Business Chief USA August 2019

HHH USA 

EDITION 

AUGUST 2019 

www.businesschief.com 

PROCUREMENT 

GOES GLOBAL 

Connecting 

the future 

Holistic digital 

transformation 

Inside the tech giant’s transition 

from PC to a data-centric model 

Highest paid CEOs 

City Focus LOS 

ANGELES 

The startups solving 

the housing crisis

FOREWORD 

W 

elcome to the August issue 

of Business Chief USA. 

This month’s cover story features 

semiconductor giant Intel, a company 

driving an industry-wide digital 

transformation and mass migration to 

the cloud. Lisa Davis, Vice President of 

Digital Transformation and 

Scale Solutions, Enterprise 

and Government, in the 

Data Center Group at Intel, 

discusses the company’s 

digital transformation from 

a PC-driven to a datacentric 

organisation. 

Our leadership feature 

focuses on how changing 

consumer expectations and 

technological advancements are 

changing the face of the manufacturing 

industry. Victoria Holt, President and 

CEO of digital manufacturer Protolabs, 

discusses 

the strategies the company is using 

Lisa Davis, 

Intel 

to create and maintain its competitive 

advantage. “We’re in a great position 

to help other manufacturers take a 

look at how they can take advantage 

of IT in their manufacturing processes,” 

Holt says. 

August’s City Focus feature takes a 

close look at Los Angeles, California, 

and some of the startups 

working to solve the city’s 

real estate pain points. 

Elsewhere, Business 

Chief investigates the top 

10 highest-paid CEOs in 

the country. 

Make sure to check out 

our in-depth, exclusive 

features on Armacell, Avaya, the 

City of Phoenix, Dentsu Aegis Network 

and more. 

If you have a story to tell, please email 

harry.menear@bizclikmedia.com 

Enjoy the issue! 

Harry Menear 

03 

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CONTENTS 

14 

Helping enterprises 

realize the power of 

digital transformation 

32 

The changing 

face of digital 

manufacturing 

44 

WHY CORPORATES 

SHOULD LOOK TO 

STARTUPS TO SPUR 

THEIR INNOVATION

54 

WESPORTUS: HOW 

BUSINESS STRATEGY 

CAN REVOLUTIONIZE 

SPORTS SCOUTING 

62 

THE CUSTOMER 

PERSPECTIVE 

HOW CASCADES AND 

SAP PRIORITIZE SUPPLY 

CHAIN SUSTAINABILITY 

70 

City Focus 

LOS ANGELES 

80 

TOP 10 


in North America

CONTENTS 

114 

Steward 

Health Care 

96 

Prysmian 

Group 

144 

Armacell 

130 

Dentsu Aegis 

Network

176 

Gateway 

First Bank 

158 

University of Alabama 

at Birmingham 

204 

Riverstreet 

Networks 

192 

AVAYA

CONTENTS 

236 

Lee Industrial 

Contracting 

218 

City of 

Phoenix 

250 

Simon Fraser 

University 

268 

City of 

Brampton

282 

Huawei 

Technologies 

296 

KPMG 

Canada 

310 

Polaris 

Transportation 

Group 

324 

SSR Mining Inc. 

338 

Ascendant 

Resources

14 

Helping enterprises 

realize the 

power of digital 


WRITTEN BY 

HARRY MENEAR 

PRODUCED BY 

TOM VENTURO 

AUGUST 2019


15

INTEL CORPORATION 

Lisa Davis, Vice President of Digital 

Transformation and Scale Solutions, 

Enterprise and Government, in the 

Data Center Group at Intel, discusses 

the company’s digital transformation 

from PC to data-centric, and the need 

for digital transformations to be both 

holistic and customer driven. 

16 

U 

biquitous digital transformation and mass 

migration towards the cloud has become 

the new reality for the world’s corporations, 

governments, and educational institutions. As data 

increasingly becomes the fuel powering the global 

economy, new methodologies, technologies and 

philosophies need to be developed in order to 

remain marketable –even the industry’s largest 

players are changing their playbooks. Intel, with 

over half a century at the forefront of semiconductor 

innovation, has been a catalyst for some of the 

most significant technology transformations in 

modern history, helping reinvent the way we work 

and play and thrive in the digital era. 

Today, Intel is both helping its diverse ecosystem 

of customers and partners harness the power of 

the digital transformation, while simultaneously 

undergoing its own transformative shift in its 

business focus. “It’s a data-centric world, and Intel 

as an organization is transitioning to harness the 

value that this data provides,” explains Lisa Davis, 


“Intel is moving 

from a PC-centric 

strategy to a 

data-centric one” 

— 

Lisa Davis, 

President of Digital Transformation & Scale 

Solutions, Enterprise & Government, 

Data Center Group, Intel 

17 



18 

“Your company’s 

ability to keep pace 

with the competition 

by leveraging 

technology to 

provide the services, 

capabilities and 

experiences your 

customers expect 

today is paramount” 

— 

Lisa Davis, 




Vice 

President 

and General Manager 

of Digital Transformation 

& Scale Solutions at Intel. “We fully 

recognize the importance of being 

data-centric, to both our business and 

our customers. Leveraging the latest 

technologies that help to move, store 

and process data allows us to serve 

our customers’ needs better.” 

Unlocking the power of Big Data is, 

Davis recognizes, the primary driver 

of Intel and its customers’ digital 

transformation. In the modern world, 

a successful digital transformation is 

the difference between commercial 

viability and being consigned to the 

Wikipedia footnotes of history. “It is 

extremely difficult to compete in today’s 

market using the technologies of 

yesterday,” says Davis. “Your company’s 

ability to keep pace with the competition 

by leveraging technology to provide the 

services, capabilities and experiences 

your customers expect today is 

paramount. The companies that don’t 

do that aren’t likely to survive.” We sat 

down with Davis to discuss her insights, 


CLICK TO WATCH: ‘BEHIND THE SCENES WITH LISA DAVIS: A NEW ERA OF IT’ 

19 

gained from a career in technology 

spanning more than three decades in 

the public and private sectors, into the 

need for ongoing digital transformations 

that are holistic, guided by corporate 

strategy and ultimately driven by 

customer demand. 

Davis’ journey in the public sector 

began as a senior in high school, 

spending her summers throughout 

college working in a Junior Fellowship 

Program at the Lakehurst Naval Air 

Engineering Center. “They were trying 

to recruit engineers to come to work 

for the US Government,” she recalls. 

“I spent 26 years, after graduating from 

Syracuse, working for the US Department 

of Defense. I think I may be one 

of the few people who started as a high 

school senior, as a GS2 – the very 

bottom of the pay scale – and retired 

as a Senior Executive Service Member, 

which is equivalent to a US Admiral or 

General.” Throughout her career with 

the DoD, Davis held almost every job 

in the IT organization, rising from 

a computer programmer, to managing 

help desks services, to managing 

infrastructure systems, to running 

mission control systems, to being 



20 

“Digital transformation 

is ultimately about the 

experiences we create 

for our customers” 

— 

Lisa Davis, 






21


22 

a Deputy CIO and eventually CIO for 

the Counterintelligence Field Activity 

in DOD, and then for the US Marshals 

Service at the Department of Justice. 

In 2012, Davis made the decision 

to leave the public sector and move to 

academia, where she became CIO of 

Georgetown University. “I was intrigued 

by the mission, which was to take an 

institution created in 1789 and continue 

to make it digitally relevant for the 

students of today,” Davis recalls. 

Guiding digital transformations was 

something Davis has specialized in 

during her time in government, and 

soon brought the concept of seamless 

internet connectivity to the Georgetown 

campus. She served at the college 

for a further three years before making 

the move to Intel, taking on her current 

role two years later running the Digital 

Transformation and Scale Solutions 

business, for Enterprise and Government 

customers in the Data Center Group 

at Intel. “What I love about this role 

is that it allows me, having been a 

customer for the majority of my career 

as a CIO, to now be in a position to 


EXECUTIVE PROFILE 

Lisa Davis, Vice President, Data Center 

GroupGeneral Manager, Digital Transformation 

and Scale Solutions, Enterprise and Government 

Lisa Davis is responsible for growing the data center business 

and working alongside enterprise and government CIOs to 

create IT transformation strategies for their organizations. 

Davis joined the Data Center Group from the Intel IT Group 

where she led and developed the IT architecture and 

integrated technology solutions supporting Intel’s world-class 

global supply chain, HR, Finance, and M&A IT. Davis is 

a three-time Chief Information Officer and has led four 

technology transformations over the course of her 30-year 

career in technology. Prior to Intel, Davis served as Chief 

Information Officer (CIO) at Georgetown University, and held 

a variety of technology leadership roles in her 26-year career 

in the Federal Government. As a member of the Senior 

Executive Service she was the CIO of the U.S. Marshals Service 

in the Department of Justice, as well as CIO of the 

Counterintelligence Field Activity in the Department 

of Defense. Throughout her 30-year career in technology, 

Davis has been a champion for women in technology 

and leadership – channeling that passion into leading 

professional development initiatives for women. 

She has served on the board of Mirantis, as well 

as the National Center for Missing and Exploited 

Children and a number of non-profit boards. 

Lisa holds a bachelor’s degree in computer 

engineering from Syracuse University, 

and a master’s degree in human resources 

management from Golden Gate University, 

and is also a Certified Information Systems 

Security Professional (CISSP). 

23 



24 

influence the product roadmap and 

build solutions with Intel’s diverse 

ecosystem of partners that help our 

enterprise customers on their digital 

transformation journey,” enthuses Davis. 

Having run the gamut of public and 

private sector digital transformation 

roles, Davis recognizes that, while 

there are differences between the 

“different flavors of government”, 

academia and the private sector – like 

speed of adoption, budget constraints 

and organizational structure – every 

transformation can be distilled to a few 

core truths. Firstly: “Digital transformation 

is ultimately about the experiences 

we create for our customers, whether 

those customers are the men and 

women of the US Marshals Service, 

or the students, faculty and administration 

of Georgetown University.” 

Unlocking the power of digital 

transformation is, in Davis’ mind, 

essential to providing Intel and its 

partners’ customers with the experiences 

they need. “I manage the global 

business for hybrid multi-cloud, 

artificial intelligence, enterprise 

analytics and cyber security solutions. 

We’re largely driven by figuring out how 

we help our customers move from 


legacy technology environments to 

leveraging cloud technologies. It’s 

about right workload in the right place 

for the right business requirements,” 

says Davis. “Today, our customers are 

managing IT environments that are more 

complex than ever as they manage 

distributed environments that consist 

of workloads or applications sitting 

on-prem and in private clouds, sitting 

out at public clouds, and now on the 

intelligent edge and with many different 

public cloud providers.” 

The complexity and increasingly 

interconnected nature of enterprise 

software and the businesses that 

software supports is at the heart 

of Davis’ second core truth: “Digital 

transformation strategy needs to be 

holistic, because it’s not just about the 

technology,” she insists. “One of the 

first things I ask our customers is what 

their corporate strategy is. Technology 

should be leveraged to help drive the 

overall corporate or government 

strategy of the company. Corporate 

strategy and technology need to be 

connected. Today, every company 

is a technology company.” 

In a landscape where technological 

innovations move from the theoretical 

25 



$70.8bn 

Approximate 

revenue 

1968 

Year founded 

26 

107,100 

Approximate number 

of employees 



27


28 

to the commonplace at head-spinning 

speeds, it is a common mistake for 

companies to latch onto every new 

development, implement it quickly, 

and then try to figure out the business 

case later. “Don’t digitally transform for 

the sake of technology,” warns Davis. 

“I digitally transform businesses to help 

them compete and remain marketable. 

When we talk about transformation, 

it’s about a connection to your corporate 

strategy. It’s also about a data 

strategy because ultimately I want to 

modernize and help transform so I can 

leverage the data within my company 

to drive insights for the business.” 

One new Intel technology that’s 

playing a key role in harnessing 

increased amounts of data for more 

rapid insights is Intel Optane DC 

Persistent Memory. In development 

for the past 10 years, Intel Optane DC 

Persistent Memory represents a 

re-architecting of the memory storage 

hierarchy. “We’ve created a new 

memory pool that is non-volatile, unlike 

RAM, and delivers more capacity and 

better TCO,” explains Davis. “A great 

use case for Optane is in in-memory 

databases like SAP Hana. SAP has 

been a key innovative partner in 


29 


strategy needs to be 

holistic, because it’s 

not just about the 

technology” 

— 

Lisa Davis, 






leveraging this new technology, which 

allows us to put large amounts of data 

in memory, next to the CPU, to solve 

the toughest business problems for the 

company. That’s the power of this new 

technology.” Ultimately, the product will 

help Intel and its customers navigate 

the exponentially growing ocean of data 

covering the world, and draw insights 

that will drive customer satisfaction and 

help determine where the next stage 

of digital transformation leads. 

“I remember sitting in budget 

committees where people would ask 

me when the ‘digital transformation 

thing’ was going to be over,” Davis 

laughs. “Digital transformation, 

certainly in today’s market, doesn’t 

have a start and an end. If you continue 

to evolve and try to keep pace with the 

technology, transformation will always 

happen.” Much as it took on a pivotal 

role in the democratization and mass 

distribution of the microchip over the 

last 50 years, Intel is positioning itself 

to be at the heart of a new reality, 

30 


strategy needs to be 

holistic, because it’s not 

just about the technology” 

— 

Lisa Davis, 





constantly shaped and reshaped 

by digital transformation. Davis is 

confident that, going forward, she will 

be able to help Intel, its partners and, 

most importantly, the end customer, 

be prepared to meet the future. 

“Intel is continuing to make investments 

and will continue to lead innovation to 

support our customers and partners. 

Certainly, in the areas of hybrid cloud, 

artificial intelligence, enterprise 

analytics, cybersecurity and even 

quantum computing, Intel is about 

being at the forefront of providing the 

end-to-end solutions that we can build 

with our ecosystem of partners to help 

all of our customers on their digital 

transformation journeys.” 

31 

CLICK TO WATCH: ‘INTEL OPTANE DC PERSISTENT MEMORY FILLS 

THE GAP BETWEEN DRAM AND SSDS’ 


LEADERSHIP 

32 

the changing face of 

digital manufacturing 

Victoria Holt, President and CEO 

of digital manufacturer Protolabs 

discusses the strategies the company 

is using to create and maintain 

its competitive advantage. 

WRITTEN BY HARRY MENEAR 



33

LEADERSHIP 

34 

The global manufacturing industry is undergoing 

a transformation every bit as sweeping and 

profound as the one that took place over 200 

years ago, when cottage industry gave way to 

coal-powered factories and the Industrial Revolution 

swept around the world. Thanks to meteoric 

advances in information technology and business 

practice, the Fourth Industrial Revolution is set to 

remake the way things are manufactured on a scale 

unseen for centuries. For the last 20 years, one 

company has been squarely at the forefront of this 

tidal wave of change. “We’re the leader in digital 

manufacturing, in part because we were invented 

that way,” says Victoria Holt, President and CEO 

of Protolabs. Based in Minnesota, Protolabs is one of 

the world’s fastest turnaround digital manufacturers 

of small, mixed batch prototyping solutions. 

Founded in 1999 by entrepreneur Larry Lukis, 

Protolabs (then called Protomolds) was born from 

his frustration with the slow process of acquiring 

custom injection molded parts. Gathering a group 

of software engineers and machinists, Lukis would 

go on to reinvent not only the process by which 

injection molding is executed, but also the customer 

experience associated with it. “He automated all 

of the front-end engineering associated with making 

a custom part using software,” says Holt. “When 

you look at how much time it takes to actually make 

a part, a big portion of the work is that upfront 

engineering where you have to put thought into how 



35

LEADERSHIP 

36 

“We’re operating 

at the cusp of 

this industrial 

revolution that’s 

taking place” 

— 

Victoria Holt, 

President and CEO, Protolabs 

you’re going to make that part. We’ve 

automated that process with software, 

which is what makes us so unique.” 

One of Protolabs’ key differentiators 

is the way in which it engages and 

interacts with its customers. “We’re 

100% e-commerce, which in a B2B 

world is a little bit unusual, and very 

unusual in the world of injection 

molding and CNC machining,” Holt 

explains. “Making sure we’ve got the 

best e-commerce experience and can 

service tens of thousands of industrial 

customers efficiently with an awesome 

experience is really important to us.” 

The model has proved a success. 

Today, from its eight facilities located 

in five countries, Protolabs provides 

CNC machining, injection molding, 

sheet metal fabrication and 3D printing 

services to industry-leading enterprises 

worldwide. “We’re operating at the cusp 

of this industrial revolution that’s taking 

place,” says Holt. “We’re in a great 

position to help other manufacturers 

take a look at how they can take 

advantage of information technology 

and software in their manufacturing 

processes.” Holt sat down to discuss 

the strategies Protolabs is using to 

create and maintain its competitive 


CLICK TO WATCH: ‘PROTO LABS CEO VICKI HOLT ON THE RISE 

OF DIGITAL MANUFACTURING ACROSS EUROPE’ 

37 

advantage, and how it is meeting 

the challenges of an industry being 

reshaped by consumer demand 

and technological advancement. 

Holt has worked in manufacturing 

for over 40 years. Working first for 

the solution spinoff arm of Monsanto 

before stints at industrial giants like 

PPG Industries and Spartech, she later 

arrived at Protolabs in 2014. “When this 

opportunity first came across my desk, 

I wasn’t sure. It was a smaller company 

compared to the other ones I’d run, but 

when I took a deeper look at Protolabs, 

the more I realized that this is the 

most intriguing business I have ever 

been involved in,” she enthuses. 

Protolabs specializes in creating 

hyper-customizable prototype parts 

for companies in need of hyperspecialized 

manufacturing builds. 

In 2014, the company was one of 

the first digital manufacturers to launch 

an industrial 3D printing service. 

The versatility of the medium suits the 

company down to a tee and, true to 

form, Protolabs is approaching the 

process in its own way. “We’re very 

differentiated in the way we approach 

3D printing,” she explains. “We focus 


LEADERSHIP 

38 

on the industrial engineer and are 

completely technology agnostic in the 

sense that we select the 3D printing 

technologies that are best for the 

industrial engineer and we will work 

with the engineer to determine which 

type of technology is best for them to 

make their part depending on what 

they’re trying to do with the part. Then 

we make very high-quality 3D printed 

parts with a broad range of materials.” 

The added versatility of 3D printing 

is perfectly suited to the hyperspecialized 

builds Protolabs is known for, 

and constant technological advances 

mean the company is always expanding 

its offerings to keep pace with new 

frontiers of possibility. In June 2019, 

Protolabs announced the launch 

production capabilities for 3D printing 

using metal. The added tensile strength, 

dimensional accuracy and cosmetic 

appearance of metal parts has lead 

to clients using Protolabs prints for 

production parts rather than just 

prototypes. “We’re starting to see a lot 

of interest in the aerospace and medical 

device areas, where people are taking 

advantage of the full design freedom 

that you get from 3D printing in order to 

create something very unique,” says Holt. 


“We’re starting to 

see a lot of interest 

in the aerospace 

and medical 

device areas” 

— 



Even with the advantages of a 20-year 

track record in digital manufacturing, 

the landscape today is not without its 

challenges. “I think people have this 

idea of manufacturing as a dirty, dark 

assembly line – like it was in the old 

days,” says Holt. “Today, it’s a high tech, 

exciting place to work with lots of change.” 

She emphasizes that attracting talent, 

helping young people entering the 

workforce to understand how vibrant 

and exciting the space is, has become 

a mission-critical priority for Protolabs. 

The need for top talent is only emphasized 

by the second big challenge in the 

industry – something that Holt notes 

is sweeping through every business 

ecosystem: the accelerating pace 

of change. 

However, generational transformation 

appears to be on her side. “One of 

the main trends right now in the 

manufacturing sector is very short 

product life cycles,” she explains. 

“People expect improvements at 

a pretty fast clip these days. So, being 

able to very quickly design, prototype, 

and launch products is a critical 

success factor for manufacturers.” 

In addition to short production cycles, 

consumer demand for quick delivery 

39 


LEADERSHIP 

40 

CLICK TO WATCH: ‘PROTOLABS: THIS IS DIGITAL MANUFACTURING’ 

and customizability is fast becoming 

in vogue. Thankfully, Protolabs’ unique 

business model in the manufacturing 

space looks to put it in good stead 

as generational change permeates 

the industry. 

“The younger people, in particular, 

are very accustomed to 100% 

e-commerce. They expect to be able 

to buy a custom part over the internet,” 

Holt says. “That change helps our 

business because part of the challenge 

“One of the main 

trends right now 

in manufacturing 

is very short 

product lifecycle” 

— 




41 

we’ve always faced is being a little 

different. We’re not like a traditional 

manufacturer, so people and companies 

have to adapt to our process. Buying 

over the internet, which was different for 

so long, has grown so much. We’ve got 

demographics on our side with younger 

people moving into the workforce who 

are very accustomed to doing business 

digitally and over the internet.” 

Looking to the future, Holt believes 

that Protolabs’ future is bright. “We 

continue to grow. Every year we’re 

adding more and more product 

developers to our user base,” she 

concludes. “It’s just a matter of driving 

that awareness and then seeing how 

easy it is to use us and how much value 

we can deliver to our clients.” 


