instance a modular frontend strategy in the entertainment development, covering multiple platforms

in a way that the common frontend solution can work across different devices, such as iOS, Android, web, Smart TVs, and STBs.

“This allows us to benefit from the group R&D and deliver a seamless experience in the different markets and brands, across different platforms , while possibly containing costs and improving time-to-market.”

The role of data and analytics in digitisation

All of this is ultimately connected to the digital transformation that Sunrise is undergoing, which is changing the way people connect, watch and create content – and, of course, TV operators need to adapt

to changing consumer demands.

Now that consumers expect better content, bundling, and more accessible delivery, as well as quick resolution of issues, it only stands to reason that TV operators can use analytics to anticipate and correct problems before they arise, offering a continually more responsive service.

The road ahead for TV operators involves embracing digital transformation and finding ways to use technology to meet evolving consumer demands. By focusing on lifetime customer value and using data to offer a more responsive service, operators can quickly develop a competitive edge.

2021

Year Founded

2780 Employees

The global IPTV (Internet Protocol Television) market is expected to reach US$150-200bn by 2025

“If we look at the way entertainment and media content is consumed today, we need to guarantee smooth accessibility to content everywhere.”

This consumption model, according to Campanale, poses two key questions:

• Are we providing our customers with the best connectivity service to access their content?

• In our technology stack, can we offer value through aggregation?

Service as an experience

Again, this is where the value-added service comes into play. Bundles both attract and retain customers.

“If we talk about customer experience, then we need to look at how remote monitoring and how digitalisation can be used to achieve it. We have intense investments in prioritising the customer experience throughout their individual journeys.

“In the technology space, in entertainment and connectivity services, we talk about how the ability to remotely

monitor the service equipment is becoming increasingly important for businesses, with remote connectivity being a key trend. We need to look at ‘service as an experience’ operating model, with the entire business chain paying particular attention to this shift.

“The usage of AI – or, more appropriately, ML and big-data – is definitively taking-off as part of the industry transformation: we collect millions of anonymous customer data points and elaborate correlation to understand where and how to improve the customer experience.

“But we aren’t yet through this journey as we are an incumbent, and we need to find the right balance between serving the customers and business continuity and operational excellence, while transforming. The good thing is that we have several teams and initiatives, at both a local and a global scale, and it’s clear there is no way back; keeping momentum will bring us to the full transformation.

“This is also valid for the way we work and operate, from enabling the agents to better serve and support (pre-emptive diagnosis and interventions) to our internal processes. Just think about the enterprise tools or collaborative tools adopting chatbots”

Concluding, Campanale says: “The combination of Sunrise and UPC is now well ahead in its journey and is forging its own identity as a company and as a postpandemic modern telco operator. We are still working hard to get ahead in this journey and provide the best product and service to our customers.”

BOOHOO GROUP

A N D THE COST O F

CY BERSEC I NFRASTRUCTURE

WRITTEN BY: MARCUS LAW

PRODUCED BY: HARRY PALMER

CURI T Y NFRASTRUCTURE

IN

SECURITY EXCELLENCE WITH MANAGING CORPORATE BUDGETS

Founded in the heart of Manchester’s historic textile district in 2006, today Boohoo Group PLC is home to a portfolio of innovative fashion brands targeting style and qualityconscious consumers with up-to-date and inspirational fashion. What started as one brand has grown extensively in the UK and internationally, and today represents a platform of multiple brands servicing customers globally, generating sales in excess of £1bn.

With a total of 13 brands under one group, Boohoo sells its clothing and accessory lines to a wide range of demographics from 18 years old and upwards. “One of the great things about the brand is that it really does cover a lot of ages and a lot of demographics,” explains Dorian Skeete, the group’s Head of Information Security. “Ultimately, we have the ambition to become the number one retail and e-commerce brand in the world.”

A POST-PANDEMIC WORLD, BOOHOO GROUP’S HEAD OF INFORMATION SECURITY, DORIAN SKEETE BALANCES

£1.983bn Group revenue reported in 2022 +14% Increase in revenue from 2021 from £1.745 bn +61% Increase in revenue from 2020 from £1.235 bn

Dorian Skeete

Creating Boohoo Group’s security strategy

Having spent 14 years in roles at the UK government, before consultancy roles including a year at IBM, Skeete has a wide range of experience in the information security field.