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TECHNOLOGY 

44 

WHY CORPORATES 

SHOULD LOOK TO 

STARTUPS TO SPUR 

THEIR INNOVATION 

Ritam Gandhi, Founder and Director, 

Studio Graphene, explores why 

traditional corporations should be 

inspired by startups if they want to keep 

up with the blistering rate of innovation 

WRITTEN BY 

RITAM GANDHI 



45

TECHNOLOGY 

46 

According to the American Enterprise 

Institute (AEI), only 60 of the Fortune 

500 companies listed in 1955 still retain 

their place amongst the business elite. While 

for some of these companies, the decline was 

inevitable, for many it reflects their reluctance 

to embrace disruptive trends that have 

radically transformed the business environment 

and the nature of consumer demands. 

In their wake has come a new generation 

of corporate titans including tech giants like 

Facebook, Amazon and Netflix who have 

rapidly become the dominant players in their 

respective industries. While many of these 

companies had humble beginnings as 

startups, once they went public, they began 

to adopt a more corporate mentality in order 

to deliver regular profits for shareholders. 

Tesla Founder and CEO Elon Musk is a 

high-profile critic of this trend, saying that: 

“Being public puts enormous pressure on 

Tesla to make decisions that may be right 

for a given quarter, but not necessarily right 

in the long-term.” 

Indeed, part of what marks Elon Musk out 

as such a successful entrepreneur is that 

he has retained his entrepreneurial spirit 

despite Tesla now being one of the biggest 

companies in the world. Many of his contemporaries, 

visionary leaders who took their 


47 

“I believe that established 

companies would be wise 

to outsource innovation 

by partnering with young 

and dynamic startups” 

— 

Ritam Gandhi, 

Founder and Director, Studio Graphene 


TECHNOLOGY 

48 

companies from startup to the upper 

echelons of the Fortune 500, have 

long since been replaced by processoriented 

executives with corporate 

backgrounds. 

As someone who made the leap 

from the corporate world of management 

consultancy into the dynamic 

startup landscape, I know how difficult 

it is for companies to retain their 

dynamism as they transition from agile 

challenger to established incumbent. 

While many founders bemoan the lack 

of a level playing field when it comes 

to the resources available to large 

corporates, being small can be an 

advantage for innovative startups as 

they are neither too unwieldy nor too 

conservative to implement new ideas. 

WHAT DO STARTUPS HAVE TO OFFER? 

So, if the balance of power is currently 

tipping away from large corporates it’s 

worth asking what about startups 

makes them so innovative. Startups 

generally consist of a small team 

which means they can remain responsive 

to changes in the market. They 

also depend for their vitality on 

identifying new, more efficient 

methods which means they usually 

“If large 

companies 

don’t take the 

necessary action 

to stay one step 

ahead, they’ll 

soon find 

themselves 

falling behind” 

— 

Ritam Gandhi, 


make for more cost-effective enterprises. 

As private entities, startups can 

make decisions with the long-term in 

mind as they don’t have to worry about 

the impact of quarterly performance 

on their share price. 

In my work with startups, I’ve seen 

how the need to break new ground 

affects the culture of many successful 

startups. Indeed, the most successful 

see their lack of scale as a virtue 

because it makes for clear-eyed 

decision-making. 


49 

However, even if corporates were to 

acknowledge the merits of this 

dynamic approach, they are fundamentally 

prevented by their size, structure 

and priorities from truly adopting a 

startup mentality. Simply put, innovation 

in the corporate world equates 

to risk. Risk of wasted resources, 

both in terms of dollars and man-hours. 

Risk of reputational damage if a 

creative project fails to bear fruit and 

in exceptional cases, the risk that a 

new product or technology will be so 

successful that it will reshape the 

industry, making it less favourable 

to the company who developed it. 

WHY DO BIG CORPORATES FAIL 

TO INNOVATE? 

While large companies are too big 

and have too much on the line to be 

truly creative, total disregard for 

innovation is not an option. These days, 

companies understand that they have 

to continue innovating if they want to 

guard against the threat of dynamic 


TECHNOLOGY 

new challengers. Of course, casting 

aside your traditional ways of working 

comes with an immense amount of risk 

and so it’s understandable that many 

executives are reluctant to wholeheartedly 

commit to new projects. 

Some companies reach a compromise 

that allows them to balance these 

competing objectives. For example, 

by implementing schemes that allow 

employees to strike a balance 

between their work on existing 

projects and on developing new ideas. 

Google’s ‘20% time’ is probably the 

most feted example as the company’s 

policy of allowing engineers to devote 

20% of their time to personal projects 

resulted in some of the company’s 

most successful products such as 

Gmail, AdSense and Google Talks. 

While this can approach can be 

a fruitful one, it’s worth noting that many 

50 

CLICK TO WATCH: ‘RITAM GANDHI TALKS ENTREPRENEURSHIP 

AND BUILDING A STARTUP THAT BUILDS OTHER STARTUPS’ 


companies have abandoned this model 

as they have become large global 

businesses. Corporates like Google now 

span too many sectors and jurisdictions 

to rely on such an ad hoc approach 

to innovation. Consequently, they need 

to find a framework that allows them 

to continue pushing technological 

boundaries while still focusing on 

maximising the value of their major 

revenue-generating products. 

WHY SHOULD LARGE CORPORATIONS 

LOOK TO COLLABORATE? 

The reality is that the corporate world 

is being disrupted at an exciting pace. 

Therefore, I believe that established 

companies would be wise to outsource 

innovation by partnering with young 

and dynamic startups. Ultimately, these 

partnerships have the potential to 

create mutual value by granting the 

startup access to capital and distribution 

51 


TECHNOLOGY 

52 

“These partnerships have 

the potential to create 

mutual value by granting 

the startup access to capital 

and distribution networks 

while giving the corporate 

a chance to benefit from 

innovative new projects” 

— 

Ritam Gandhi, 



networks while giving the corporate 

a chance to benefit from innovative 

new projects. 

This change in corporate culture 

takes many forms including mentorship 

programmes and in-house tech 

incubators but strategic partnerships 

are gradually emerging as the most 

effective way of leveraging a startups’ 

disruptive potential. 

As corporations become larger and 

more results-oriented it makes it more 

difficult for innovative ideas to come 

to fruition. That’s why I believe forwardthinking 

companies are increasingly 

looking to collaboration with startups 

as the solution. After all, there’s 

nothing to suggest that corporates 

and startups have to co-exist as 

separate entities. In the digital age, 

size doesn’t guarantee future success. 

If large companies don’t take the 

necessary action to stay one step 

ahead, they’ll soon find themselves 

falling behind. 

53 


PEOPLE 

54 

WeSportUs: how 

business strategy 

can revolutionise 

sports scouting 

Could blockchain decentralise talent-spotting 

and make it fairer? WeSportUs thinks so. 

Ex-Banker Latif Adéothy is applying business 

expertise to revolutionise sports scouting 

WRITTEN BY LATIF ADÉOTHY 



55

PEOPLE 

56 

Business is often told to consider 

what it can learn from sport. But what 

about the other way around? What 

could sport learn from business? Sport 

focuses on winning, the team spirit and match 

analysis, but could it also learn how to focus 

on customers, empower teams and better 

use technology? 

Could technology disrupt sport and the 

talent-scouting process? I think it could 

definitely benefit from technologies that 

could decentralise decision-making. 

I had an experience in Africa that convinced 

me to try and develop a solution. In Abidjan, 

a city on the southern Atlantic coast of 

Côte d’Ivoire, I came across a group of young 

footballers. Boys, with sandals on their feet, 

were playing on a field that looked more like 

scrub than a Premiership stadium. They let 

me join in for a little game. And we lost 10-0! 

Despite having never set foot in a training 

centre and playing in sandals, one young 

player scored 8 goals! It disappoints me 

that this boy’s raw talent could go unspotted 

due to a lack of resources and visibility. 

The sports world wouldn’t be the first 

entertainment industry to be challenged 

by technology. The music industry has had 

to reinvent itself by harnessing, rather than 


57 

“The benefit is twofold: 

to give more visibility to 

talent, and to facilitate 

their relationship with 

potential supporters” 

— 

Latif Adéothy, 

Founder, WeSportUs 


PEOPLE 

58 

continuing to fight, technology. So, the 

sports world could reinvent itself 

through digital to combine entertainment 

experience, performance, and the 

experiences of professional and 

amateur athletes. 

The benefit is twofold: to give more 

visibility to talent, and to facilitate their 

relationship with potential supporters. 

All this and an opportunity to restore 

sport’s positive image, which has been 

tarnished by numerous scandals. 

But how would this work when so 

many people play sports? In 2017, 

two out of five people across Europe 

“One young player 

scored 8 goals! 

It disappoints me 

that this boy’s raw 

talent could go 

unspotted due to 

a lack of resources 

and visibility” 

— 




CLICK TO WATCH: ‘WESPORTUS – APP PROMO’ 

59 

played at least one sport once a week; 

three out of 10 also played in clubs. 

That’s nearly 155mn, not to mention the 

amateurs who sometimes play several 

sports, in the park or at home. More 

than 600,000 hours of videos are 

uploaded to YouTube every day. With 

so many people participating in sport, it 

is difficult to identify the new talent who 

could dominate their discipline. 

The solution would need to incorporate 

an innovative social network 

based on openness. Today, our talent 

spotting system is focused on just a 

few institutions located in the richest 

countries. So we need a mechanism 

which could enable young talent to 

truly emerge from the multitude of 

amateur athletes around the world. 

This is still difficult to imagine on social 

networks in their current format. 

In asking myself how we could 

make sports-scouting less random, 

I started thinking about my experience of 

business, banking and blockchain. Could 

scouting benefit from blockchain; the 

disruptive technology that is disrupting 

the business world? It is a decentralised 

and participatory system and so, through 

its differentiating cultural and monetary 


PEOPLE 

60 

value proposition, we could use 

blockchain to engage the social sports 

community in a different way. 

Why bet on the blockchain? Because 

the fundamentals of this technology are 

based on the very notion of transparency 

and information sharing. It is a technology 

that is open to almost everyone, 

is decentralised and transparent. As a 

result, each transaction belongs to both 

individuals and everyone at the same 

time, making the system completely 

democratic and robust. 

This technology gives us an opportunity 

to bring fans back to the centre of 

sport. Using decentralisation, athletes 

can showcase themselves and fans 

can like them, raising their profiles to 

potential patrons, sponsors and clubs. 

They can even give new talent a boost 

by microfunding new boots or access 

to professional training grounds. 

In business terms, this clearly 

demonstrates how sport can better 

listen to their customers (fans) and 

empower them. Fan involvement could 

also bring their passion and sense of 

fair play back to the heart of the global 

sports community. 

I want us to imagine a sports social 

network model that integrates 

“I want us to imagine 

a sports social network 

model that integrates 

a cryptocurrency and 

gives power to the fan 

communities that 

will elect the young 

athletes of tomorrow” 

— 




61 

a cryptocurrency and gives power to 

the fan communities that will elect the 

young athletes of tomorrow. It’s not a 

pipe dream. Social networks could take 

on their full meaning and we can move 

from a narcissistic vision to a holistic 

approach, taking on the role of 

revealing talent and creating a meritocracy. 

The world of sport is truly at the 

crossroads of funding innovations 

and the emergence of new media to 

reinvent the entertainment of tomorrow. 

At the moment, too much talent is 

never seen, never makes it out of the 

park game and into the arena, because 

the players never get scouted. We’re 

inventing a decentralised global talent 

detection platform, within the reach of 

sports professionals, which will promote 

champions from multiple horizons. 

What if new technology and business 

nous could find, support and sponsor 

the next Usain Bolt or the future Kylian 

Mbappé? That’s the plan at WeSportUs. 


SUSTAINABILITY 

THE CUSTOMER 

PERSPECTIVE 

62 

HOW CASCADES AND 

SAP PRIORITISE SUPPLY 

CHAIN SUSTAINABILITY 

Business Chief sits down with Xavier Duprat, 

Director of Logistics and Production 

Planning at Cascades, to learn how the 

business is putting sustainability at the 

forefront of its operations 

WRITTEN BY SOPHIE CHAPMAN 



63


64 

Aces Sustainability is quickly shifting from 

an idealistic preference to a missioncritical 

change in operations. Beyond 

reduced waste and increased efficiency, 

sustainability has emerged as a necessary 

way to do business to appeal to both partners 

and customers. 

Sustainable business practices are 

especially relevant in the packaging industry, 

historically one of the biggest contributors 

to supply-related waste with an estimated 

30,000 tons rotting in landfills. Cascades, 

one of the top packaging manufacturers 

in North America, is on the front lines of 

sustainable business practices through 

a streamlined supply chain. To hear about 

their story, we sat down with Xavier Duprat, 


Planning at Cascades. 

To get started, please tell us about Cascades 

and its core values? Cascades produces, 

converts and markets packaging and tissue 

products that are composed mainly of 

recycled fibres. With 25 plants operating 

across Canada and the United States, we 

are the largest manufacturer of containerboard 

in Canada and the sixth-largest in 

North America. In line with our corporate 

mission to “improve the well-being of people, 


“WITH 25 PLANTS OPERATING 

ACROSS CANADA AND THE 

UNITED STATES, WE ARE THE 

LARGEST MANUFACTURER OF 

CONTAINERBOARD IN CANADA 

AND THE SIXTH-LARGEST IN 

NORTH AMERICA” 

— 

Xavier Duprat, 


Planning at Cascades 

65 

communities and the planet by 

providing sustainable and innovative 

solutions that create value,” and to 

optimise its supply chain, we realised 

that we needed more consistent 

planning processes, faster planning 

cycles and better user engagement 

in our supply chain strategy. 

Why did Cascades decide to address 

the issue of waste, and how are you 

doing so? We have evolved our 

business processes to address the 



66 

“WE HAVE EVOLVED OUR 

BUSINESS PROCESSES 

TO ADDRESS THE ISSUE 

OF SUSTAINABILITY 

HEAD-ON, KNOWING 

THAT IT IS AN INDUSTRY- 

WIDE CHALLENGE” 

— 

Xavier Duprat, 


Planning at Cascades 

issue of sustainability head-on, knowing 

that it is an industry-wide challenge. 

We understand that sustainable 

business practices, like an efficient 

supply chain, are not only good for the 

planet but are also good for business. 

What sustainability challenges has your 

company faced? In order to get the 

business results we wanted, we knew 

that we had to make some changes. 

Working alongside supply chain 

leaders such as SAP, we determined 

that enabling fact-based decision 

making by increasing end-to-end 

supply chain visibility and providing 

access to information from one place 

was something that we needed to 

address. There was no relationship 

between sales and operations and 

strategy and tactical operations, which 

was also causing issues. We knew 

that we needed to make some changes 

in order to facilitate faster planning 

cycles and consistent processes for 

sales and operations planning, while 

improving collaboration and user 

engagement across functions. 

What SAP technologies are you using 

to help with the project and what 


CLICK TO WATCH: ‘SUSTAINABLE PACKAGING – 

CASCADES IS PART OF THE SOLUTION’ 

67 

impact is the project having on the 

rest of the business? We introduced 

the SAP Integrated Business Planning 

solution to provide full support for 

monthly and weekly planning processes 

and to enable easy collaboration and 

quick resolution of issues across 

functions. The enhanced data and 

forecasting help our company make 

smarter decisions. With our employees 

and sales teams able to focus on 

adding value, we were able to be more 

agile and responsive to our customers’ 

needs, allowing us to continue to deliver 

the innovative products that our 

customers have come to rely on. With 

SAP, we now have a comprehensive 

and transparent overview of our supply 

chain, helping us to be highly responsive 

to customer needs. 

In the end, why did you select SAP 

and how is its technology helping 

with efficiency? Implementing SAP 

Integrated Business Planning has 

helped us establish long-term 

partnerships with our most strategic 

customers. These partnerships 

enable us to support our growth and 

sustainability goals with our strong 



68 

focus on the supply chain. Since 

choosing SAP, we have seen valuedriven 

results, including: 

• Improved decision-making with 

the aid of more-accurate data and 

forecasts (up to 80% better forecasting 

accuracy 

• 90% less time needed for data 

collection 

• Reduced costs, due to increased 

visibility and improved collaboration 

• Improved planning security 

supporting sales to new markets 

• Greater efficiency with maximised 

production capacity and faster access 

to relevant information for both internal 

and external users 

• Enhanced ability of employees and 

salespeople to focus on value-added 

tasks such as customer service 

What trends are you seeing within the 

packaging industry and how are you 

adapting to them? The containerboard 

industry is increasingly moving towards 

a “buyer’s market,” as more capacity 

and foreign investments are shifting 

the equilibrium of demand and supply 

in this direction. In the past, it might 

have been somewhat acceptable to 

operate and service customers with 


69 

a certain amount of backlog within 

a “weekly” window, but I don’t think 

that will be the case in the coming 

months and years because of this new 

reality. Customers are becoming more 

demanding – and rightfully so. In 

response, organisations need to shift 

their mindset to service the customer 

in a timely manner, focusing more 

rigorously on cost control, working 

capital and “just-in-time inventory” 

best practices. 

Where do you see Cascades going in 

the next five years? We need to have 

a clear understanding of our global 

supply chain and master new processes 

in order to deliver and exceed 

customer expectations. True customercentricity 

will hinge on on-time delivery 

as a critical differentiator, and in turn, 

help organisations thrive in this new 

environment over the next five years. 


CITY FOCUS 

70 

City Focus 

LOS AN 

Business Chief observes the oversubscribed, 

undersupplied, high-priced housing market 

in the United States’ second-largest city, and 

some of the enterprising startups and firms 

working to disrupt the multi-billion dollar 

Los Angeles real estate space 


WRITTEN BY HARRY MENEAR 

GELES 

71 


CITY FOCUS | CHICAGO 

LOS ANGELES 

72 

T 

he United States’ second most-populated 

metropolitan area, Los Angeles County 

sprawls across more than 4,000 sq m 

and is home to in excess of 10mn people. The City 

of Los Angeles itself houses more than 4mn human 

beings, as well as the heart of the global entertainment 

industry, and home to Fortune 500 

companies like CBRE Group, AECOM and KB 

Home. In 2017, the tri-county area of Los Angeles- 

Long Beach-Anaheim reached a collective GDP 

of more than US$1trn. However, while the average 

cost of living in the city is 48.2% higher than 

the national average, according to Kiplinger, 

median household incomes are roughly $3,00 

below the US median point. This hasn’t stopped 

people flocking to America’s second city though, 

drawn by its cultural prominence and aesthetic 

of glamorous excess. 

Famously, the principalities of the rich and 

famous, Los Angeles neighborhoods like Bel Air 

and Beverly Hills boast some of the largest, most 

expensive properties in the country. Complete with 

12 bedrooms, 21 bathrooms, three kitchens and five 

bars - not to mention a spa and massage studio, 

fitness center and 85-foot infinity swimming pool - 

924 Bel Air Road is comfortably the most expensive 

home on the market in the state today, 

with a $188mn price tag. 



73

CITY FOCUS | LOS ANGELES 

Luxury mega mansions aside, 

the Los Angeles property market is 

potentially fertile ground for real 

estate businesses. In December 2018, 

the median property price in Los Angeles 

was $879.5K, trending up 12.9% 

year-over-year, according to research 

done by Norada Real Estate. The city 

is also reportedly in the grips of a 

housing shortage. With this combination 

of high demand 

‘The average 

cost of living 

in Los Angeles 

is 48.2% higher 

than the national 

average’ 

74 


CLICK TO WATCH: ‘JACK RYAN, CEO OF REX, INTERVIEW ON BUSINESS ROCKSTARS’ 

75 

and an economically stratified population, 

there are several promising 

startups looking to harness the power 

of cutting-edge technologies to enable 

Los Angeleno home hunters. 

REX REAL ESTATE 

Utilising artificial intelligence (AI) and 

machine learning (ML) solutions, REX 

Real Estate aims to help buyers and sellers 

bypass the expensive Multiple 

Listings Service process used by real 

estate agents, marketing houses directly 

to consumers. Founded in 2015, the 

startup is based in Woodland Hills, 

on the border of the Santa Monica 

mountains. Aiming to disrupt the traditionally 

expensive and sales-focused 

real estate industry, REX pays its 

agents larger salaries and incentivises 

them based on customer satisfaction, 

rather than the rapid closure of deals. 

Unlike traditional real estate brokers, 

REX charges a flat commission of 2%, 

rather than the usual 5-6%. 

The company also has a strong 

sense of social responsibility; for every 

50 homes sold, the company donates 

one to a family in need, building homes 

in Cambodia and Columbia. 



76 

COVER TECHNOLOGIES 

For some, just buying a home isn’t 

enough; building one from the ground 

up to your exact specifications is all 

that will suffice. Since 2014, local tech 

and architecture startup Cover Technologies 

has been working to provide 

custom-designed and built ‘backyard 

studios’ to the residents of Los Angeles. 

Cover uses proprietary design 

software and a precision manufactured 

building system to deliver 

exceptional modern design, functionality, 

and energy performance, 

in a fraction of the time of traditional 

custom construction. The company’s 

software generates three custom 

designs in as little as three days. 

Cover maintains the studios make 

for excellent short-term rental accommodation, 

studio space, home gyms, 

offices and of course, potentially cheap 

solutions for LA’s housing shortage. 

According to Forbes, Cover can deliver 

a 400 sq ft prefabricated structure 

between $120,000 and $160,000. 

In 2018, founders Alexis Rivas and 

Jemuel Joseph were named to the 


Forbes 30 Under 30 in Manufacturing 

and Industry list. 