Joining Boohoo in June 2022, one of Skeete’s first actions was to create the group’s security strategy, ensuring the delivery of all cybersecurity processes, training programmes, maintenance and growth activities continue to take place at the highest standard.

“One big buzzword for our security strategy at the moment is consolidation,” he explains. “We have quite a complex environment and a number of tech stacks that need protecting in different ways.

“When it came to creating our security strategy, we needed to look at consolidating how we do that, not just in terms of the tooling and technology that we use and the vendors that come with that, but also streamlining our policies and processes and resources to do that across the wider group.”

But as Skeete explains, with 13 brands to think about, achieving this was no easy task. “It wasn’t easy, but it certainly was something that needed to be done,” he comments.

“Don't get me wrong, we're not starting from the bottom, but we certainly do have a journey to navigate in terms of where we are now and where our future state needs to be.”

DORIAN SKEETE HEAD OF INFORMATION SECURITY, BOOHOO GROUP PLC

“ONE BIG BUZZWORD FOR OU R SECURITY STRATEGY AT TH E MOMENT IS CONSOLIDATION ”

The focus on the bottom line

With the focus on the bottom line at the front and centre of every CISO’s mind, especially in a post-pandemic world, continuing to deliver high-quality security programmes while managing a corporate budget is a constant challenge. As Skeete explains, efficiency is key.

“We're all aware of the economic downturn at the moment, the climate that all industries are living in and that brings its own challenges at Boohoo,” he describes. “We don't have a lot of fat to work with, so you have to make sure the resources, the tooling that you are using is used to its utmost, that you're squeezing as much as possible out of all of it.

DORIAN SKEETE

TITLE: HEAD OF INFORMATION SECURITY

COMPANY: BOOHOO GROUP PLC

INDUSTRY: CYBERSECURITY

LOCATION: LONDON, UK

Dorian Skeete is Head of Information Security at Boohoo Group PLC, where he is responsible for Information Security, Data Protection and Privacy across their 13 brands, including household names like Pretty Little Thing, BoohooMAN and Karen Millen. Day to day, Dorian looks after a team of 12, while delivering on a multi-year cybersecurity strategy including advisory for the Boohoo Risk Committee and Board, increasing Information Security capability and professional development of his staff. Prior to Boohoo, Dorian was the IT Security Lead at Advantage Smollan and an Associate Director at Crossword Cybersecurity, while spending his formative years as an RF and Cyber Engineer for the Ministry of Defence.

EXECUTIVE BIO

Boohoo Group and the cost of cybersecurity infrastructure

“One of the ways we do that,” Skeete adds, “is by making sure that our staff are as trained on the tools and the platforms as possible and that we're wasting as little time and effort as possible.”

When it came to creating Boohoo Group’s security strategy, keeping the security team aligned with the business as a whole was key.

“I made sure that the strategy is directly aligned to business objectives,” Skeete explains. “We need to be enabling the business to achieve what it wants to achieve. I know that security has quite a bad rap sometimes of being the department or the capability that always says no, and I want to change that viewpoint, certainly in Boohoo.

“It's not about saying no, but about asking how we can work safely. It's all about teaching that mantra to the staff, who are our key stakeholders around the business, and bringing them on the journey. We have two very good governance structures that we've set up that have representation from the likes of HR and legal to the wider technology group to make sure that we're bringing them on the journey with us.

“It's not about us dictating to them what we think is the best thing to do, but we want it to have a more collaborative approach that we can help guide and transform the business alongside us.”

As Skeete describes, when it comes to the continued delivery of Boohoo’s security programmes, it is crucial to keep the group’s core values in mind.

“A lot of our focus has to be on business as usual, keeping the lights on, making sure revenue's coming in and making sure security is underpinning those core business objectives in terms of making as much money as possible,” Skeete comments.

“But also alongside that is the project work, some of the work streams in the strategy that needs to run in parallel to make sure that we're meeting the goals of continuous improvement as well.