ANDREW JONES AUCTIONS 

Decorating a house can be as much 

of a struggle as the process of buying 

one. For LA’s wealthiest residents, 

seeking out unique and valuable items 

is big business. Last year, just south 

of downtown Los Angeles, Andrew 

Jones opened the city’s newest 

auction house. A full service art 

and antiques auction firm, Andrew 

Jones Auctions celebrated its one 

year anniversary in 2019, according 77 

CLICK TO WATCH: ‘LA STARTUP OFFERS CUSTOM SMALL PREFABS 

ADAPTED TO AREA CODE’ 



to a report by the Los Angeles Times. 

The two-day anniversary sale saw the 

house close deals amounting to $1.5mn, 

including a set of rare books by C.L.F. 

Panckoucke worth $220,000. 

Jones, originally from the UK, 

has worked in auction houses since 

the age of 16 and has brought more 

than 40 years’ experience in the busi- 

“The modern approach 

to auctioneering 

is embracing all the 

modern technology” 

— 

Andrew Jones, 

Founder and CEO, 

Andrew Jones Auctions 

78 


ness to the endeavor. Like every 

industry, however, high end auctioneering 

has seen its share of disruption from 

the internet age. The Times reported 

that, at the anniversary auction, 

“in a sign of how much the auction business 

has changed, only 100 people 

attended in person and 1,935 participated 

online.” 

“It was a little confusing, disorienting 

… It took about 20 lots for me to just 

remember that there were people out 

there,” remarked Jones. “The modern 

approach to auctioneering is embracing 

all the modern technology, understanding 

that the good old days as I recall them 

are gone, and you really have to be fully 

onboard with social media platforms.” 

79 


TOP 10 

80 



in North America 

81 

Business Chief takes a closer look at 

the highest paid CEOs at America’s 

biggest companies, according to a 2018 

report by USA Today 

WRITTEN BY AMBER DONOVAN-STEVENS 


TOP 10 

82 

10 

Randall Stephenson 

AT&T 

Randall Stephenson is an American telecommunications executive 

and the chairman of AT&T. AT&T is the world’s largest telecommunications 

company with its headquarters at Whitacre Tower 

in Downtown Dallas, Texas. The telecommunications provider 

was established 35 years ago, and today employs over 268,540 

people with a revenue of $163.8bn. Stephenson receives annual 

compensation of $28.7mn. 


83 

09 

Alex Gorsky 

Johnson & Johnson 

Alex Gosrky is the chairman of one of the most valuable companies: 

Johnson and Johnson, the medical product company that specialises 

in consumer and pharmaceutical goods, and medical devices. 

The Kansas City-born businessman receives $29.8mn from the 133-yearold 

company and oversees 126,400 employees. He featured as one 

of the most influential leaders by Pharma Voice n 2014. He recently 

received CADCA Humanitarian of the Year Award and was awarded 

an Honorary Doctorate from Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia. 


TOP 10 

84 

Indra K. Nooyi 

PepsiCo 

Indra K. Nooyi was the CEO of PepsiCo, from 2006 until 2018, before 

passing the position to Ramon Laguarta. Nooyi is responsible for 

the successful redirection of PepsiCo’s business strategy, navigating 

it away from its standardised ‘junk food’ products towards healthy 

alternatives. The 63-year-old was ranked amongst the 100 most 

powerful women in 2014 by Forbes. Today, Nooyi has a salary of 

$31.1mn and has become joint director of a public-private partnership 

with the Connecticut Department of Economic and Community 

Development, called the Connecticut Economic Resource Center. 


Rewiring the T-Mobile 

Supply Chain with Digital 

Technology platform 

T-Mobile is known for its resolute pursuits and 

unwavering focus on customer experience. Digital 

Transformation was the preferred strategy and supply 

chain was one of the chosen areas for transformation 

in order to build foundational capabilities. The tenets 

of the Digital Supply chain transformation included 

Customer Centricity, Real-time Inventory visibility and 

Asset traceability, Time to market and integration with 

other partner ecosystems. 

Tech Mahindra, #15 in the Forbes Digital 100 ranking 

2018, collaborated with T-Mobile to take up the 

challenge of going beyond the brief through architectural 

simplifications and automation through a co-created 

framework for transformation. 

Whilst the idea was to shatter the architectural 

monolith, the efforts were centered around “ Small 

and RoI-driven” bets among the others which include 

Inventory serialization, reverse logistics serialization, 

IMEI tracking, and applications that were delivered 

successfully through 100% agile mode of execution. 

The resulting KPI’s were higher NPS, reduced time 

to market, reduced inventory cycle time and better 

control over operating costs. The next time a 

customer connects with any T-Mobile touch point and 

is able to access real-time inventory, check product 

availability, trade-off an old phone for a new one in a 

frictionless manner, it is the Digital transformation in 

action, enabled by a robust T-Mobile - Tech Mahindra 

partnership. 

Tech Mahindra’s ability to deliver value to the 

business with a state-of-the-art digital platform and 

transforming the culture of the operations has helped 

T-Mobile achieve digital maturity in a record time. 

To learn more visit us at, https://www.techmahindra.com/cwce.html

TOP 10 

86 

Jeffrey L. Bewkes 

Time Warner 

Jeffrey L. Bewkes became the CEO of Warner Media, formerly Time 

Warner, in 2008. He held the role for the following decade, and after 

it was acquired by AT&T in 2016, he assisted with the transition. 

The Media executive has remunerations of $32.6mn. 


87 

Brian L. Roberts 

Comcast 

Brian L. Roberts is an American CEO who is at the helm of Comcast. 

He is considered to be “Pennsylvania’s most powerful businessman,” 

according to 2003 “The Pennsylvania Report Power 75.” Comcast 

was originally founded by his father, Ralph J. Roberts, and Brian 

Roberts became President of Comcast Corporation in 1990 when 

the company had $657 million in annual revenue. Today the company 

a revenue of $80.4bn, and employs 150,000 people. As of last year, 

his recorded compensation was recorded at $33.0mn 


TOP 10 

88 

Robert A. Iger 

Disney 

Robert A. Iger is both chairman and CEO of the largest media 

conglomerate in the world: The Walt Disney Company. He has overseen 

major acquisitions such as Pixar in 2006 for $7.4bn, Marvel Entertainment 

in 2009 for $4bn, Lucasfilm in 2012 for $4.06bn, and 21st 

Century Fox in 2019 for $71.3bn. Disney has annual profits of $9.4bn 

and employs over 195,000 individuals. Iger receives compensation 

of over $36.3mn, and in recent months has been rumoured to be a 

contender in the 2020 US presidential elections, according to Forbes. 


89 

Safra A. Catz 

Oracle 

Safra A. Catz is an Israeli-born American co-CEO of the multinational 

computer technology corporation, Oracle Corporation. As of last 

year, Oracle became the third-largest tech firm, with revenue of 

$37bn. In addition to her position, she has been of assistance to 

President Trump, during his transition term, and she lectures at Stanford 

Graduate School of Business. As of April 2017, she became the 

highest-paid female CEO of any US company, making over $40.7mn. 


TOP 10 

90 

Mark V. Hurd 

Oracle 

Mark V. Hurd is the other co-CEO of the Oracle Corporation. He makes 

more than his co-CEO, Safra A. Catz, with an income of $40.8mn. 

Before his move to Oracle, Hurd was the chairman, president and 

CEO of Hewlett-Packard (HP), until he resigned in 2010. His strict 

cost-cutting at HP proved successful as the company navigated the 

recession, making profit as opposed to his projected deficit. This was 

apparently the motivation for previous CEO, Larry Ellison, appointing 

him as co-CEO of Oracle. 


“We need to 

make the world 

more how we 

want to see it.” 

- Scott Saunders, 

CEO & Founder, Happy Money 

Happy Money & Alliant Credit Union 

proudly celebrate 2 years of partnership, 

changing the way people think about 

and use money.

TOP 10 

Dirk Van de Put 

Mondelez International 

Dirk Van de Put is Chief Executive Officer of Mondelēz 

International and has a total compensation of $42.4mn. 

The confectionery company Mondelēz International 

has over 90,000 employees across America and 

generates a revenue of $25.9bn. Van de Put has dual 

citizen as both a Belgium and American citizen, and 

completed his formal education in Belgium, achieving 

a doctorate in veterinary medicine. 

92 

CLICK TO WATCH: ‘BIG CONSUMER BRANDS ON TRADE AND TECH TRENDS’ 



93

TOP 10 

94 


Brian Duperreault 

AIG 

Brian Duperreault is the highest-paid CEO in the US, with 

a total compensation of $43.1mn. Duperreault has spent 

the entirety of his career within the insurance industry. 

He started at AIG as an actuary in 1973, before working 

his way up the ranks, but left when it seemed unlikely 

that his predecessor Hank Greenberg would retire. 

Duperreault himself retired in 2006 but was enlisted by 

Marsh & McLennan Companies to return to the industry 

in 2008 to rebuild the company following its 2004 

bid-rigging scandal. His second retirement in 2012 was 

short-lived, as his interest in data-analytics inspired him 

to create Hamilton Insurance Group, in Bermuda during 

December 2013. He was called back to AIG in 2017 to 

assist in the rebuilding of the company, which had been 

underperforming since the 2008 recession. He transformed 

AIG, building its revenue to $52.3bn. He has won 

a vast number of awards and honours and is currently 

a member of the Wall Street Journal CEO Council. 

95 


96 

PRYSMIAN GROUP 

GOES GLOBAL 

WITH ITS LATEST 

ACQUISITION 

WRITTEN BY 

DAN BRIGHTMORE 

PRODUCED BY 

DENITRA PRICE 



97


PRYSMIAN GROUP’S SUPPLY CHAIN 

DIRECTOR, GIANMICHELE ALIVIA, 

AND CPO, NA BRIAN SCHULTIES, 

REVEAL HOW ITS MERGER WITH 

GENERAL CABLE HAS EXPANDED 

THE COMPANY’S GLOBAL REACH 

AND OFFERED THE OPPORTUNITY 

TO MAXIMIZE ITS SYNERGIES 

98 

P 

rysmian Group is now a global force in 

the energy and telecom cable systems 

industry. Boasting nearly 140 years’ 

experience, the company’s wide service offering 

has driven sales exceeding €11bn via a 

29,000-strong workforce operating in over 50 

countries across 112 plants worldwide. Since the 

$3bn acquisition of General Cable in 2018, the 

group is embracing the complex transformation 

required to merge company cultures and meet the 

needs of a global footprint, while managing the 

synergies between procurement processes, 

supply chain and operations. 

Prysmian’s CPO, NA Brian Schulties worked 

at General Cable, starting in 2006, so he has 

a unique perspective on the challenges ahead. 

“While the re-organization was challenging, it was 

timely,” he reveals. “We’re merging two cultures 

into one and it’s not something you do in 30 days…” 

Senior Supply Chain Director Gianmichele Alivia 



99

Bekaert is a strategic and long-term 

partner for us on steel wire and cables. 

Their high quality, focus on research and 

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CLICK TO WATCH: ‘PRYSMIAN GROUP AND GENERAL CABLE JOIN FORCES’ 

101 

agrees: “Setting up the new organization 

was only a part of the work that had 

to be done. We’re now starting the 

discussions about merging the ERP 

systems and the tools we need.” 

Following its acquisition by Goldman 

Sachs in 2005, the former Pirelli 

Cables & Systems (where Schulties 

also worked prior to General Cable) 

was renamed Prysmian. “The company 

has grown tremendously in the past 

year,” explains Alivia. “We generate 

approximately $4.1bn in revenue in 

North America, which was more or 

less what the legacy Pirelli company 

was doing globally. All of the challenges 

are mastered here. Since the acquisition, 

we’ve been working to bring these two 

entities together. North America is where 

the bulk of the general cable business 

was and so this is where the majority 

of the effort has been placed.” That 

effort has included the integration of 

5,000 staff while managing fixed costs, 

something that has been key to Prysmian’s 

success as a lean organization. 

Schulties admits a $3bn acquisition 

invites a period of instability. 



102 


“Expectations since the merger are 

high, and we only have two years from 

start-to-finish to work on the synergies 

– beyond that it becomes the normal 

course of business.” He cites the 

success of the integration of Draka 

into Prysmian Group in 2011 and notes 

that CEO Valerio Battista has stated 

the progress with synergies is ahead 

of schedule. Alivia adds that the same 

challenge is being tackled on the 

supply chain side “The first step was 

to look at inventory (since the merger 

inventory locations have dropped 

from 77 to 70) but now we’re analyzing 

more complex points including the 

rationalization of our network where 

inventory is kept, our flows, product 

location and distribution. We need 

to ensure we make the right product 

in the best facility,” he explains. 

Prysmian is engaged in setting new 

contracts with carriers and working 

on their implementation with third-party 

logistics companies essential for 

managing the network. “It’s not only 

the logistics network,” adds Alivia. 

“We are reviewing every single facility 

and product to make sure we service 

the customer from where it makes the 

most sense; we’re looking at cost of 

103 


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ANALYTICS, MACHINE 

LEARNING AND AI” 

— 

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CPO NA, Prysmian Group 

production and factory efficiencies, 

but also the cost of delivery.” 

Beyond the strategic change 

triggered by the merger, Alivia notes 

how Prysmian is always open to 

dynamic change in the quest for 

greater efficiencies through the 

implementation of new technologies. 

“We’ve run idea pilots with augmented 

reality in our factories and trialed 

smart devices, such as sensors, both 

in our production lines and out in the 

field.” The group is keen to implement 

machine learning to help with its 

logistics network, though Alivia 

105 

Gianmichele Alivia 


Alivia started his career at Pirelli in Milan with the 

corporate supply chain team. Since 2006, he has moved 

back and forth between Italy and the US working mostly 

on supply chain and managing the company’s B2B website. 

Alivia spent time at the former U.S. headquarters in South 

Carolina during the merger with General Cable. At the time, 

he was in charge of the regional supply chain of Legacy 

Prysmian, North America, and then, after the acquisition 

of General Cable, Alivia moved to current headquarters 

located in Highland Heights, KY and took a role 

in the new organization where he is working 

on the synergies project following the merger 

between General Cable and Prysmian Group. 



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concedes the cable industry is quite 

conservative and only implements 

technology when it can serve a proven 

purpose. “One of the most interesting 

things we’re doing is putting tracking 

devices on our cable drums to be able 

to monitor where they are at all times 

and ensure there is a faster turnaround 

of these assets once the cable on the 

drums has been used,” he reveals. 

Meanwhile, Schulties believes there’s 

potential to harness AI capabilities to 

reduce the need for remedial tasks. 

Almost a year on from the acquisition, 

Prysmian Group is preparing the 

significant step of merging its ERP 

systems. “It will generate efficiencies 

“EXPECTATIONS SINCE 

THE MERGER ARE HIGH, 

AND WE ONLY HAVE TWO 

YEARS FROM START-TO- 

FINISH TO WORK ON THE 

SYNERGIES – BEYOND THAT 

IT BECOMES THE NORMAL 

COURSE OF BUSINESS” 

— 

Brian Schulties, 

CPO NA, Prysmian Group 

107 

Brian Schulties 


Brian Schulties is the head of Purchasing for 

Prysmian Group North America. Schulties 

has more than 30 years of experience 

in the procurement field in the automotive, 

foundry and wire and cable markets. 

Prior to joining the company, he was the 

vice president of Sourcing for General Cable. 

Brian holds a bachelor’s degree in business 

administration from Cleary University 

and has a lifetime C.P.M. certification. 



108 

with everyone operating the same way 

on a shared system; obstacles will be 

removed giving us a better foundation 

to build for the future,” confirms Alivia. 

“We are going state-of-the-art with the 

latest version of SAP, which is IoT 

(Internet of Things) ready. This will 

allow us to build onto it and look at 

the potential for predictive analytics, 

machine learning and AI.” 

Beyond the challenges of the 

merger, innovation remains a high 

priority for Prysmian with 25 R&D 

centers across the globe and a 

commitment to patenting new cable 

designs. Schulties is keen to act on 

the voice of the customer and see the 

company leveraging its supply base, 

as far as its technology and ability 

to provide innovation with delivery 

to market. On that quest, Prysmian 

works with 3PL, transportation and 

supplier partners. “We’re in discussion 

with companies like UPS,” says Alivia. 

“How do we create more than just 

a supplier/customer relationship? 

How do we form a strategic partnership 

with the extended supply chain 

team to come up with solutions? 

We’re having whiteboard discussions 

to find ways of solving shared problems 



109


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across the entire infrastructure of 

our organization.” 

Focusing on shared sustainability 

goals is also key for a company 

ranked third in its sector by the 2018 

Dow Jones Sustainability Index (DJSI). 

Prysmian is working with procurement 

to identify ways it can increase the 

percentage of return of recycled 

plastic and wood from pallets. 

Meanwhile, it is engaging with freight 

providers who invest in new trucks 

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reduce emissions. “We’ve also joined 

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CLICK TO WATCH: ‘PRYSMIAN GROUP SHOWS ITS ADVANCED VESSELS FLEET’ 



112 


Prysmian 3rd in the Dow Jones Sustainability Index 

Prysmian works with its partners 

for a common goal: achieving 

sustainability now and for the 

future. It has improved its 

ranking due to numerous actions 

completed in the environmental, 

social and governance fields. 

These include, amongst other 

things: vesting the Board of 

Directors’ Compensation and 

Nomination Committee with 

tasks such as: overseeing 

sustainability issues; adopting 

inclusion and diversity policies; 

implementing a Code of Business 

Conduct designed to disseminate 

responsible business practices 

along the supply chain; reducing 

emissions of ozone-depleting 

substances; extending the KPIs 

adopted in its own Sustainability 

Report, drawn up according to 

the G4 guidelines of the Global 

Reporting Initiative. 


the SmartWay,” adds Alivia. “It’s an 

EPA (Environmental Protection 

Agency) program whereby companies 

work collectively to reduce emissions 

and improve efficiency.” SmartWay 

offers an integrated set of no-cost, 

peer-reviewed sustainability accounting 

and tracking tools to help companies 

make informed freight transportation 

choices across their supply chain. 

Looking ahead, Prysmian’s strategy 

is to be “consolidators of the market,” 

says Alivia. “We want to squeeze 

efficiencies out of the companies we 

acquire, generate cash, pay the debt 

and get ready for the future acquisition. 

The fact that we’ve just made a 

big purchase doesn’t mean we’re not 

analyzing the next potential acquisition 

two or three years from now.” 

The strategy is set: making links in 

the chain is building a bright future 

for Prysmian and its customers. 

113 


114 

Setting the trends 

in the supply 

chain sector at 

Steward Health 

Care 

WRITTEN BY 

SEAN GALEA-PACE 

PRODUCED BY 

DENITRA PRICE 



115

STEWARD HEALTH CARE 

Michael Prokopis, Vice President 

of Supply Chain at Steward Health 

Care, discusses the supply chain 

strategies his firm is leveraging 

amidst digital transformation 

in the healthcare sector 

116 

A 

s the largest private, tax paying, physician-led 

healthcare network in the US, 

Steward Health Care boasts an extensive 

portfolio of 38 hospitals in the US and Malta. 

Having experienced a significant transformation 

in its offering over the past few years, the hospital 

prioritises the importance of first-class care to its 

patients. With procurement becoming increasingly 

influential to the way Steward Health Care operates, 

the firm created a shared services model which 

evaluates how the facilities are acquired. Michael 

Prokopis, Vice President of Supply Chain 

at Steward Health Care, discusses his company’s 

journey to transform its supply chain. “In shared 

services model, we have a number of different 

teams all working together,” he says. “We have 

a contracting department as well as a data team 

that helps us to understand the value metrics 

as well as reporting out to the facilities and 

observing how they’re doing on the KPIs. We have 

a procurement group which processes requisitions 

and turns them into purchase orders. We also have 

a value analysis wrapper, which allows us to 



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120 

evaluate from a clinical perspective 

how every single product that 

we introduce into the supply chain 

and deliver to our clinicians helps 

us decide whether it’s better than 

something we’re already using.” 

Having taken steps to embrace 

digitalisation over the past couple 

of years, Steward Health Care 

is currently operating two ERPs 

and is well underway in its digital 

transformation journey. “We’re 

on a digital path,” affirms Prokopis. 

“We know we’ve got to get to one 

enterprise resource planning capability, 

and we’re in the process of undergoing 

that transformation now. What’s 

critically important from there 

is how you take that information 

and begin to use it, in order to get 

better consumption information at 

the point of care and understand 

what your inventory positions are. 

We’re also creating a mission control 

capability that will allow us to predict 

our ability to deliver care in advance. 

It’s not enough that we schedule 

a patient for an operating room 

procedure two or three weeks out. 

We also then have to understand 

“We fundamentally 

believe innovation 

is the core” 

— 

Michael Prokopis, 

Vice President of Supply Chain 

at Steward Health Care 


CLICK TO WATCH: ‘ABOUT STEWARD HEALTH CARE’ 

121 

what the nature of supply is and 

we can get the supply at the point 

of care when we need it.” 

With a determination to lead the field 

and remain innovative in the healthcare 

sector, Steward Health Care remains 

agile as it responds to the latest trends 

in the supply chain space. “The back 

orders are always a problem. We have 

to ask ourselves how we make sure, 

with the highest level of prediction, 

we can deliver the things that we’re 

promising to our customers,” says 

Prokopis. “It’s really about deciding 

how we can predict the back order 

by watching and monitoring. You have 

to ask yourself what you are going 

to do about it, and how you can do 

it in advance in order to counter 

the problem from happening.” 

Prokopis believes what really 

differentiates Steward Health Care 

from its rivals is value analysis. 

“If you look at other hospital organisations, 

they have a grassroots approach 

where there might be a value analysis 

team that supports every hospital,” 

he explains. “Most will also have 



122 

an executive steering committee, 

what makes ours different is that 

we also have a product category 

team serving as the inflection point 

to understand what’s happening 

in the facilities and generate lots of 

grassroot ideas that are evaluated 

and monitored for broad standardization 

across our nine-state footprint.” 

Due to the firm’s significant transformation 

over the past two years which 

has seen the number of Steward 

Health Care hospitals dramatically 

increase from 10 to 38, the company 

considers innovation a key pillar to its 

future growth and pivotal to success. 

“We fundamentally believe innovation 

is the core,” explains Prokopis. “Due 

to the way we’ve expanded, we’re 

moving at the speed of light. I like 

to joke that we’re a car moving down 

the road at 100mph and we’re not only 

changing the tires, but we’re also going 

to swap out the engine and the 


transmission at the same time. 

We have to do things differently 

in order to find those value pockets 

and continue to drive towards quality 

of care. It’s not just about consolidating 

standards or bulk buys. We’re constantly 

pushing ourselves to see if there’s 

a way for us to improve, reimagine 

and rethink the way that we’re working 

in our hospitals, and most importantly, 

delivering care for our patients.” 

Operating with a firm customer-centric 

approach, Prokopis is constantly 

evaluating how his firm can become 

more sustainable and drive more value 

for patients. “One of the things that 

we say is that every dollar we save 

in the supply chain is not a dollar that 

rolls to the bottom line – it’s actually 

a dollar that we can now reinvest into 

our care,” he says. “There’s a long list 

of things to buy and do and renew 

to stay on the cutting edge. I tell 

my team all the time that our fiduciary 

responsibility as a supply chain is that 

we’re a services organisation. We have 

service level agreements that we have 

to not only achieve but exceed! I come 123 




A leader with a uniquely business-minded 

approach to healthcare, Michael Prokopis is 

the Vice President of Supply Chain at Steward 

Health Care. Overseeing the $1.5 Billion supply 

chain capabilities of more than 30 hospitals 

comes naturally to an executive with more 

than twenty years’ worth of experience in 

strategy, planning, and optimization. Michael 

has master’s degrees from MIT and Dartmouth 

and lives in Dallas, TX. 


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“It’s important to pick 

strategic partners 

with whom you go 

through the process 

of demand planning 

up to five years in 

advance and you’re 

sharing information 

so that both of you 

can improve the 

supply chain” 

— 




from a different mindset than traditional 

healthcare and provide an outside 

perspective on what I think a supply 

chain should look like. I tell my boss 

all the time that we don’t need to 

reinvent the supply chain…we just 

need to correctly implement. It’s 

important to pick strategic partners 

with whom you go through the process 

of demand planning up to five years in 

advance and you’re sharing information 

so that both of you can improve 

the supply chain; that is what happens 

in other industries with just 

as much unpredictability.” 

With the importance of establishing 

and maintaining successful partnerships 

vital to all businesses’ success, 

Steward Health Care utilises a variety 

of tools to help analyse a range 

of different data in order to predict 

patient volume to allow staff to be 

treated accordingly. Prokopis explains 

what he looks for when seeking 

to formulate a successful strategic 

relationship. “At the end of the day, 

a good partner is the one that says, 

‘If we do this or if we try that, we have 

the opportunity to move this KPI 

or metric’. We’re always looking 

for ‘strategic’ partners; we hope 

someone’s going to come to us and 

say, ‘Here’s some ideas that we haven’t 

implemented or maybe you haven’t 

contemplated. Let’s see if we can 

figure out how to do this together’. 

Those are the kinds of things that 

are extremely important to do. To me, 

a partner is someone who really wants 

to work with you, that generates new 

ways of doing things and thinks outside 

the box to see if we can approach the 

problem from a different perspective.” 

125 



126 


23,000+ 

Employees 

worldwide 

2010 

Year founded 

38 

Hospitals in the US 

and Malta 

127 


STEWARD HEALTH CARE

“To me, a partner 

is someone who 

really wants to 

work with you, that 

generates new 

ways of doing 

things and thinks 

outside the box” 

— 




Looking to the future, Prokopis has 

a clear vision of how his company can 

continue to grow over the next few 

years. He believes the key to future 

success is to constantly monitor 

the supply chain. “We’ve just opened 

two facilities in April. One was an 

acquisition and the other was a facility 

that had been shut down that we 

reopened the doors for,” he notes. 

“At the end of the day, you take the 

supply chain that you’re developing 

and look for an opportunity to firstly 

convert a hospital that was doing 

things differently, and secondly 

provide an opportunity where 

you’re literally starting from scratch. 

You have to ask yourself how you make 

sure that when the first patient walks 

in the door, they’re going to get exactly 

what they need in the time that they 

need it in. That’s the key.” 

129 


130 

+ 

Procurement 

goes global 

at Dentsu Aegis 

Network 

WRITTEN 

BY 


PRODUCED BY 

DENITRA PRICE 


131 

= 


DENTSU AEGIS NETWORK 

Dentsu Aegis Network is tackling 

the need for a centralized 

procurement function to meet the 

demands of a strategy targeting 

growth through acquisition 

132 

T 

he Dentsu Aegis Network is the first 

global marketing services group built 

for the digital economy; designed around 

the needs of its customers with the goal of driving 

sustainable business growth for their brands and 

business. Growth through acquisitions (such as 

Merkle), aligned with organic development, is key 

to the company’s own strategy. To keep pace with 

that growth it became essential for Dentsu Aegis 

to create a centralized procurement team in each 

of its regions of operation. 

Sabrina Traskos, Senior Vice President, Procurement, 

heads up the organization’s American 

Procurement Team. “My team is responsible for 

the entire spectrum of procurement activities, from 

strategic sourcing all the way through to issuing 

POs and ensuring invoices are correct; as well 

as looking after real estate and facilities on a day 

to day basis,” she says. “The focus of what we’re 

doing is supporting the entire network throughout 

the procurement lifecycle.” 

The challenge for Traskos and her team is to build 

out a centralized function while assisting the 

brands across the Dentsu Aegis Network with their 



133


134 


Sabrina Traskos, Senior Vice President, Procurement 

Traskos is a proven team leader with extensive international 

experience in contract negotiations, strategic partnerships, OEM 

and licensing deals. Her procurement and project management 

responsibilities deliver a significant impact to a company’s bottom 

line. As a former Senior Director at GPO Broadlane she 

managed strategic sourcing on behalf of healthcare 

providers... “Learning how to talk about requirements 

in an unbiased way and gain consensus and buy-in 

from the different organizations was a great 

experience which prepared me for working with 32 

different brands across the Dentsu Aegis network.” 

At Dentsu Aegis she manages the integration of 

new tech initiatives, adding value and efficiencies 

to its supply chain management while pushing 

forward with the firm’s sustainability goals. 


“Cisco is helping us 

move the employee 

base into as few 

facilities as possible” 

— 

Sabrina Traskos, 

Senior Vice President, Procurement, Dentsu Aegis Network 

procurement transformation. “We 

have 32 business units in the United 

States so we’re getting 32 different 

constituencies on board with our 

Source-to-Pay process,” explains 

Traskos. “For some of them, it’s the 

first time they’re doing a purchase 

order, so a solid communications 

plan is an absolute necessity for us. 

It doesn’t stop when we sign the 

contract with the supplier and get 

them loaded into the Source-to-Pay 

system. We have to make sure all of 

the relevant stakeholders know who 

our suppliers are, what the process 

is and what the transition plan is to 

switch to newly selected suppliers.” 

Consensus building is integral to 

improving efficiency. “We aim to give 

people a say in the design of the 

processes and choosing the vendors,” 

pledges Traskos. “After all, they’re the 

subject matter experts who know what 

they need best.” The next step to 

tackle is integrating the right technology. 

“When we win a new client, we 

often have to get up and running very 

quickly. Procurement needs to support 

whatever they need – it could be 

research, technology or recruiting, for 

example – with very quick turnaround,” 

explains Traskos. “But this can lead to 

wildly different approaches across the 

network which could present a data 

135 


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integrity issue. Procurement has a 

central role in harmonizing the process 

and making sure the purchasing data 

stays consistent.” 

The pathway to the successful 

integration of new brands into Dentsu 

Aegis’ processes is aided by a 

governance structure. “Steering 

committees are at the heart of this,” 

says Traskos. “We have representatives 

from each of the business units 

and we meet regularly to discuss 

procurement projects, potential 

savings and to analyze any disruptive 

technologies.” She believes it’s vital 

to build a community approach to 

change while providing the opportunity 

to learn from your peers. 

To support positive disruption, what 

innovations is Dentsu Aegis embracing 

on its procurement transformation 

quest? Traskos is excited about the 

advent of Source-to-Pay across 

Dentsu Aegis Network. “Previously, 

it’s been a bit of a journey just to get 

aggregated spend or figure out how 

much we spend in a particular category 

or with different suppliers. Source-to- 

Pay’s spend analytics is going to help 

the team leapfrog to another level 

where we can provide our internal 

clients with recommendations and 

137 

CLICK TO WATCH: ‘SUSTAINABLE PROCUREMENT AT DENTSU US’ 



138 

opportunities to save, build partnerships 

where appropriate, and really 

improve overall vendor management 

and relationships.” She believes 

building an ecosystem will improve 

user experience and bring through 

more initiatives to enhance efficiencies 

and savings. 

Currently, Dentsu Aegis is keenly 

focused on the benefits of automation. 

Dentsu’s Automation Team works with 

Catalytic and UI Path on robotics and 

RPA (Robotic Process Automation) to 

aid the transition from paper to digital. 

“We’ve been able to achieve some 

significant savings in terms of reducing 

the amount of time staff spend on basic 

tasks,” says Traskos. “This enables us 

to shift our employees’ time to work on 

more strategic functions and that 

benefits our clients. The success of the 

efforts to date allow us to roll out more 

automation of other processes.” 

As Dentsu has grown through 

acquisition, its real estate portfolio has 

grown as well. Now, the company 

seeks to work on real estate consolidation 

in order to reduce the overall costs 

of running so many offices. For Traskos 

alongside Chris Bendowski, VP of Real 

Estate and Facilities, to achieve this 


2013 

Year founded 

35,000+ 


of employees 

1,000 

Clients 

50% 

Revenue driven 

by digital 

without disruption, partnerships with 

the likes of Canon Solutions America 

are key. Canon, the leading camera 

and print solutions business, a leading 

imaging technology and managed 

services company, is providing office 

services to ensure robust support for 

the smooth running of office functions 

for all employees. “Canon Solutions 

America supports us with everything 

from traditional printers to reception 

and event services. We have about a 

hundred offices in the US alone, with 

as many as seven in some cities,” adds 

says Traskos. “Canon Solutions 

America is our essential partner in 

providing the staffing to support these 

offices with the highest level of service 

to the organization,” adds Chris 

Bendowski. “As we renovate office 

space and design offices more 

conducive to collaboration, we need 

network and WiFi support to create a 

stable and high performing environment 

in the workplace. Cisco solutions 

help us achieve that with a high level of 

confidence while achieving savings.” 

Cisco are also involved with a project 

to install POE (Power Over Ethernet) 

lighting to provide energy savings 

across the organization. “The beautiful 

139 



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thing about POE is the ability to collect 

data from all your devices and look at 

room utilization, who is using the room 

and the capabilities that come along 

with that. For example, you can adjust 

the temperature of a conference suite 

according to the number of occupants. 

Big Data is helping us drive efficiencies 

here, and offer a customized experience 

for our employees.” 

Looking at trends across the procurement 

panorama, Traskos is enthused 

by the way data accessible via user 

friendly dashboards is enabling category 

managers like Sultan Bajwa to make 

quick decisions on her team, both on 

a tactical and strategic basis. “All of the 

data provided via IoT sensors can lead 

us towards greater savings. For example, 

the ability to look at energy consumption 

by floor helps us streamline processes 

and become more cost efficient.” 

Sustainable procurement is a top 

priority for Dentsu Aegis Network in 

2019 and beyond. “We’re getting the 

message out there to make sure our 

suppliers understand how important 

it is,” confirms Traskos. “Source-to-Pay 

can help us set up the initial relationship. 

From the initial RFP, a supplier will see 

Dentsu’s statement on sustainable 

procurement, they see how much of 

the scoring is based on them having 

a verifiable sustainable procurement 

141 



“Source-to-Pay’s spend 

analytics is going to help 

the team leapfrog to another 

level where we can provide 

our internal client base 

with recommendations 

and opportunities to save” 

142 

— 

Sabrina Traskos, 

Senior Vice President, Procurement, Dentsu Aegis Network 

program within their organization, and 

how they should align with the UN 

SDGs (United Nations Sustainable 

Development Goals). Once they 

become a supplier, we communicate 

on how our sustainability program is 

progressing, and more specifics on 

what we require within the various 

categories. The communication must 

occur on a regular basis to build a 

community in tune with our objectives 

and further the SDGs.” 

While Traskos notes that all procurement 

organizations are focused on 

savings targets, continuous monitoring 

via data now allows for a more nuanced 

approach able to identify areas for 

acceleration to meet the organization’s 

goals. “Our center of excellence, led 

by Alex Love, pays really close attention 

to savings and trying to help different 

business units achieve their objectives,” 

she maintains. “Source-to-Pay will 

provide a big lift for us but we don’t 

want to underestimate the change 

management that’s involved.” 


143 

Allied to its financial and sustainability 

goals for procurement, Traskos is keen 

to encourage communication across the 

business around reducing its carbon 

footprint. “For travel and expenses, how 

do we partner with IT so that we can 

leverage Microsoft Teams to its full 

potential? What else can we do to 

partner with different airlines and 

reduce our carbon footprint? What can 

we do with S2P in terms of making sure 

that the SDGs are being pushed out 

to our different supplier partners? 

Not only are we making it 15% of our 

scoring, to determine who to partner 

with and who has made this a priority, 

but we’re trying to make this more 

visible by building a communication 

strategy around it. Not just for within 


144 

Creating value 

and sustainability 

through technology 

in the Armacell 

supply chain 

WRITTEN BY 

HARRY MENEAR 

PRODUCED BY 

DENITRA PRICE 



145

ARMACELL 

Amber Jesic, General Manager, 

Supply Chain, Americas at Armacell 

discusses using technology to 

pursue best sustainable practice 

in the company’s supply chain 

146 

T 

he global perception of the supply chain 

has undergone a revolution over the past 

decade. What was once a series of 

independent nodes in a scattered network 

of buyers and suppliers conducting transactional 

deals has transformed into something far more 

delicate, complex and effective. “Organizations 

are becoming more sophisticated in the supply 

chain space. As they become better at supply 

chain and inventory management, they’re becoming 

more aware of the opportunities associated with 

the supply chain becoming more interdependent 

and approached from an end-to-end perspective,” 

says Amber Jesic, General Manager, Supply 

Chain, Americas at Armacell. “The increasing 

availability of real-time reporting and visibility, 

as well as increasing customer expectations, 

has certainly caused supply chains to evolve in 

recent years.” As the global supply chain industry 

changes, this newfound maturity opens up 

avenues for companies to fulfil ambitions and 

live up to core values in new ways. 


147 

Production lines in Mebane, NC 

Armacell manufactures structural PET panels 

in Brampton, Ontario, Canada. 


ARMACELL 

148 

As a global leader in the insulation 

market, Armacell’s products are vital 

to making projects in the construction 

and manufacturing space more energyefficient, 

and therefore sustainable. 

For Jesic, her role at Armacell was the 

perfect fit. “Sustainability is not only 

personally important to me, but it’s 

also the basis of how Armacell 

operates,” she says. “The company 

has a culture of global collaboration 

and innovation that was appealing and 

they’re also open to change. I saw the 

role as a chance to make contributions 

to the organization, and an opportunity 

“Sustainability 

is not only 

personally 

important to 

me, but also 

the basis of 

how Armacell 

operates” 

— 

Amber Jesic, 

General Manager, Supply Chain, 

Americas, Armacell 

Elastomeric foam sheets and rolls are stored before shipping 

out of Armacell’s component foam plant in Conover, NC 


CLICK TO WATCH: ‘MAKING A DIFFERENCE AROUND THE WORLD’ 

149 

to leverage our holistic network and 

supply chain to drive competitive 

advantage and drive efficiencies. 

A lot of our products drive sustainability. 

Our ArmaFlex closed cell foam 

insulation saves 140 times more 

energy over the course of its life than 

needed to manufacture and transport 

it.” We spoke to Jesic about the ways 

in which Armacell is harnessing 

cutting-edge technology in order to 

drive supply chain innovation, not 

only to create value, but make the 

company more sustainable. 

Although Armacell itself was 

officially incorporated in 2000, its 

origins can be traced back to the 

1860s and Armstrong World Industries. 

In 1954, Armstrong was responsible 

for the invention of ArmaFlex, the 

world’s first flexible insulation product, 

carving out its own industry niche 

that it has dominated ever since. 

In addition to making flexible products, 

Armacell is committed to ensuring that, 

as a company, it stands by its principles 

of sustainability. “As a multi-materials 

and multi-product company, we apply 

world-class practices every day 

and expand into adjacent technical 


ARMACELL 

150 

“Technology 

provides an 

opportunity to 

simultaneously 

reduce costs 

and improve 

service” 

— 

Amber Jesic, 



insulation end markets, continuously 

extending our temperature range 

and equipment verticals,” Jesic says. 

“We substitute the legacy materials 

of our competition with our innovative 

solutions and reinforce our premium 

brand position to create value for 

equipment owners, specifier engineers, 

contractors and investors.” 

Jesic’s role provides a broad mandate 

and list of responsibilities, as she 

oversees purchasing, planning, distribution, 

transportation and compliance. 

She and her team are working to deploy 

sustainable technology and strategies 

across Armacell’s supply chain, from 

converting the company’s shipping 

lines to an intermodal approach and 

reducing miles travelled, to recycling 

over one billion plastic bottles into 

polyethylene terephthalate (PET) 

products. “Beyond the benefits we 

seek to realize through technology, 

we also are committed to best practices 

that impact the environment. To reduce 

waste, we have cases where we also 

donate our scrap to prevent it from 

going into landfills,” says Jesic. “It can 


e used in the carpet industry as 

a padded base for installations, 

sometimes it’s used for the foam 

padding in children’s playgrounds – 

the breadth of application is mindboggling 

sometimes, given all the 

different areas you can use foam.” 

The core of the company’s innovations 

and sustainability initiatives 

involve applying technology to create 

value in a sustainable way. “Technology 

provides an opportunity to simultaneously 

reduce costs and improve 

service. We’re driving automation 

wherever possible and easing the 151 


Amber Jesic, General Manager 

Amber Jesic is the General Manager of Supply Chain, 

Americas, at Armacell. Jesic’s innovative and analytical 

approaches have redefined and optimized the value of 

supply chains within select Fortune 500 companies. 

A key strategist with an award-winning career in supply 

chain management, she has proven that with ingenuity, 

solutions to complex issues can be developed. 

She is a thought leader, having led an autonomous 

truck program as featured in the New York Times. 

Amber holds a Six Sigma Black Belt and an MBA from 

NYU Stern School of Business. 


ARMACELL 

$686mn 

Approximate 

revenue 

2000 

Year founded 

152 

3,000 


of employees 


153 

Armacell makes foam for gaskets for 

use in the aerospace industry. 


ARMACELL 

Armacell makes foam for gaskets for use in 

the transportation industry. 

CONTRIBUTING TO THE EARTH’S FUTURE 

WORKING HAND IN HAND WITH OUR CUSTOMERS 

Congratulations Armacell on your fine article! 

THE WORLD’S LARGEST 

PVC PRODUCER & RIGID 

VINYL COMPOUNDER 

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K-Bin KBcustomerservice@k-Bin.com

process of doing business with 

Armacell, predominantly through EDI 

integration, but also through our 

digitalization efforts regarding load 

planning and shipment consolidation 

to reduce miles travelled and condense 

shipments,” Jesic explains. 

As a company that has never been 

afraid to carve its own way using the 

latest technological developments on 

offer, Jesic points out that Armacell is 

watching the development and testing 

of autonomous freight vehicles with 

great interest. “They can definitely 

drive sustainability benefits,” she says. 

“Beyond the 

benefits we seek 

to realize through 

technology, we also 

are committed 

to best practices 

that impact the 

environment” 

— 

Amber Jesic, 



155 

PARTNER FACTS 

Shintech 

The modern supply chain is becoming more collaborative and 

interconnected. As Jesic notes, “multifaceted partnerships are 

much more common. We work with our suppliers to develop 

mutually beneficial plans for the management, inventory 

management as well as delivery.” Founded in 1974, Shintech has 

grown to become a leader in its field in much the same way as 

Armacell. It is currently the largest producer of PVC in the US and 

has been partnered with Armacell for more than five years. “Their 

consistent service has been an asset to our business,” says Jesic. 


ARMACELL 

156 

“Autonomous trucks will let you better 

handle fuel usage, there’s less starting 

and stopping, you can have a bigger 

fuel tank without a driver, and of 

course an autonomous truck will be 

able to provide much more accurate 

track and trace capabilities.” 