“Doing all of this at scale is certainly not easy,” he explains.

“I've got a diverse, amazing team, multi-skilled in different pillars of information security, but despite that, we do lean on some of the great relationships we have with vendors and suppliers.”

DORIAN SKEETE HEAD OF INFORMATION SECURITY, BOOHOO GROUP PLC

“WE'RE ALL AWARE OF THE ECONOMIC DOWNTURN AT THE MOMENT, THE CLIMATE THAT ALL INDUSTRIES ARE LIVING IN AND THAT BRINGS ITS OWN CHALLENGES AT BOOHOO ”

Partnerships ensuring ongoing success

As Skeete explains, working as a multi-discipline team means it is important for Boohoo Group to work with a range of partners and vendors to ensure continued success.

“Some of our partnerships are relatively new, like in the case of our partnership with SenseOn, but with others we've built up a partnership over a number of years,” he describes. Working collaboratively, in a true partnership, is crucial for Boohoo, ensuring that both sides are singing from the same hymn sheet.

“We don't want this to be just a vendor and customer relationship,” Skeete says. “It really is a partnership and we bring them on the journey with us. Our partners are acutely aware of our strategy, what we're trying to achieve and what their role in achieving that is. This means we're all aligned, and that we're all singing from the same hymn sheet essentially.

“IT'S ALL ABOU T TEACHING THA T MANTRA TO TH E STAFF, WHO AR E OUR KE Y

STAKEHOLDER S AROUND TH E BUSINESS , AN D BRINGING THE M ON THE JOURNE Y ”

DORIAN SKEETE HEAD OF INFORMATION SECURITY, BOOHOO GROUP PLC

“Because we consume lots of different services, that's especially important for us. So for instance, we have a 24/7 security operations centre (SOC) alongside SenseOn. Because of the functions of a SOC, we need to be plugged in and it needs to be a bilateral relationship. We really do push the partnership angle as opposed to just a vendor that we've bought something off of.”

As Skeete explains, Boohoo’s partnerships are vital to the group’s ongoing success.

“To be honest, it would be difficult for the security function to function without them,” he says. “It was something that I was aware of as soon as I joined that partnerships with our external providers are extremely important to the security ecosystem at Boohoo.

“I think one of the other advantages of having that external help and expertise is that not only can we lean on it, but we can use it to help upskill our internal staff so that they can grow in their career and personal development as well. There's lots of great expertise that we have with those partners and they're teaching us things every day. So that's great for my staff.”

Delivery of security strategy

For Skeete and Boohoo Group, the number one priority for the near future is ensuring the business gets through the current economic challenges unscathed, while remaining secure at the same time

“We will also be focused on the delivery of the strategy, the really important work streams that we've got in flight at the moment in terms of implementing some new tooling, gaining consolidation and efficiencies,” Skeete adds. “Looking internally, we will be looking at what processes we can improve. Building up our own information security framework, our own information security risk framework,

feeding that into the new governance levels that we've created and just generally making a much more cybermature organisation.”

Trends such as zero trust are also on the radar for the future, as organisations increasingly face more frequent and sophisticated attacks.

“You can't travel too far without hearing buzzwords like zero trust and that's something that's on our radar too,” Skeete explains. “It seems like every day there is another company that has been hit, either with ransomware or some kind of double-dip data breach. So I see that trend continuing.

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“Ransomware won't just be about encrypting the data that you have,” he adds. “It'll be about extorting companies not only to unencrypt that data, but to stop it from being transmitted and sold to the wider world as well. So I see that being a big thing.”

With generative AI-related threats creating new challenges for security teams, businesses will need to work proactively in future and keep these threats on their radar.

“ChatGPT is a huge buzzword at the moment,” Skeete concludes. “There were initially stories about using it to write malware and so on. I think not just from ChatGPT, but other open source machine learning capabilities, that's got to be

something that's on everyone's radar at the moment and thinking about what we can do to combat that. Malware is such a scalable threat as it is and with AI machine learning, they're only going to add to that.”

DORIAN SKEETE HEAD OF INFORMATION SECURITY, BOOHOO GROUP PLC