Gathering data from a fleet of 

autonomous trucks may be years 

away for Armacell, but Jesic stresses 

how vital data from other sources has 

become for the company today, and 

the importance of having the analytics 

to draw actionable insights. “We’re in 

the design and development phase 

of using forecasting tools that will 

provide predictive analytics which will 

be used in our production planning 

and inventory management to better 

service our customers,” she explains. 

As the leader in the $13.5bn 

equipment insulation market, Armacell 

is constantly striving to pursue its 

multi-pillar growth strategy. Its 

dedicated R&D teams are continually 

driving the company’s portfolio growth 

of intellectual property, having more 

than doubled the number of patents in 

the company’s name over the past five 

years. Looking to the future, Jesic is 


excited to continue bringing Armacell’s 

open, innovative approach to the 

workings of its supply chain and 

management of her team. “I encourage 

a culture of openness to change and 

present things in a perspective that 

highlights the benefits of why that 

change is being introduced. So, in the 

instance of digitalization, if it improves 

the ease of doing business with 

Armacell, our suppliers and customers 

then I’ll emphasize those benefits to 

the teams so they understand why 

we’re pursuing these changes. Also, 

benefits like automated reporting help 

keep our focus on best, not budget,” 

she concludes. Armacell’s future is 

bright, as it continues to work towards 

creating not only value, but a bright 

future for the planet too. 

157 


158 

The University 

of Alabama 

at Birmingham 

celebrates its 

immense digital 


WRITTEN BY 

AMBER DONOVAN-STEVENS 

PRODUCED BY 

CRAIG DANIELS 



159

UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA AT BIRMINGHAM 

In an exclusive interview 

with Vice President and CIO, 

Dr. Curt Carver Jr., he shares 

the hundreds of ‘wins’ 

achieved in streamlining 

the university experience 

160 

E 

mpowering greatness in others is at 

the heart of every technical solution the 

University of Alabama at Birmingham 

(UAB) has made, and this could not be more evident 

from the technology transformation that has taken 

place over the past four years under the leadership 

of Dr. Curt Carver. It is no surprise that the University 

of Alabama at Birmingham was keen to enlist 

Carver to spearhead IT operations with his 

impressive career history and dedication to student 

and staff wellbeing. Carver previously worked as 

the Vice Chancellor for Information Technology and 

CIO at the University System of Georgia. Prior to 

that, during his time at the US Military Academy 

at West Point, he rose through the academic ranks 

from instructor to full professor, before becoming 

Vice Dean, serving as deputy to the Chief Academic 

Officer. Whilst in this role, Carver also participated 

as an American Council of Education fellow at 

George Mason University, visiting 40 other universities 

across the United States, gaining a holistic view 

of task management across various universities. 


$3.4bn 

Approximate 

revenue (2018) 

1969 

Year founded 

23,000 


of employees 

161 



162 

“When I started 

in 2015, it took 

us about 800 

minutes to close 

out a phishing 

attack. Today 

we do it in 11” 

— 

Dr Curtis Carver, 

Vice President and Chief Information Officer 

He has been with UAB since 2015 

and, under his leadership, the university 

has had over 420 ‘wins’. Carver defines 

a ‘win’ as a concern raised by the 

community, which is met with solutions 

that are validated as successful by staff 

and students, while in line with the 

strategic plan. Averaging around 100 

wins a year, Carver could not begin to 

list all of the achievements, but shared 

with us some from the 2017 and 2018 

reports. This year marks the university’s 

50th anniversary, which has seen the 

University of Alabama at Birmingham 

ranked number one amongst young 


CLICK TO WATCH: ‘UAB. POWERED BY WILL’ 

163 

universities (those under 50 years of age) 

in the United States and 11th in the world. 

“We are trying to empower greatness 

in our students, faculty, and researchers 

and clinicians,” explains Carver. “That 

means removing obstacles preventing 

them from accomplishing their research 

and teaching tasks, and trying to figure 

out mechanisms to co-author solutions 

to not only achieve their goals, but to 

create a competitive advantage for them 

compared to other universities.” Carver 

emphasizes the need to build strong 

partnerships with students to create 

solutions that do not only “comply or 


Be Future Ready. 

Outpace Change. 

With student success a top-of-mind issue for the 

higher education industry, institutions are poised 

to have their day in the sun—proving not just their 

academic worth but their strategic value as well. 

To make good on that promise and thrive in the 

digital age, institutions must stay ahead of the 

fast-changing forces that are driving new educational 

models, a student-minded culture and new 

ways of working. They must Be Future-Ready and 


The focus for many institutions is on improved 

student outcomes, which means retaining students 

in any possible way for them to reach their 

academic goals. But this requires many human 

resources, engaged faculty and skilled talent. 

Catering to your students also means that institutions 

and their workforces have the right insight 

and data at their fingertips to advise students 

properly. Answering the many student inquiries— 

from common to more complex financial aid questions—can 

be time-consuming, and often ends up 

being costly to institutions. 

How do you stay ahead in a world that is changing 

faster than ever? Human intelligence alone isn’t 

enough. Innovations in AI, machine learning and 

digital assistants are analyzing data, providing 

answers, and suggesting next steps to help 

students and employees respond in minutes, not 

weeks or months. Predictive analytics are forecasting 

multiple scenarios to help institutions be 

ready for future disruptions. Human resources, 

finance, and student-focused offices will play a 

pivotal role in building a future-ready institution 

that can not only withstand change, but outpace it. 

Digital transformation is a challenge for any 

institution. In the past, most have relied on disparate, 

on-premises solutions designed to serve 

specific purposes. This meant that processes for 

core functions like recruiting, talent management, 

financial aid management, and financial planning 

and budgeting were carried out in different systems. 

With no integration—and no single system 

of record—processes were disconnected, ease of 

use was impeded, user experience was diminished, 

and vital data was left untapped. 

Many institutions thought they could solve the 

challenge by simply performing a “lift and shift” of 

their on-premises solutions to a cloud infrastructure. 

While this model can reduce costs, it does 

not help with innovation of student interactions 

and processes themselves. 

Hear how Butler University decided to 

simplify their financial aid process 

and how the University of Pittsburgh is 

modernizing their human capital 

management,financials, and analytic 

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166 

satisfy, but delight their expectations.” 

“These are solutions that they feel that 

they are a part of,” he comments. 

Another motivation of the company’s 

technological transformation is the goal 

of easing the workload of both staff and 

students. “Some of the ways in which 

we have achieved this is by moving to 

unlimited email, creating passwords that 

don’t expire, and having unlimited storage, 

as well as creating the fastest networks 

and research computers in the state. 

When you’re working with genomics 

and personalized medicine, these small 

factors make a great deal of difference.” 

Carver cannot emphasize enough 

the importance of listening to a variety 

of people when devising a business 

strategy. “On my first day as CIO, 

we created a crowd-sourcing site, 

and we had some 800 meetings in the 

first 100 days. By creating a voice for 

everyone, you can work towards the 

best possible solution and provide 

each aspect of the university with 

its own competitive edge.” This level 

of communication enabled staff 

and students to be receptive to the 

technical changes, because they 

were solutions requested by them. 

For example, one goal was to 

leverage the faculty’s disciplinary 

expertise. “We can’t treat faculty as the 

most expensive typists on the planet,” 


jokes Carver. At the end of each term, 

staff are tasked with the movement 

of student records from the learning 

management system to the student 

information system. “So if you’re 

teaching 300 students, that’s about 

900 clicks to complete this task, taking 

hours. And if you make an error, the 

staff member then has three different 

permissions and five forms to complete 

to rectify the mistake,” explains Carver. 

“So we built a button, and all of the 

information is transported across 


Curtis A. Carver Jr 

Curtis A. Carver Jr., Ph.D., was named Vice President for 

Information Technology and Chief Information Officer in 

June 2015, following a national search. A senior leader in 

higher education information technology, Carver came to 

UAB from his position as Vice Chancellor and CIO for the 

Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia, 

having previously held key leadership positions at the US 

Military Academy at West Point. Carver earned a bachelor’s 

degree in computer science from the US Military Academy 

at West Point and his Master’s Degree and Doctorate in 

computer science from Texas A&M University. Throughout 

his career, he has received numerous national and 

international honors and awards for military, teaching, 

and research excellence. Carver is a frequent keynote 

speaker and has published extensively. 

167 


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169 

systems in about a second, eradicating 

the previously arduous process. 

“If we’re going to change the world, 

let’s be serious about changing the 

world, and that means empowering 

people and taking some of these 

bureaucratic tasks off their plate,” 

Carver continues, with reference to the 

university’s students. “When students 

were scheduling, they would go into 

the student information system and 

they would download the schedules 

into Excel, and they would try to build 

a schedule. So we worked with the 

registrar and enrollment management 

and deployed a tool where the students 

could input their desired classes, 

when they are working or when they 

would rather not be on campus, and it 

automatically builds multiple schedules 

for them, and they just pick the schedule 

they want.” 

Carver notes that part of the success 

of the strategy is to be a servant leader, 

and not a Napoleonic one. “It’s not 

about control. It’s about empowerment.” 

Carver believes that it is important to 

hire people smarter than himself, as 

it empowers employees, instilling within 

them a sense of responsibility to find 



“We are trying to empower 

greatness in our students, 

faculty, and researchers 

and clinicians” 

— 



170 



171

a solution. He commends his team 

of staff, who are particularly committed 

to the improvement of cybersecurity. 

Carver reflects on how cybersecurity 

has improved: “When I started in 2015, 

it took us about 800 minutes to close 

out a phishing attack. Today we do it in 

11.” He returns to the topic of passwords, 

sharing another solution that was 

deployed. “We gave students and staff 

a mobile-enabled platform that tracks 

passwords and generates strong unique 

ones, strengthening security further.” 

Of the many wins, Carver said his 

favorite was the movement of 1,250 

undergraduate classes into the 

learning management system. “This 

cloud-based solution enabled students 

to push one button, and all of their 

undergraduate classes, all of the 

requirements then transfer into their 

mobile device calendar.” This is a 

drastic change from the previous 

organization where staff either handed 

out paper timetables or posted them 

on their own websites. 

Looking ahead, Carver notes some 

of the solutions that the university 

is currently piloting. “We’re working 

on building a navigation system that 173 



“If we’re going to 

change the world, 

let’s be serious about 

changing the world” 

174 

— 




automatically locates free parking 

space for students.” Carver and his 

team are working toward a new 

strategic plan that, in the true spirit 

of his ethos, is a compilation of stories 

about those who will benefit from the 

technology solutions. “This puts 

customers at the center of the 

conversation and it focuses on digital 

moments that delight them. So we’re 

very excited about the future and what 

we’re going to be able to do with this 

kind of customer centric approach.” 

In a time where technology and AI 

is considered to be detached if not 

impersonal, Carver is subverting this 

with his leadership, and using technology 

to improve the lives and relationships of 

staff and students. With any hope, his 

innovation will spread to other universities, 

with the University of Alabama at 

Birmingham leading the way. 

175 


176 

Gateway 

First Bank: 

from lender 

to banker 

WRITTEN BY 

JOHN O’HANLON 

PRODUCED BY 

ANDY TURNER 



177

GATEWAY FIRST BANK 

With a goal to grow its accounts 

and deposits nationwide, Gateway 

Mortgage Group is preparing 

in mid-2019 to launch Gateway 

First Bank, its full-service, direct-toconsumer 

digital bank 

178 

B 

uying a home is a pivotal decision for 

anybody. Much more than a routine 

commercial transaction, it speaks to that 

person’s aspirations, hopes, and family identity. 

It was with this awareness, and a vision to help 

families and communities grow stronger through 

home ownership, that Kevin J Stitt, a career 

professional in the mortgage industry, started up 

Gateway Mortgage Group in 2000. By 2017, through 

some of the most challenging times for the housing 

market, Stitt had grown Gateway to become one 

of the largest privately held mortgage origination 

and servicing companies in America, employing 

more than 1,200 people at 160 branch offices. 

In November 2018, Kevin Stitt was elected 

Governor of the State of Oklahoma, but before he 

stepped aside from the position as CEO at Gateway 

he had been able to advance a long-held desire 

to move beyond the origination and servicing 

of mortgage loans and turn the company into 

a fully-fledged bank. Leveraging the expertise of 

Stephen Curry, a banker specializing in banking 


179 

“Increasingly we turn 

to technology to 

reduce the number 

of touchpoints and 

enhance the borrower 

experience” 

— 

Stephen Harpe, 

CIO, Gateway First Bank 



180 

“It used to take 

days, even weeks 

to get through 

an application 

process… 

but now on the 

mortgage side 

of the business 

we average less 

than 30 minutes” 

— 



transitions who replaced Stitt as CEO 

in August 2018, Gateway acquired 

Farmers Exchange Bank to form 

Gateway First Bank which, with $1.2bn 

in assets and five banking centers in 

Northwest Oklahoma, emerged 

overnight as one of the largest banks in 

the State of Oklahoma by asset size, 

and one of the largest bank mortgage 

operations in the United States. 

The enabling technology team 

Growing the technology infrastructure 

to support the radical and 

highly-unusual transformation from 

a mortgage company into a bank is a 

process that has been ongoing since 

the appointment of Steven Harpe as 

CIO in 2013. Harpe had held senior 

leadership roles in IT for more than 20 

years. Back then, there wasn’t really 

a technology division in the present-day 

sense, he recalls: tech was seen as a 

black box, and the relationship with the 

rest of the business was an adversarial 

one. “We had to develop a managed 

services concept within the business,” 

Harpe explains. 

Digital enablement is now recognized 

as essential to all financial services, 

though the industry as a whole has 

been slow to acknowledge that. 


CLICK TO WATCH: ‘THE GATEWAY EXPERIENCE’ 

181 

This is a company built on service, 

and that has been the secret of its 

rapid growth to date. “As we continue 

to take on additional customers we 

also want to be able to effectively 

recruit the sales and corporate staff 

that will serve them. Attracting the best 

people means offering them the best 

products available through a top tier 

technology platform.” Harpe adds that 

it’s a mistake to suppose that millennials 

are the only group to embrace digital 

technology, citing his mother who, 

at 74, is inseparable from her iPad for 

communication, shopping and financial 

services too. “Financial services were 

late getting into this space but as we 

move forward it’s no longer millennial 

problems we are trying to solve. 

We are trying to solve problems for 

everybody and the digital platforms 

that we are building and integrating 

today can do that,” stated Harpe. 

Over recent years, mobile-friendly 

technology has penetrated all industries, 

with mortgage lending no exception, 

Harpe points out. “Increasingly we turn 

to technology to reduce the number of 

touchpoints and enhance the borrower 

experience by giving them an intuitive 



182 

one-touch technology platform.” 

Fintech has become a commodity, 

so his strategy has been to outsource 

the principal elements to the partners 

who do it best. “I want to spend our 

time on applications, enhancing digital 

experience, and making better use of 

data to understand how we can best 

deliver our mortgage and other 

financial services,” Harpe added. “We 

see ourselves as servants to everyone 

in this company, and I am proud to be 

able to say we quickly ditched the old 

backroom mindset and created a very 

dynamic, agile and digital forwardthinking 

group.” 

The IT organization Harpe leads 

now has around 40 people, all with 

a problem-solving mentality. “When we 

hire someone, we look well beyond 

IT knowledge and competence,” he 

comments. “We want people who will 

take ownership of their ideas, and have 

a sense of urgency about them; people 

who are excited to be here and keen 

to solve problems for the business.” 


FOUR KEY PLATFORMS 

On the front line of a lender’s relationship 

with its clients is the point of sale (POS) 

system. In a competitive environment, 

the speed and efficiency with which a 

loan application can be processed 

makes all the difference. The POS 

system Gateway selected was 

provided by Blend, a Silicon Valley 

software developer that now connects 

more than 15,000 banks and financial 

institutions to make routine checks. “It 

used to take days or even weeks to get 

through an application process, which 

was stressful for the applicant, but now 

on the mortgage side of the business 

we average less than 30 minutes,” 

stated Harpe. “We can automatically 

pull W2s, tax records and the like, 

ingest these files and use the Blend 

platform to digest the information and 

quickly get through the 1003 process.” 

The difference this makes to the 

customer experience is immense 

and it helps Gateway deliver its vision 

to realize the American Dream of 

homeownership. As Blend’s founder 

Nima Ghamsari has said, a large 

number of people don’t realize they 

qualify for home ownership until they 

183 


Steven Harpe, CIO 

Harpe leads customers using a unique combination of business 

experience coupled with 30 years of technology background 

in large scale cloud computing operations and engineering 

management. He has engineered, implemented, and managed 

some of the world’s largest technology platforms with 

multifaceted business applications. In addition, he has led 

initiatives to digitize technologies based on aged architectures, 

including providing mobile platforms. Harpe is dedicated to 

enthusiastic and progressive leadership as a means of creating 

and nurturing a lifelong passion of developing people to 

achieve their goals. In April 2019 he was appointed to the 

Oklahoma Board of Corrections. Harpe is a keen drummer 

in his spare time, having backed a number of rock bands. 


CLICK TO WATCH: ‘GATEWAY MORTGAGE GROUP - LINKSTEP’ 

185 

go through this process. Not surprisingly, 

customer satisfaction and net 

promoter score (NPS) rates have 

soared. “Everything we’re doing is 

geared around the customer experience 

and we remove as much friction from 

that process as we can,” Harpe 

emphasizes. “Blend is going to be 

helping us with direct deposit for new 

deposit account creation as well.” 

After approval, the loan application 

moves into the loan origination process. 

The current loan origination software 

(LOS) provider Byte has served the 

company well but Gateway will be 

selecting a new partner in the summer 

of 2019. Discussions are in hand with 

two industry-leading contenders. 

As the launch of Gateway First Bank 

approached it was clear it should move 

to the most sophisticated core banking 

system available. In January 2019, it 

was announced that this partner would 

be FIS, a global leader in financial 

services technology with a focus on 

retail and institutional banking. “FIS is 

a global company, and it supports 

many of the leading direct-to-consumer 

banks in the market around the world,” 

says Harpe. “Its service will be hosted 



186 

on its own private cloud, in which it 

has invested massively, and it has 

deep experience and scale in digital 

banking.” The transition from the 

current Jack Henry banking system 

will take place in July 2019. 

Loan servicing is the ongoing 

relationship between lender and client, 

and this relationship will be trusted to 

Sagent LoanServ, another partner with 

its own private cloud. Moving infrastructure 

from the data center into the 

cloud, whether private or public, has 

been an ongoing goal of the IT team, 

and has largely been achieved, with 

Blend hosted on AWS as well as both 

contenders for the LOS. “By the end of 

2020, we are going to be sitting in a 

very unique place. We are a mortgage 

company that became a bank – and 

that is exciting enough in itself – but by 

then we will have all of our core 

technology running our operations in 

our business wholly on the cloud, on 

some of the largest fintech platforms.” 

Such partners were selected because 

they are highly future-oriented 

organizations that look at themselves 

primarily as technology companies. 

This, says Harpe, drives their behavior 

and decision making. 

“Everything we’re 

doing is geared 

around the customer 

experience and we 

remove as much 

friction from that 

process as we can” 

— 





187

FIS is proud to have Gateway First Bank as a new strategic 

partner on the Horizon Core Platform. 

To learn more about FIS leading solutions and client success stories, 

visit www.fisglobal.com/now.

“When you implement 

new technology, 

new skill sets are 

required and new 

jobs get created” 

— 



PLAYING THE BALL IN FRONT 

Most of Gateway’s growth up to this 

year’s bank acquisition and merger has 

been self-generated, so the new bank 

will be focusing on safeguarding its 

reputation as Harpe emphasizes. “Over 

the coming years, we will see mainly 

organic growth mixed with some 

acquisitions. But to use a baseball 

analogy, we are very much a ‘play the 

ball in front of you’ company – one 

thing at a time. The ball in front of us is 

the bank transition, the transfer of our 

core systems to FIS and choosing the 

right loan origination partner.” 

Digitizing the operations and 

leveraging 21st-Century technologies 

such as machine learning and automation 

will definitely not endanger jobs at 

Gateway, Harpe predicts. “We are, in 

fact, creating scale. When you implement 

new technology, new skill sets are 

required and new jobs get created. 

We are excited about those opportunities, 

and even more excited about what this 

is going to provide for our clients. If you 

are a mortgage or a banking customer 

(or hopefully both) you are going to be 

able to consume Gateway First Bank 

through a common set of digital 

experiences from a single platform. 

That is where we are headed.” 

The future of banking is omnichannel, 

and as such Gateway will try to achieve 

a full set of responsive, personalized 

digital services to its customers. For 

example, The Digital One Online 

Account Origination solution will allow 

customers to open and manage their 

accounts via mobile and laptop devices. 

“This is a foundational time for us,” 

enthuses Harpe. We are creating a 

brand new foundation so mobile 

banking, credit cards and personal 

finance will all be extendable through 

the APIs and digital services that we 

are building. Our customers will find it 

easy to find us and do business with us.” 

Gateway First Bank is a nationwide 

operator that was founded in the 

communities of Oklahoma. Its community 

189 



190 

“We are creating 

a brand new 

foundation… 

our customers 

will find it easy 

to find us and do 

business with us” 

— 




spirit and commitment are a real 

differentiator for the company, Harpe 

insists – home ownership is all about 

aspiration, the family and a stable 

society, so the company that Kevin Stitt 

founded has always looked for ways to 

reach out. The projects it supports are 

numerous, but typified by the establishment 

and continuing support of a Christian 

school in Nigeria in 2009 as well as 

the Gateway Youth Ranch in Uganda 

which enhances the lives of disadvantaged 

young people in that country. 

Closer to home, Harpe picks out 

Pearl’s Hope, a Tulsa-based project 

and refuge that supports homeless 

women and their families and helps 

them get back on their feet. “Oftentimes 

they find themselves having to 

run from home without the most basic 

necessities of life: Gateway provides 

Pearl’s Hope with some of these 

essentials.” The compassion he clearly 

feels chimes in with the company’s 

ethos of helping hard-working people 

regardless of their current wealth. 

191 


192 

Providing clients 

with a unique 

approach to digital 


WRITTEN BY 

SOPHIE CHAPMAN 

PRODUCED BY 

CRAIG DANIELS 



193

AVAYA 

As Avaya provides tailored services 

for its clients, the company’s Senior 

Director of Client Experience 

Innovation reveals how digital 

transformation is changing the 

telecommunications industry 

194 

A 

vaya is a software and services organization 

that has a long legacy in the telecommunications 

industry. Headquartered 

in California’s Santa Clara, in the heart of Silicon 

Valley, the business has evolved alongside the 

industry. “The evolution really came down to the 

mobile device – the smart phone becoming the 

entry point for communications across every 

platform,” explains Tim Gogal, Senior Director 

of Client Experience Innovation at Avaya. 

“Looking at it from a corporate perspective, 

not only do we have a very strong focus on evolving 

our customer strategies around the evolution 

of a multichannel or omnichannel approach 

to customer service, we also internally create 

and invent software that ties all those things 

together.” Gogal’s team has developed its strategy 

to optimize the transition from legacy telecommunications 

engineering skill sets to software developments 

that cater to clients’ needs. 

“I run a sales organization that focuses 

on evolving our clients’ customer service strategies. 


“Digital transformation is 

ultimately defining that 

there’s a larger imperative 

at play; it encompasses much 

more than just technology” 

— 

Tim Gogal, 

Senior Director of Client 

Experience Innovation, Avaya 

195 


AVAYA 

196 

“The industry itself 

uniquely allows 

Avaya to position 

itself as an 

industry expert” 

— 

Tim Gogal, 



We’re moving away from simply 

focusing on contact centers 

and looking at a larger digital transformation 

imperative,” Gogal says. 

“We’re understanding how customers 

are communicating with brands and 

social media using crowd sourcing 

websites, and we’re addressing the 

larger understanding that customer 

service today, in a digital transformation 

mindset, is completely different 

than the industry as a whole.” Having 

previously worked as a contact center 

agent, Gogal realized there was a better 

way of doing business if organizations 

could align technologies with customer 

service strategies. Through his analysis 

of the strategy, Gogal earned his place 

as a global voice architect which led 

to him selling the technology that 

can transform businesses. 

With the proliferation of mobile 

devices, Avaya ensures it is offering 

the most advanced services whilst 

maintaining a tailored approach, 

enhancing efficiency and desirability 

in its communications component. 

“Digital transformation is ultimately 

defining that there’s a larger imperative 

at play; it encompasses much more 


CLICK TO WATCH: ‘AVAYA THROUGH THE EYES OF OUR EMPLOYEES’ 

197 

than just technology. It encompasses 

the importance of understanding 

who is at the other end of the communication 

channel – whether it’s a phone 

call, a chat or an SMS – and giving that 

particular individual the opportunity 

to communicate through the channel 

that’s most appropriate and most 

effective for them,” comments Gogal. 

“I have a team of software developers 

that focus on creating individual, 

customized and unique experiences 

on a case by case basis for each 

and every one of our clients.” 

Avaya’s omnichannel approach 

has enabled it to adapt to customers’ 

needs. “We have the ability to integrate 

very seamlessly with virtually 

any enterprise application that’s 

available and bring the contextual data 

sets of those back-office applications 

into the overall client experience. 

We are uniquely positioned to provide 

our clients with a personalized service 

across virtually any media channel 

and that’s a fundamental game 

changer for us,” Gogal adds. 

“Avaya’s business lineage leads us 

back to the 1-800 patent. Having such 

a strong legacy in the communications 


space, along with the customer service 

industry, uniquely allows Avaya to 

position itself as an industry expert,” 

says Gogal. As a business with a great 

understanding of the industry surrounding 

it, the firm uses its knowledge 

to stay on top of vertical trends. Avaya 

combines trends of the future with 

its end customer experience through 

two key areas — service design 

and driving business outcomes. 

Gogal will deploy a team of software 

developers and digital transformation 

strategists to build prototypes 

for the client leveraging service design 

practices focused on streamlined 

business process models. “We start 

the process by understanding explicitly 

what our end customers want from 

the brand from an experience perspective,” 

he notes. Following the initial 

stage, the business will conduct 

interviews to align with the executive 

level visions of the company. During 

the consulting process, the team will 

build the business model into 

a communication workflow that 

focuses on streamlining the experience. 199 


Tim Gogal, Senior Director of Client 

Experience Innovation 

Tim Gogal built his career in the customer service 

industry. He’s an Entrepreneurial Leader, Strategic 

Thinker, Cultural Change Agent, with a passion 

for Anthropology, Ethnology, and Service Design 

Strategy with a focus on changing the landscape 

of business technology in today’s digitally disrupted 

world. His specialties include: Sales & Consulting, 

Corporate Management, Telecommunications 

(Voice) Architecture, Business Analytics, 

Customer Service Operations Management, 

Application Development. 


AVAYA 

200 


201 

£3.27bn 

Approximate 

revenue in 2017 

2000 

Year founded 

8,100 


of employees as of 2018 


AVAYA 

202 

“We look at whether we have 

opportunities for deploying artificial 

intelligence (AI) via chat bots. We look 

at things such as IoT devices and how 

we can leverage them to build a better 

and more desirable experience. 

Are there IoT sensors that can be 

leveraged in this process depending 

upon each case-by-case basis? 

We look at whether or not blockchain 

is applicable as it relates to security 

needs. It is important to understand 

where our clients are today and what 

their end customers want, and what 

technologies are in play which can 

be leveraged to achieve a digitally 

transformed experience, with security 

in mind, of course.” 

As an example of the Client Experience 

Innovation team’s “Art of the 

Possible” mentality, the group developed 

a prototype last year that 

incorporated the customer service 

agent and the residential establishment 

– working with technologies such 

as Google Home and Amazon Alexa. 

To show how the client experience 

is evolving, and how uniquely posi- 


“It’s a delicate balance 

of understanding high 

level trends but also 

targeting the minutia 

of customers’ business 

issues and overall 

expectations, and how 

we solve for them” 

— 

Tim Gogal, 



tioned Avaya’s open architecture really 

is, they wanted to show how they 

can enable its clients to book trips 

via voice command. “The idea is in 

creating that use case of booking a trip, 

selecting your flight itinerary, your hotel 

capability, and capturing all those 

attributes through the in-home AI 

platform. Then, if there’s a need for 

a conversation, it can be escalated 

to an agent or a customer service 

representative in a contact center 

who receives the appropriate data 

along with the contextual history 

of everything that took place within 

that AI platform,” Gogal explains. 

As Avaya continues to target each 

customer’s individual needs, 

the company looks forward to facing 

new and distinctive challenges 

on a case-by-case basis. “The focus 

is understanding what the uniqueness 

of each business process is and 

layering on the Avaya solutions 

as the communication fabric 

for making operations as seamless 

as possible,” says Gogal. “It’s a delicate 

balance of understanding high level 

trends but also targeting the minutia 

of customers’ business issues 

and overall expectations, and how 

we solve for them.” Whilst streamlining 

the operations of its customers 

by removing human latency, striking 

a parallel between technology 

adoption and personalization will 

continue to be a top priority to the firm. 

203 


204 


205 

RiverStreet 

Networks: 

digital disruption 

to telecoms 

infrastructure 

WRITTEN BY 

SOPHIE CHAPMAN 

PRODUCED BY 

CRAIG DANIELS 


RIVERSTREET NETWORKS 

As RiverStreet evolves 

with the changing telecom 

landscape, RiverStreet 

Networks’ CTO tells us 

about the company’s digital 

transformation journey 

206 

R 

iverStreet Networks was established 

in 1951 to create access to telephone 

services in rural North Carolina. 

The Communications Act of 1934 ensured that 

having access to a telephone is an inalienable right, 

leading to companies and cooperatives being 

subsidized to build telephone infrastructure. 

“Our mission at the time, although we didn’t know it, 

was to serve the unserved,” says Jody Call, the 

firm’s Chief Technology Officer (CTO). Until 2014, 

the company had around 10,000 customers. This 

changed when the government began reducing 

subsidies due to a lack of access lines as a result 

of the proliferation of mobile devices. “We had a lot of 

attrition of our access lines and our company was 

growing as more of a broadband provider. We had 

overbuilt our entire network in our cooperative 

footprint of about 10,000 customers with gigabit 

fiber to the home, and we had pretty much captured 

the market here – so we started expanding 

outside of the county,” he adds. 


207 

“Our mission 

at the time, 

although we 

didn’t know it, 

was to serve 

the un-served” 

— 

Jody Call, 

Chief Technology Officer, 

RiverStreet Networks 



208 

“We’ve had to 

disrupt our own 

internal processes 

and ways of 

thinking and to 

accommodate 

and embrace new 

technologies” 

— 

Jody Call, 



Under its expansion strategy, 

RiverStreet has acquired and merged 

with other businesses in the state of 

Wilkes County, North Carolina. The 

company anticipates that its customer 

and account rate will reach 35,000 

by the end of this year, following the 

completion of further deals, with 

25,000 of those customers connecting 

to broadband. “The paradigm shift in 

the industry is to provide broadband 

in the unserved and under-served 

areas and to address the digital divide 

– we’re looking at that through several 

different ways of infrastructure,” says 

Call. RiverStreet upgrades fiber to 

home, DSL networks, RF cables and 

traditional cable television, and is 

looking into fixed wireless options. 

Part of RiverStreet’s continual 

transformation includes regularly 

evaluating each incumbent vendor 

relationship and their respective 

product roadmaps. These relationships 

and roadmaps have to be aligned with 

the firm’s current and future plans as 

they change – technologies change, 

customer needs change, and cost is 

always an underlying factor. Avoiding 

getting too comfortable in any vendor 

relationship is paramount in how 


CLICK TO WATCH: ‘RIVERSTREET NETWORKS: DRONE COMPILATION’ 

209 

RiverStreet’s Operations group stays 

focused on addressing customer 

needs and continuing to serve more 

of the unserved popluation. Recently, 

as part of this evolving mindset, the 

company partnered with Sacramentobased 

MobiTV to complement and 

eventually replace its existing IPTV 

deployment with an OTT (over-the-top) 

TV package that closely resembles 

RiverStreet’s legacy IPTV offering. 

This OTT technology allows the firm’s 

customers the option of watching 

TV as they previously had in a linear 

fashion while adding the option of 

a single screen to watch OTT, appbased 

content. The look and feel of 

traditional TV are merged with current, 

app-based, OTT streaming. This 

product is poised to perform well in 

RiverStreet’s continued growth across 

their diverse markets. 

As the business has evolved with 

the environment surrounding it, digital 

disruption has been at the heart of its 

operations. “Typically, a lot of companies 

in our industry are very rooted or set in 

one way of doing things. We’ve had to 

disrupt our own internal processes and 

ways of thinking and to accommodate 



210 

and embrace new technologies.” 

The CTO recalls a change in culture 

throughout the firm’s evolution, with 

the business being a more IT-based 

operation than ever before. Over 50% 

of the company’s staff work in IT, with 

technology underpinning the company’s 

core functions. “RiverStreet is a 

technology-based company. If it weren’t 

for digital, as far as what we provide 

to our customers, we would not have a 

business case at all. Everything we rely 

on is integrated into our digital billing 

system. Our mapping system is digital, 

how we provision customers is digital, 

how we upgrade them – everything 

is reliant on technology,” he notes. 

When the company began embracing 

digital transformation, it realised fiber 

was the best connectivity option for 

the state. “When we embraced fiber to 

the home technology in 2014, we said, 

‘This is the only way to do a network’. 

However, it’s expensive and we had to 

take the blinders off and realize that there 

are other ways to serve the unserved 

customers in the rural areas, and that 

could be fixed wireless,” says Call. 



Jody R. Call, Chief Technology Officer 

Jody R. Call oversees the organization’s operations while aligning 

its strategic vision with the customers’ growing and ever-evolving 

technological needs. Bleeding edge deployments, calculated 

risks, and industry disruptions in rural communications are a 

normal day’s work in this role, which requires a growth mindset 

and the willingness to adapt and change direction with short 

notice. Call was hired in 2006 as a systems engineer to manage 

the company’s IPTV roll out. Later that year, he took on the task 

to design, engineer, and deploy the network topology for the 8-year, 

$44+ million, fiber-to-the-home project effectively migrating all 

of Wilkes Communications’ 9,000+ legacy copper / DSL subscribers 

to an all-active, Gigabit, fiber network; one of the first companies 

in the United States to do so. During his combined 23+ year career 

he has simultaneously taught several years at the collegiate and 

post-secondary level specializing in course concentrations 

including: networking, cyber security, hardware and software 

systems concepts, network operating systems, and general IT 

concepts. Call holds an A.A.S in Electronics Engineering, 

a B.S. in Human Services, and a M.A. Ed. in Instructional 

Technology: Information Systems. He has completed 

post-graduate work in wireless technologies and 

network engineering and has held or currently holds 

industry-relevant certifications from Cisco, ITILv3, 

Apple, Dell, and CompTIA. Call resides in 

his hometown of Wilkesboro in rural North 

Carolina, with his wife, daughter, son, 

five cats, and ten dogs. 

211 



1951 

Year founded 

150 


of employees 

212 

HQ 

Wilkes County, NC 



213

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Fixed wireless connectivity can be 

connected using existing assets such 

as cellphone towers, state, county or 

city owned towers, water towers, and 

grain silos at agricultural locations. 

“We’ve transformed our mindset to say, 

‘It’s okay to offer this’,” he adds. 

RiverStreet recently entered into 

a 10 to 20-year partnership with the 

North Carolina Electric Membership 

Corporation (NCEMC), which governs 

the 26 cooperatives across the state. 

“There’s been a lot of talk in recent 

years about electric coops wanting to 

get into the broadband business – they 

don’t want to do it for a lot of the same 

“Our mission 

at the time, 

although we 

didn’t know it, 

was to serve 

the un-served” 

— 

Jody Call, 



215 



“We don’t just 

want to survive 

in the industry, 

we want to be 

able to thrive” 

— 

Jody Call, 



216 

reasons we don’t want to get into the 

electric business, because it’s foreign 

to us. We wanted a partnership in 

which we share revenue, but we could 

utilize the NCEMC’s fiber optic 

infrastructure connected to substations, 

and in return we could do fixed wireless 

or fiber to the home for customers in 

rural areas.” The NCEMC has roughly 

1.2mn customers across North 

Carolina, with about 700,000 being 

within the 17 counties RiverStreet is 

targeting. “First, we get customers 

connected to fixed wireless; that 

shows us where the interest is. Then 

we could then build a permanent fiber 

to the home solution to those pockets. 


It’s probably the biggest project we 

have going on,” Call adds. 

Another aspect of the company’s 

transformation journey is maintaining 

a growth mindset, despite a lull in 

funding. “It is important to continue to 

grow rather than waiting for someone 

else to come in and help. We’ve been so 

reliant on government subsidies, with 

organisations like the FCC providing 

settlements based on access lines. 

But that is slowly going away, and we 

don’t just want to survive in the industry, 

we want to be able to thrive.” Growth is 

driving the firm’s operations, with 

upgradeability and scalability being top 

priorities for RiverStreet. “We’re also 

looking out for our employees and their 

families, their retirements and the 

growth of this company. If we’ve grown 

this much since 2014, we can only 

imagine how much more we can grow 

if we look another 10 years into the 

future,” remarks Call. 

217 


218 

The City of 

Phoenix: Rising 

to the challenge 

of its 2050 

sustainability 

goals 

WRITTEN 

BY 


PRODUCED BY 




219

CITY OF PHOENIX 

The City of Phoenix is working 

towards zero carbon, zero 

waste, a 100-year supply of 

water, clean air, and parks and 

transit in every neighborhood. 

CSO Mark Hartman reveals 

how its 2050 goals are making 

it one of the most sustainable 

desert cities in the world. 

220 

W 

hen the Chief Sustainability Officer for 

the City of Phoenix took up his post in 

2014 the target was to become the most 

sustainable desert city in the world. Five years 

later, Mark Hartman and the very innovative 

department heads across the City are setting their 

sights on a sustainability roadmap for 2050 to 

ensure progress for future generations in Phoenix. 

“Back in 2016 when City departments adopted 

these goals we asked: ‘What kind of city do we 

want to be in 2050?’” explains Hartman. “Instead 

of thinking ‘How did we get here?’, we want to be 

able to say, ‘We planned to get to this place’ and 

this is what the perfect city looks like — our 2050 

environmental goals aim to articulate those long 

term desired outcomes. Setting out the long-term 

environmental goals of zero carbon, zero waste, 

clean air, a 100-year supply of water, and parks 

and transit in every neighbourhood will drive us 



221


222 

“Setting out the longterm 

goals of zero 

carbon, zero waste, 

clean air, maintaining 

our 100-year supply 

of water, and parks 

and transit in every 

neighbourhood will 

really drive us towards 

what we’re trying to 

achieve as a city” 

— 

Mark Hartman, 

CSO, City of Phoenix 

towards what we’re trying to achieve 

as a sustainable desert city.” 

A big part of that sustainability 

journey is a series of major projects 

including the 91st Avenue wastewater 

biogas project (the largest facility of 

its kind in the US). “Our water department 

is capturing methane from our 

wastewater, putting it in a pipeline and 

generating revenue by selling it to the 

California green energy market. It’s a 

great example of finding a use for the 

methane from wastewater treatment. 

In addition to the biogas, we actually 

reuse nearly all of the wastewater. 


CLICK TO WATCH: ‘BECOMING A CARBON NEUTRAL CITY’ 

223 

We’re ahead of the curve, which 

encompasses how we focus our 

approach in the desert.” Along with 

the biogas production, reclaimed 

water is also being diverted into 

irrigation for farming and agriculture 

and for cooling at the Palo Verde 

Nuclear Generating Station. Meanwhile, 

the final by-products, the 

bio-solids which amount to 10% 

of total waste, become fertilisers 

for non-food crops. 

Hartman also notes the city’s 

approach to the final polishing of 

water has evolved. “Typically, you 

would just build a treatment plant 

before releasing it into the waterways,” 

he says. “Instead, we’ve constructed 

the Tres Rios Wetlands. It’s significant 

because we’re using nature to do the 

work for us and at the same time, 

it transformed this desertscape into 

a beautiful wetland home to 150 species 

of birds. So in contrast to many of our 

human behaviors that are slowly 

contaminating our ecosystem, we are 

being restorative and enhancing 

nature so that it can thrive.” 

It’s not just the city’s infrastructure 

that is evolving. Phoenix is also 



224 

supporting sustainable home development 

with a series of initiatives as 

part of its vision to have all new 

buildings net positive in both energy 

and materials by 2050. “We ran a 

$100,000 competition to design a 

beautiful home that is sustainable and 

near net-zero, and yet can be built at 

the cost of typical construction,” says 

Hartman, who notes that even with 

adherence to the latest building codes 

we’re a long way from buildings that 

need little energy to condition them. 

“Our planning department has posted 

the winning design and the detail 

construction drawings from Imirzian 

Architects on our website so anyone 

can download the pre-approved plans 

for free to build a net-zero energy 

home at a cost similar to current 

construction. And here in Phoenix, we 

won’t charge building permit fees for 

the first 25 homes. It’s an opportunity 

to encourage home buyers to think 

differently about the energy savings 

from well-insulated walls and highperformance 

windows.” Hartman 

highlights this focus also extends 


to government buildings. “We’re doing 

deep energy retrofits in all of our 

facilities,” he says. “We’ve put forward 

proposals on three specific sites 

where the $30mn budget will actually 

be paid back through energy savings. ” 

Phoenix is allied to the Covenant of 

Mayors, the world’s largest movement 

for local climate and energy actions, 

which has over 9,000 cities in partnership 

worldwide to meet the commitments 

of the Paris Agreement, chiefly 

a 30% reduction in carbon by 2025. 

Hartman takes inspiration from this 

global quest as Phoenix looks to 

implement new processes. “Public 

Works recently installed a state-ofthe-art 

$15mn facility where we take 

organics and use a state-of-the-art 

Turned Aerated Pile (TAP) system to 

produce certified compost faster 

than other composting methods,” 

he reveals. “In partnership with the 

City’s Compost Facility operator, 

WeCare Denali, we’re processing 

nearly 55,000 tons of inbound organic 

waste to compost which is either sold 

regionally, used at City parks and 

properties, or provided to City 

residents at special give away events .” 

225 


Mark Hartman, Chief Sustainability Officer 

Mark Hartman is Phoenix’s Chief Sustainability Officer, 

charged to catalyze the long list of actions already underway 

to help Phoenix become a global leader in sustainability. 

Most recently, in April 2016, the council approved the 2050 

Environmental Goals and now, Hartman is working with 

departments and the community to develop interim goals 

and complementary social and economic goals. Hartman 

formerly worked at the City of Vancouver for eight years 

in Sustainability leading their carbon-neutral buildings 

strategy and their green building code, as well as supporting 

Vancouver’s ambition to become the greenest city in the 

world by 2020. Mark holds an MBA from Heriot-Watt 

University and is a LEED accredited professional. 


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Hartman believes the biggest 

challenge any city faces in pursuit of 

its sustainability goals is to break the 

cycle of the human propensity to do 

things the way they’ve always been 

done. “We are reluctant to embrace 

change, even when we’re presented 

with amazing opportunities,” he says. 

“We’re using more resources than is 

within the earth’s carrying capacity 

which is not sustainable long term. 

We need to start thinking about 

solutions to reduce waste in all of our 

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227 



228 

Collaboration is key for the ongoing 

sustainable evolution of Phoenix. 

“We’re working with established 

partners to help us with technology 

and innovation,” confirms Hartman. 

“For our retrofits, we’re utilising the 

expertise of Ameresco, Honeywell, 

Trane, McKinsey and Noresco. They 

bring decades of experience to help 

us achieve our goals with systems that 

are easy to use and operate.” These 

efforts are part of the city’s 2020 

goals to retrofit 185 City buildings 

to make them 20% more efficient. 

“Ameresco is also running our 91st 

Avenue biogas facility as well as being 

the contractor that build it,” he adds. 

What sustainability trends has 

Hartman identified globally, and 

across the US, that can support 

Phoenix with its 2050 goals? “I’m 

excited about the potential to purchase 

renewable energy,” he observes. 

“We’re in a regulated environment, 

so it needs to be in partnership with 

our utilities. We’re looking at options 

like virtual power purchase agreements 

and ways you can procure energy 

from renewable sources that are 

equivalent to, or less than, current 


utility pricing. It is possible to save 

money when you buy renewable 

energy.” Allied to this, Hartman is keen 

to make these opportunities available 

through community solar projects by 

partnering with a utility to implement 

solar and help reduce electricity costs 

in lower-income areas. “We also hope 

to partner with Clearway Energy to 

provide clean electricity to the district 

cooling system to offer carbon-neutral 

cooling to downtown buildings.” 

Hartman believes that, from a 

carbon pollution point of view, there 

are huge opportunities to apply the 

same learnings from making buildings 

more energy-efficient to transportation. 

“There’s a real move towards 

electrification of transportation,” he 

notes. “Norway’s electric vehicle sales 

now make up more than 70% of the 

market and countries like China see 

electrifying cars and buses as the 

solution to pollution.” 

Elsewhere, the Street Department 

just completed an upgrade of its 

95,000 street lights to LED. It may 

have cost $30mn but Hartman points 

out that it pays for itself out of the 

energy savings, with the net savings 

229 


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exceeding $1.5mn per year over and 

above the debt service cost, while 

providing better quality and more 

reliable lighting. 

Another goal for Hartman is to see 

Phoenix move towards a circular 

economy: “What if all the products 

and packaging we purchase was 

100% recyclable and everything went 

back to the suppliers, and then, they 

used them for reproduction?” He 

notes that the Public Works department 

is visionary as it was the first city in 

the U.S. to join the Ellen MacArthur 

CE-100 Network, an industry catalyst 


for the circular economy. In partnership 

with the Arizona State University, 

the City launched the RISN Incubator 

to work with early stage ventures with 

a focus on waste diversion and 

improvements in processing or 

utilization of waste as a raw material 

for new products or energy. As of 

1 May 2019, 13 new businesses have 

generated $4.75M in revenue, raised 

$3.44M in capital, created 57 jobs, 

launched 13 products, filed 3 patents, 

and provided 43 internships. “We’re 

“We’re looking at options 

like virtual power 

purchase agreements 

and ways you can 

actually build and 

contract to get energy 

from a solar plant that’s 

equivalent to, or less 

than, current pricing” 

— 

Mark Hartman, 

CSO, City of Phoenix 

231 



2050 GOALS 

• Make walking, cycling and 

transit commonly used in 

every Phoenix 

neighbourhood 

• Create zero waste through 

participation in the circular 

economy 

• Maintain a clean and 

reliable 100-year supply 

of water 

232 

• Reduce community carbon 

emissions by 80-90% 

• All residents to live within a 

five-minute walk of a park or 

open space 

• Achieve a level of air quality 

healthy for all residents and 

the natural environment 

• Maintain a sustainable, 

healthy, equitable, thriving 

local food system. 


working with the private sector 

providing feedstock and land for lease 

at attractive rates to turn palm fronds 

into animal feed and mixed plastics 

into fuel... It’s exciting to look at how 

we can turn waste into resources 

instead of dumping it in a huge hole in 

the ground. Here in Phoenix we could 

fill our baseball stadium seven times 

with the waste we collect from 

residential customers. What are the 

resources we could take out of that 

seven stadiums worth of waste? 

Whether that’s up-cycling furniture or 

using plastic bags to make decking— 

we need to be creative. Meanwhile, the 

trucks that pick up that waste travel the 

equivalent of going to the moon and 

back 14 times. People say ‘it’s free to 

throw stuff away’, but it’s certainly is not 

free. Imagine the fuel needed to travel 

to the moon 14 times in a garbage truck. 

One opportunity to address this fuel 

use is underway for our landfill gas, 

whereby the methane will be captured 

and converted into cleaner burning 

natural gas to fuel our garbage trucks. 

This will ensure cleaner air and avoids 

mining natural gas by replacing it with 

methane produced in our landfill.” 

233 



PARTNER INFO 

Phoenix: supporting renewable energy 

and products through utilities 

234 

“We’re working with Arizona 

Public Service (APS) and Salt 

River Project (SRP),” explains 

City of Phoenix CSO Mark 

Hartman. “SRP wants to add 

1000MW of utility-scale solar 

over the next five years. The first 

100MW they made available to 

their largest customers. The city 

will be able to purchase solar at 

2.7 cents per kilowatt hour for 20 

years, and then sell it on the 

market at prevailing rates, which 

today averages over 3 cents, 

which means a large credit on 

our bill. As both customers and 

utilities invest in projects like 

this, its producing clean energy 

while saving money.” 

Hartman hopes to see many 

more of these projects. Phoenix 

already boasts 32MW of solar 

on city land, more than any 

other US city, and aims to 

double that figure. “We’re 

planning to add solar to parking 

lots, rooftops and unused land,” 

he pledges. “We’re also looking 

to lease out landfill property to 

utilities and renewable energy 

developers as a means to 

provide clean energy.” 


235 

In the short term, the city is on track to 

meet its target of 40% waste diversion 

by 2020. Meanwhile, Phoenix is 

working hard with energy service 

companies (ESCOs) to reduce 

building energy use by 20% for next 

year and targeting 15% for renewable 

energy used city-wide from diversified 

sources. Ultimately, Hartman stresses 

the need to also prioritize economic 

and social sustainability. “Environmentally 

there’s much we can do to raise 

awareness and make positive change 

but those outcomes must be achieved 

alongside economic and social 

sustainability as articulated in the 

City’s General Plan — community 

health and education, equity, civil and 

human rights, and safe communities 

— in order to become a truly sustainable 

desert city. 


236 

INSIDE LEE 

INDUSTRIAL 

CONTRACTING’S 

PEOPLE-DRIVEN 

DIGITAL 

TRANSFORMATION 

WRITTEN BY 

HARRY MENEAR 

PRODUCED BY 

TOM VENTURO 



237

LEE INDUSTRIAL CONTRACTING 

Lee Industrial Contracting 

Senior Operations Manager 

Andrew Keilman and Director 

of Sales Michael Hahn discuss 

the company’s people-first 

digital transformation strategy 

238 

A 

s the pace of technological advancement 

increases exponentially with each 

passing year, companies are given more 

access than ever to solutions that increase 

efficiency, cut costs and drive competitive advantage. 

However, in the light of new and dazzling 

technological applications, it is all too easy to lose 

sight of the core principle of a business relationship: 

the people. The shiniest, most powerful business 

tools in the world are worthless without the right 

people to wield them, and market leading products 

are irrelevant if they are not suited to the needs 

of the customer. For over 30 years, Lee Industrial 

Contracting has been working to bring turn-key 

solutions to heavy industry in a way that marries 

sector leading, top quality products with the right 

people in order to provide the best possible 

customer experience. “We consider our company 

to be a strategic partner with all of our customers. 

Their goal is our goal,” says Michael Hahn, Director 

of Sales at Lee. 


“WE CONSIDER OUR 

COMPANY TO BE A 

STRATEGIC PARTNER 

WITH ALL OF OUR 

CUSTOMERS. THEIR 

GOAL IS OUR GOAL” 

— 

Michael Hahn, 

Director of Sales, Lee Industrial Contracting 

239 



240 

“LEE HAS THE 

BEST PEOPLE 

IN EACH 

RESPECTIVE 

TRADE THAT WE 

DO WORK IN” 

— 

Andrew Keilman, 

Senior Operations Manager, 


As a people-driven company, Lee is 

always looking to do things in the most 

efficient, cost effective, meaningful 

manner that adds optimum value for 

the client in the form of end-to-end 

services. Over the years, the company 

has grown its capabilities, vehicle fleet 

and roster of specialized equipment 

multiple times over, becoming one of 

the most capable complete solutions 

contractors in the region. A powerful 

tool in its arsenal that allows Lee to add 

value for its customers is its uniquely 

diverse range of in-house capabilities. 

Performing 13 different trade services 


CLICK TO WATCH: ‘LEE CONTRACTING IN-HOUSE DEPARTMENTS’ 

241 

in-house sets Lee apart within the 

industrial space. Self-performing as 

many different functions as they do, 

allows the company to control every 

aspect of its projects, from design 

and cost to scheduling and quality. 

For Senior Operations Manager, 

Andrew Keilman, who joined the 

company in 2014, the company’s 

emphasis on an exceedingly high 

standard for in-house capabilities is 

what attracted him in the first place. 

“When I saw the operations, the people 

and how everything was organized, 

I wanted to be a part of it. Lee has the 

best people in each respective trade 

that we work in,” he explains. 

We sat down with Hahn and Keilman 

to discuss Lee’s corporate strategy, 

competitive advantages, and how the 

next steps in Lee’s digital transformation 

journey will allow it to continue putting 

people, partners and clients at the 

center of everything it does. 

“We’ve won Supplier of the Year for 

General Motors two years in a row,” 

notes Hahn. One of the key drivers 

behind Lee becoming General Motors’ 

Supplier of the Year is the way the 

company handles safety, project 



242 

delivery and the unique technological 

demands of providing its turn-key 

solutions. “Our technology played 

a big part in that award,” explains Hahn. 

Central to Lee’s technology strategy 

in the past few years has been the Lee 

Electronic Data Management System 

(LEDMS), an in-house data center 

and management platform. LEDMS, 

Keilman notes, houses the full spectrum 

of Lee’s digital operations, from its 

quoting process to scheduling. 

“It’s one of the big things that General 

Motors really zeroed in on,” he remarks. 

Now, with the rapid advancement of 

business tools, Lee is preparing to take 

steps from private towards public 

cloud infrastructure. The company is 

currently in the process of switching 

its operational software over to Oracle’s 

NetSuite, which will enable it to have 

a much more unified software structure 

and accommodate future growth. 

The transition to public cloud software 

will help provide Lee with real metrics 

and real analysis on how the company 

is performing month over month. 

Most importantly, the transition towards 


NetSuite will help the company gain 

insight into its CRM process, helping 

Lee continue to build meaningful, 

collaborative and long-term relationships 

with Lee’s clients and partners. 

The traditional relationship between 

seller, supplier and buyer is evolving. 

A traditional, purely transactional 

approach is no longer viable in the 

modern world of ecosystems and 

strategic relationships. Lee sees the 

shift in the status quo and is working 

to embrace a collaborative approach. 

“We have strategic partners, strategic 

subcontractors, strategic design firms 

and strategic materials providers. 

We can’t succeed independently 

without all those folks at the table,” 

says Hahn. “The key is understanding 

the client’s performance metrics. 

It could be dollars, quality or time that’s 

most important to them. If we can help 

them save time and increase their 

ability to react to their customer 

requirements everybody wins. 

We also have something else that other 

companies don’t offer: value engineering.” 

With its extensive roster of trades 

and in-house capabilities, Lee is able 

to explore a potential customer’s goal 

and create their request for proposal 

(RFP), pitching them additional ways 

243 


Andrew Keilman, Senior 

Operations Manager 

Andrew Keilman is a Senior Operations 

Manager at Lee Contracting. Kielman 

has been in the industry for over 22 years. 

He started at Lee in 2014 as a Pipefitting 

Coordinator and was quickly promoted 

to oversee multiple departments as 

an Operations Manager. Andrew was 

most recently promoted to Senior 

Operations Manager in 2019. 



244 


1989 

Year founded 

Employee owned 

since 

2015 

434 

Number of employees 

245 


Industrial, Commercial and 

institutional Electrical Contractors 

Services southeast Michigan 

• LED Lighting Upgrades 

• Power Distribution 

• Trouble Shooting 

• Veterinary Offices / Hospitals 

• Generator Installation 

• Interior and Exterior Wiring 

• Machine Wiring 

• Preventative Maintenence 

• Facility Relocations 

24 Hour Service 

Available / 

Licensed and 

Insured 

586-293-0003 spectronelectric.com 

31400 Kendall Suite A Fraser, MI 48026

to increase value through their project. 

“Value engineering has reduced cost, 

waste and time spent, all of which are 

invaluable to the customer. Between 

70-80% of the time our customers go 

with our value engineering options.” 

The emphasis on collaboration at 

Lee isn’t restricted to relationships 

between the company and its clients; 

internal cooperation and support is 

a core value that the executive team 

works hard to support. Morale and 

personal development are also 

important to Lee’s corporate culture. 

“We have a morale team, which is 

comprised of people from various 

areas of the company that meet on 

a monthly basis and come up with 

ideas to give back to our employees,” 

says Keilman. From management and 

communications techniques to trade 

skill training, Keilman explains that 

Lee’s team is dedicated to “building up 

all of our people, all the way from the 

apprentice level up to the highest tier 

of management”. Not only are Lee’s 

employees made to feel as though their 

company is invested in them, but four 

years ago founder Ed Lee made sure 

that every employee was personally 

invested in the company. “Ed decided 

to sell the company to the employees, 

247 


Michael Hahn, Director 

of Sales 

Michael Hahn has been in the industry 

for 33 years and has been with Lee 

Contracting for 15 years. Michael started 

out managing the electrical department 

and quickly moved into sales to help build 

the business for Lee. Michael was 

promoted to Director of Sales at 

the beginning of 2019. 



248 

“THE KEY IS UNDERSTANDING 

THE CLIENT’S PERFORMANCE 

METRICS. IF WE CAN HELP 

THEM SAVE TIME AND INCREASE 

THEIR ABILITY TO REACT TO THEIR 

CUSTOMER REQUIREMENTS 

EVERYBODY WINS” 

— 

Michael Hahn, 

Director of Sales, 



so we became 100% employee owned,” 

says Hahn. 

Valuing its employees as much as it 

does, Lee’s corporate strategy places 

tremendous emphasis on safety. The 

company has a strong safety team that 

is involved in every project, job hazard 

analysis and tool box talks; the health 

and wellbeing of Lee’s people is 

paramount. As it embraces the next 

stage of its digital transformation 

journey, the company is keeping people 

at the heart of everything it does. 

Along with the management team, 

including Keilman and Hahn, are at the 

helm of a diverse, capable, innovative 

company that puts people first, using 

the power of human dedication and 

ingenuity to drive innovation. Looking 

to the future, Keilman is confident in the 

capabilities that Lee brings to the table: 

“We have the best people, the best 

tools, the best equipment, the best 

facilities and the best plan on every 

project that we do. I think that’s enabled 

us to be successful year after year.” 

249 


250 

SIMON FRASER 

UNIVERSITY 

AN ENGAGED 

UNIVERSITY 


WRITTEN BY 

JOHN O’HANLON 

PRODUCED BY 


251 


SIMON FRASER UNIVERSITY 

SIMON FRASER UNIVERSITY’S 

SUSTAINABILITY OFFICE IS 

A FOCUS OF ACTION AT THE 

INTERSECTION OF PLANETARY 

REGENERATION, HUMAN 

HEALTH, AND SOCIAL JUSTICE. 

252 

O 

ne can’t help thinking that the sustainability 

team at Simon Fraser University 

(SFU) have some of the best jobs in the 

world. Most of the world’s young people, at least, 

are now swinging behind the awareness that we 

are living during a time of climate crisis and that 

time is running out to change our behaviour if we 

are to avoid or mitigate the consequences of 

biodiversity loss, pollution, and climate change. 

That awareness is not unique to SFU, of course, 

but few higher education institutions have 

embraced sustainability principles so intelligently 

or realistically. The Province of British Columbia is 

committed to reducing greenhouse gas emissions 

to 80% below 2007 levels by 2050 and, in 2011, 

its capital Vancouver, home to SFU, set the goal of 

becoming the greenest city in the world by 2020. 

SFU is a partner in these broader goals. 

The University itself has adopted sustainability 

as one of its six core values, which means it is 

embedded in the fabric of the institution and the 

day-to-day decisions taken by every department. 


The green wall by SFU’s Saywell Hall 

253 

The University is also in the process 

of developing a 5-year climate action 

plan to address the most urgent 

sustainability issue of our time. 

SFU recognizes that its institutional 

responsibility extends beyond its 

boundaries to include the social, 

economic and ecological sustainability 

of its campuses and the communities 

in which they operate. Therefore, 

these plans are being developed with 

the recognition that sustainability 

work broadly, and climate action 

specifically, cannot be done without 



254 

“THE MOMENT 

YOU STEP ON 

CAMPUS AS A 

NEW COMMUNITY 

MEMBER YOU GET 

INTRODUCED TO 

THE CONCEPT OF 


AS A CORE VALUE” 

— 

Candace Le Roy, 

Director of Sustainability, 

Simon Fraser University 

addressing social inequities, racism, 

reconciliation and partnership with 

local Indigenous nations. 

To implement SFU’s sustainability 

values, eight very committed 

professionals are led by Director of 

Sustainability Candace Le Roy – they 

provide planning, consultancy, and 

support services to SFU community 

members to help them develop, scale, 

or promote their sustainability work 

and lead sustainability projects across 

the university. It’s by no means an act 

of enacting top-down policies, she 

hastens to say. “We recently finalised 

our 20-year Sustainability Vision, 

which identifies 20 strategic goals 

following a year-long community 

engagement progress involving 

all University stakeholder groups: 

thousands of people took part from 

students up to the Board. Everything 

we do in the Sustainability Office 

is in collaboration and partnership 

with the faculty, staff, students, and 

communities we are embedded in. 

Sustainability at SFU is a shared 

responsibility and a joint effort. 

Our office merely facilitates this joint 

effort so that it is coordinated, 

connected, and inclusive.” 


CLICK TO WATCH: ‘SFU OPENS NEW SUSTAINABLE BUILDING’ 

255 

PARTNERS IN ENGAGEMENT 

It’s this level of commitment, she 

observes, that makes the job so 

rewarding. Every new student and 

member of staff receives sustainability 

education through orientation: “The 

moment you step on campus as a new 

community member you get introduced 

to the concept of sustainability 

as a core value. We want them to see 

how each individual can contribute in 

their area.” However she acknowledges 

that most people come in with a high 

level of awareness these days – all the 

team needs to do is connect this 

awareness to what SFU is doing, 

listen to their ideas, and help remove 

barriers to their contributions in 

practice. At SFU, students aren’t seen 

as ‘end-users’ to be trained and 

delivered, but as partners in learning, 

discovery and community engagement. 

The tripartite social, economic and 

ecological view of sustainability is 

something that all alumni have an 

opportunity to take with them into the 

world beyond. To ensure that the work 

at SFU is connected with global goals 

the 20-Year vision and the emerging 

5-year plan have been developed in 



256 

alignment with the UN’s Sustainable 

Development Goals. 

Engagement with major British 

Columbia institutions is key to SFU. 

For example, the Pacific Water 

Research Centre (PWRC) recently 

hosted a seminar on Vancouver’s Rain 

City Strategy to embrace rainwater as 

a valuable resource and to conserve 

90% of its annual rainfall. The 

University also aims to support major 

shifts in behaviour such as its advocacy 

for a funicular (gondola) to connect 

its University campus on the top 

of Burnaby Mountain, providing an 

alternative to the diesel-fuelled bus 

service. This project has been finally 

approved in principle by Burnaby city 

council, and would speed up travel 

times and cut emission levels. 

Another promising project is the 

development of the Corix biomass 

district energy system on the Burnaby 

Mountain campus which will reduce 

the campus greenhouse gas emissions 

by 60%-80%. This — along with 

the University’s achievement of 

reducing the carbon footprint of the 

University’s investment portfolio by 

50% below the baseline measurement 

SFU’s Academic Quadrangle 


eported as of 31 March 2016 — 

demonstrates how the university is 

committed to working with on and off 

campus partners to make big shifts in 

the way they operate as an institution. 

A major project underway encourages 

‘sustainable spaces’ across the 

university’s facilities which integrates 

sustainability principles into the 

day-to-day actions of staff members. 

Becoming a Certified Sustainable 

Office is a great way to encourage 

staff collaboration on sustainability 

and to create a more robust, engaged 

workplace, says Blok. “Certified 

Sustainable Offices adopt practices 

that improve their environmental, 

economic and social performance. 

They receive a toolkit, support and 

resources and that encourages others 

to participate.” This certification 

program has now been extended into 

events, vendors, and soon into labs. 

Large events such as the President’s 

annual staff appreciation BBQ are 

certified sustainable events further 

demonstrating that all levels of 

the University are contributing to 

these efforts. 

The bottom line, says Manager of 

257 


Candace Le Roy, Director of Sustainability 

Guiding the institution-wide approach to sustainability 

leadership, Le Roy consults on risks and opportunities 

to integrate sustainability into the University’s core 

business. Over her 16 years at SFU, Candace has been 

dedicated to facilitating University-wide efforts to 

innovate and contribute meaningfully and measurably 

to the shift toward a regenerative, circular, and 

equitable society and economy. Candace works 

collaboratively with partners both within and outside 

the University to identify, develop, and deliver major 

cross-portfolio projects that contribute to this work. 



258 

Campus Sustainability, Kayla Blok, 

is that sustainability should be 

integrated into all projects, research 

and teaching. It is also central to 

procurement, with all contracts and 

purchases over $100,000 required 

to be considered from a sustainability 

point of view. “Whenever we go out 

to tender we have questions and 

requirements for suppliers, and 

I support multiple request for proposal 

(RFP) committees by advising on how 

that should be done. When we undertake 

a project, are our staff seeing their 

work through a sustainability lens? 

When our students graduate are they 

leaving with a holistic understanding 

of sustainability? These are the type of 

questions we are asking.” 

THE ROAD TO ZERO WASTE 

It is never going to be possible to 

recycle 100% of waste, but by 

adopting ‘circular economy’ practices 

SFU is heading towards a goal of 10% 

waste minimization and 90% diversion 

from landfill. SFU started its zero 

waste journey in 2012 at a time when it 

had only a two-stream waste diversion 

system and most items were being 


“WHEN OUR 

STUDENTS 

GRADUATE ARE 

THEY LEAVING 

WITH A HOLISTIC 

UNDERSTANDING 

OF SUSTAINABILITY?” 

— 

Kayla Blok, 

Manager of Campus Sustainability, 


sent to the landfill. Within 18 months, 

the initiative was diverting more than 

70% of SFU’s landfill waste and had 

introduced circular economy principles 

to look at purchasing, and require 

suppliers to work towards recyclable 

and compostable packaging. 

Today, across the campus, there are 

four-stream waste stations allowing 

for food and compostables, paper and 

cardboard, recyclables and landfill 

garbage. It’s not hard to get buy-in 

these days, with the media full of 

reminders about things like plastic 

pollution and extinction rates, but 

people still need to be helped to 

understand the circular economy – 

that is where the Sustainability Office 

steps in to educate and encourage, 

affirms Kayla Blok. The team, in 

conjunction with a large stakeholder 

group that includes departments 

across the university, is currently set to 

launch an initiative to eliminate singleuse 

plastics and products from all three 

campuses, making them the first 

university in Canada to act on this issue. 

Research, business expertise, 

software engineering and the spur of 

environmental perils have come 

together in an exciting project that 

259 


Responsible 

Investing for 

a sustainable 

future. 

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constitute a solicitation of an offer to buy, or an offer to sell securities nor should the information be relied upon as investment 

registered trademark of Bank of Montreal, used under licence.

Invest. Avoid. Improve. 

As a founding signatory to the United Nations Principles for Responsible Investment (UNPRI), BMO Global Asset 

Management is boldly committed to solving our clients’ sustainability challenges with the prudent management of 

environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) issues integrated into our overall investment philosophy: 

Invest in companies that demonstrate responsible business. 

Avoid companies with activities that harm society or the environment. 

Improve companies’ management of their ESG issues through engagement and voting. 

For over 35 years, this approach to responsible investment has driven long-term value by aligning our clients’ 

financial goals with their ethical values. 

Let’s connect: 

www.bmogam.com 

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advice. Past performance is no guarantee of future results. All Rights Reserved. ®”BMO (M-bar roundel symbol)” is a


262 

promises to contribute a great deal 

to achieving zero waste. And each of 

these facets has come out of SFU. 

The founders of Intuitive AI Hassan 

Murad and Vivek Vyas are both alumni 

of SFU, where they first developed 

software to tackle the problem of 

recycling. SFU itself may have made 

great strides but globally only around 

3% of waste is recycled. Even in a 

four-stream system, waste identification 

remains a problem – what is recyclable, 

what is not, where should you put it? 

They began with a simple vision, 

to create a zero waste world. This led 

them to develop an AI platform driven 

by sensors that empower spaces to 

be more sustainable. 

Murad and Vyas launched Oscar, 

an AI-powered visual sorting system, 

with a camera that detects people 

approaching a bin, automatically 

identifies each item and tells people 

where to place it. “This is a true 

innovation story from SFU,” explains 

Blok. “They spent a great deal of time 

formulating this idea at our labs on 

the Surrey campus. We were able 

to support this project right from 

the ideation phase, and the Sustainability 

Office was there at the initial 

Erica Lay, Associate Director at SFU’s 

Sustainability Office presenting at a 20-year 

sustainability visions and goals session. 

consultations providing key facts, 

giving operational and logistical 

feedback, and providing expertise. 

The testing phase was carried out on 

our downtown Vancouver campus and 

we were successful in providing space 

for them to test the platform and 

promote their message.” The Surrey 

campus now houses the first higher 

education Oscar waste station in 

Canada and have been taken up 

at coffee chains and an airport in 

Toronto. Intuitive is currently part 

of the Next AI accelerator in Toronto 


and the VentureLabs business 

accelerator at Simon Fraser University. 

Oscar is as much about data as it is 

about making life easier for the 

consumer of a cup of coffee. The 

software can identify brands, patterns 

of consumption by area and demographic 

information all of value to the 

airport, shopping mall or university 

where it is located – garbage in, 

valuable data out. It’s by leveraging 

this data that Intuitive AI will monetise 

its software in the future. “Perhaps the 

most promising part of the technology 

is that it provides robust data,” says 

263 


Kayla Blok, Manager of Campus 

Sustainability 

Overseeing the Campus Sustainabilityportfolio, 

Blok liaises with operational functions across 

all three campuses to implement and scale 

sustainable decisions and practices. Her work 

ensures that the University operates in alignmen 

with its sustainability plans, visions, and goals. 

Blok offers consulting services for all SFU 

Community members and works closely with 

internal and external partners on signature 

projects and initiatives. 



Kayla Blok. “We look forward to 

seeing how we can apply this data 

to influence design, planning, and 

purchasing decisions, for example. 

Our hope is that it will help our 

operational as well as sustainability 

goals by creating targets to improve 

waste management at the campus.” 

264 

AWARENESS AND PERCEPTION 

Oscar has attracted a lot of media 

attention thanks to its visibility. “This 

is a really good example of the kind 

of thing that happens at SFU due to 

our culture of, and commitment to, 

innovation, community engagement, 

and student empowerment,” says 

Candace Le Roy. “Our students get 

to work on projects that they take out 

into the wider world and the benefit 

comes back to the institution through 

new projects and initiatives and the 

application of technology. In the 16 

years I have been at SFU, I have seen 

the students always at the forefront of 

major initiatives at SFU and then they 

carry this leadership to the communities 

and organizations they serve 

when they leave.” 

Even with the impetus provided by the 

rapidly increasing media coverage of 


SFU’s Morris J. Wosk Centre 

for Dialogue 

the climate crisis, getting sustainability 

thinking embedded in a large, transient 

and diverse university population is 

not a simple feat. It might seem like 

a no-brainer to ban plastic bottles, but 

many overseas students come from 

cultures where bottled water is the 

only safe water. “We constantly have 

to customize our communication 

tactics and infuse them with humanity,” 

she says. “On the one hand, we have 

to keep up with innovations in industry, 

research, politics and international 

targets and do things like ban single 

use plastics and dramatically reduce 

our greenhouse gas emissions and on 

the other hand we also have to bring 

people along with us on this journey. 

We need to help people understand 

how their consumption decisions 

affect the planet and people, but we 

can only do this if we make an effort to 

understand them not has consumers, 

but as people who have unique 

backgrounds, experiences, and 

perspectives. Sustainability efforts 

have been rightly criticized for being 

led primarily by rich white people 

who come from a particular (mostly 

Western) perspective. If we are to truly 

address sustainability issues we need 

265 



266 

to design solutions from all perspectives 

and with all people in mind.” 

Justifiably proud of the nuanced 

and holistic way in which the organisation 

has taken the lead on advancing 

sustainability best practice, Candace 

Le Roy, her team, and their colleagues 

at SFU work tirelessly to gain the 

support of all stakeholders. “Getting 

a major initiative off the ground at 

a university is usually the first and 

biggest hurdle because we value the 

engagement of all relevant stakeholders 

and engagement takes time. But the 

effort put in is well worth the quality 

that is the result,” she says. She points 

to the cross departmental teams that 

have been formed to work on initiatives 

like the BC Cool Campus 

challenge, spearheaded by SFU but 

spread across British Columbia, to 

reduce energy consumption by simple 

actions and the Fair Trade and 

Changemaker Campus designations 

SFU has achieved. 

In the end, all of this is about 

changing the way we see the world 

and our place in it. Virtually every 

decision we make has an impact on 

people and the planet, good or bad, 

she concludes. “At the end of the day 

SFU’s Asia Pacific Hall in the Morris J. Wosk 

Centre for Dialogue 

“SUSTAINABILITY 

GIVES UNIVERSITIES 

AND COLLEGES 

A COMPETITIVE 

ADVANTAGE AND 

MAKES US MORE 

RESILIENT TO 

INTERNAL AND 

EXTERNAL THREATS” 

— 

Candace Le Roy, 

Director of Sustainability, 



267 

it’s not about recycling or using less 

energy. Sustainability work is about 

understanding how to make better 

decisions based on a strong understanding 

that humans are a part of 

nature not outside of it. We need to 

learn from, respect, and apply 

Indigenous ways of knowing and leave 

no one behind. This means constantly 

being aware of the interconnections 

between ecology, politics, economics, 

and social inequities. It’s planning to 

ensure we survive on this planet and 

our institutions survive in the current 

political and ecological climate. 

Addressing sustainability challenges, 

like the climate crisis, gives universities 

and colleges a competitive advantage 

by making us more relevant to our 

communities and more resilient to 

internal and external threats.” 


268 

THE CITY OF 

BRAMPTON: 

MANAGING ENERGY 

AND EMISSIONS 

FOR SUSTAINABLE 

OUTCOMES 

WRITTEN BY 

WILLIAM SMITH 

PRODUCED BY 




269

CITY OF BRAMPTON 

CHUN LIANG, SUPERVISOR, 

ENERGY MANAGEMENT AT 

THE CITY OF BRAMPTON, 

ONTARIO, DISCUSSES THE 

ROLE SUSTAINABLE ENERGY 

HAS TO PLAY IN MEETING 

EMISSIONS TARGETS 

270 

C 

limate change matters pertaining to 

emissions and sustainable sources of 

energy are high in the public consciousness. 

Energy generation measures such as solar 

panels and wind turbines serve as symbols of 

energy that are more sustainable because they 

reduce emissions at large, with an emissions 

strategy often functioning as the vanguard for 

sustainable outcomes. Chun Liang is Energy 

Management Supervisor at the City of Brampton, 

Ontario, and is responsible for the energy and 

emissions strategy of City owned buildings. 

He credits the urgency of global warming as 

inspiring his entry into the field. “Right before I got 

into energy performance contracting, the Kyoto 

Protocol came into effect and said two things: 

global warming is happening and human activity is 

contributing to it. Warming is related to emissions 

which are generated by the energy that we use, 

especially the burning of fossil fuels, so I thought 

to myself, ‘this is a great time to get into energy 


Photos courtesy of the City of Brampton 

271 



272 

“TOO OFTEN WE 

WORK IN SILOS 

WHEN WE COULD 

BE SHARING 

KNOWLEDGE 

AND LESSONS 

LEARNED” 

— 

Chun Liang, 

Supervisor, Energy Management, 

City of Brampton 

performance contracting – the world 

is moving on this, and I can join the 

movement to help the planet and 

recover energy costs’.” 

In his current role, Liang has used 

his energy background to help rectify 

some of the challenges Brampton 

faces. This includes a large portfolio 

of older buildings that have a number 

of energy performance issues 

including building envelope and 

building automation systems. Some 

have outdated automation systems 

so Liang initiated a technology 


CLICK TO WATCH: ‘UNLOCKING DOWNTOWN BRAMPTON’S POTENTIAL: 

CONCEPTUAL VIDEO’ 

273 

investigation including discussions 

regarding a unified display portal 

(single pane of glass view) with key 

stakeholders to determine the best 

solution for the City of Brampton. 

“The hope with a unified display is that 

building operators will have an easier 

time managing the control of many 

different buildings, improve energy 

performance and increase occupant 

comfort.” With an energy performance 

and modelling background to ensure 

buildings meet targets, including 

energy performance targets under 

the LEED building rating system, Liang 

has brought his experience to bear on 

properties in Brampton, and one of 

the major potential energy efficiency 

improvements comes from heating. 

“When you look at the energy and 

emissions pie chart of a building, 

especially in an Ontario, Canada 

context, much of it is from heating 

since we’re burning fossil fuels for 

eight months a year. That is a major 

consideration for us because it 

applies to both of our objectives: to 

reduce energy use while also reducing 

our emissions. The focus for the 

next five years – the term of the City’s 



274 

Zero Carbon Transition Plan – is 

finding ways to reduce natural gas 

use in the City’s existing buildings. 

A recent successful project done 

by the energy management team 

was the installation of heat recovery 

system. “This system recovers heat 

from swimming pool drain water at 

one of the City’s community centres,” 

says Liang. 

While effective measures can be 

taken to improve the energy performance 

of existing buildings, future 

gains can be achieved by ensuring 

new structures are built to high 

performance standards. “The City 

of Brampton is designing, building 

and renovating many new community 

centers, fire stations, etc. due to 

population growth. The energy 

management group works closely 

with our building design and construction 

division, collaborating with them, 

to integrate energy design into the 

buildings.” To achieve the energy 

targets required, Liang and his team 

have introduced parametric energy 

modeling that uses cloud computing 


as one of the central tools. “The 

benefit of energy modeling on the 

cloud is that it can quickly simulate 

interactive effects, thereby drastically 

reducing the amount of time it takes to 

produce options that not only provide 

optimal energy performance but can 

also illustrate paths for emissions 

and operating cost reductions. If we 

change lights to LED or we use more 

daylighting, what effect does that have 

on the heating? Strategic use of 

daylight for a building can also be 

a passive form of heating which can 

help to reduce emissions associated 

275 

Chun Liang, Supervisor, 

Energy Management 


Chun Liang is an energy management professional 

with over 20 years of experience in the building 

industry including HVAC design and construction, 

energy performance contracting, building energy 

modelling and LEED consulting. He is currently 

the Supervisor of Energy Management at the City 

of Brampton responsible for strategic planning, 

project delivery, energy procurement, utility 

management, third party funding and reporting. 



276 


“IT’S NOT JUST 

ABOUT ENERGY 

EFFECTS, BUT 

ALSO OCCUPANT 

COMFORT” 

— 

Chun Liang, 



277 


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“WE’RE IN A RACE 

AGAINST TIME TO HIT 

THE PROVINCIAL AND 

FEDERAL EMISSION 

REDUCTION TARGET, 

WHICH IS BASED ON 

THE PARIS AGREEMENT, 

SO WE NEED TO 

TRANSITION TO ZERO 

CARBON AS SOON 

AS WE CAN” 

— 

Chun Liang, 



with heating.” Aside from utilizing 

sustainable energy, such measures 

have the knock-on effect of improving 

the experience of citizens, as with the 

natural light provided by daylighting. 

“These are the types of things that we 

also look at. It’s not just about energy 

effects, but also occupant comfort.” 

Such measures are to play a vital 

part in achieving the city’s ambitious 

Zero Carbon Transition Plan. “The 

provincial government has set a target 

of 30% emissions reductions by 2030, 

and the federal government has set an 

80% reduction target by 2050, which 

is in line with the Paris Agreement to 

limit the global temperature rise to 1.5 

degrees Celsius by 2050. Our Zero 

Carbon Transition Plan is predicated 

around these targets. We’re looking at 

reducing our energy use for new and 

existing buildings by 30% by 2030. 

We’re targeting various measures: 

heating, ventilation, air conditioning 

systems and building envelope. 

We’re going to use heat recovery: 

recycling waste heat wherever 

possible. Once you get the energy 

demands of the building down, then 

the next step is to look at renewable 

technology. That’s the most efficient 

way to approach it. It’s energy 

management 101.” Other innovations 

geared towards meeting the city’s 

targets include innovations in passive 

heating. “The SolarWall is a matte 

black surface that can be put on top of 

a building’s exterior wall, leaving an air 

gap,” says Liang. “The sun hits this 

black surface, and transfers energy to 

the wall and air gap. The air is heated 

in that gap and then brought into the 

building to preheat the air for ventilation. 

“We expect to verify the energy savings 

279 



280 

for a system installed at a City of 

Brampton building as it has found 

success in other building applications.” 

The system may be able to reduce 

emissions associated with heating. 

Regarding the reduction of vehicle 

emissions, charging stations for 

electric cars have been installed at 

City owned buildings with a focus on 

public facing sites such as libraries 

and community centres. 

“We’re in a race against time to hit 

the provincial and federal emission 

reduction target, which is based on 

the Paris Agreement, so we need to 

transition to zero carbon as soon as 

we can,” says Liang. It is obvious that 

Brampton is proactively contributing to 

this effort, setting targets and bringing 

in concrete measures to ensure their 

achievement. Nevertheless, sometimes 

advancements can bring their 

own drawbacks. “We have a number 

of solar photovoltaic installations that 

generate electricity for us, and they 

provide a steady stream of revenue, 

as well as reducing our electricity use. 

The challenge is the cost of electricity. 

If we switch over to electricity to heat 

our buildings, electricity costs 


significantly more than natural gas per 

equivalent energy unit, so the question 

is, how do we bridge that gap? It’s kind 

of an open question.” 

One possible solution to this 

conundrum is an improvement in 

the way society works together. 

“I’m hoping to see more collaboration 

between municipalities, utilities, and 

the private sector. Too often we work 

in silos when we could be sharing 

knowledge and lessons learned. 

For example, a battery storage project 

can provide resiliency for a building 

and perhaps also provide part of 

its energy needs for heating and 

cooling. This approach provides 

great co-benefits, if the costs of off 

peak battery charging can be 

lowered further. That’s something 

I hope to see more of in the future. 

As we collaborate and collectively 

pool our resources, we accelerate 

the case for sustainability.” 

281 


282 

HUAWEI 

TECHNOLOGIES: 

BRINGING RURAL 

CANADIANS CLOSER 

WITH HIGH-SPEED 

INTERNET 

WRITTEN BY 

LAURA MULLAN 

PRODUCED BY 

ARRON RAMPLING 



283

HUAWEI TECHNOLOGIES 

FAMOUS AS A TRAILBLAZER IN 

THE CONSUMER ELECTRONICS 

AND 5G MARKET, HUAWEI 

TECHNOLOGIES IS NOW TURNING 

ITS ATTENTION TO CANADA’S FAR 

NORTH IN A BID TO CONNECT 

REMOTE, RURAL COMMUNITIES 

284 

W 

hether you want to reconnect with a long 

lost friend, learn a new language or even 

order a taxi, the internet has made it 

possible with just a click of a button. It’s arguably 

one of the most disruptive technological innovations 

of the last century. In fact, in Canada’s Internet 

Factbook 2018, a whopping 96% of Canadians 

highlighted how high-quality internet access was 

important at home, with 59% going as far as to call 

it ‘critically important’. Yet, whilst the internet may 

seem like a ubiquitous tool, ready and waiting at our 

fingertips, for many of Canada’s rural communities, 

poor or no internet access is a common reality. 

One firm hoping to remedy this is Huawei 

Technologies Inc. The Chinese powerhouse has 

made it big in the consumer electronics market, 

standing as the second largest phone maker in the 

world, and it’s also leading the race towards 5G. 

Chris Pereira, Director of Public Affairs at Huawei 

Technologies, outlines how Canada has played 

a vital role in Huawei’s success, standing as a central 

hub for research and development. “Last year, 



285


286 

“HAVING 

ACCESS TO 

HIGH-SPEED 

INTERNET 

CAN BE LIFE 

CHANGING” 

— 

Christopher Pereira, 

Director of Public Affairs, 

Huawei Technologies Canada 

we invested $180mn in research and 

development in Canada to build our 

research centre in Ottawa and to 

accelerate 5G research,” he notes – 

and now the company wants to give 

back. Pereira explains that, by committing 

to the United Nations’ sustainable 

development goals, Huawei is embarking 

on an ambitious endeavor: to 

connect all Canadians with high-speed 

internet by 2030. In addition, the 

Canadian Radio-television and 

Telecommunications Commission’s 

(CTRC) universal service objective for 

fixed Internet access service is that all 

Canadians have access to at least 50 

Mbps download and 10 Mbps upload, 

with an option of unlimited data. 

Likewise, the universal service 

objective for mobile wireless services 

is that all Canadians have access to 

the latest generally deployed mobile 

wireless technology (currently LTE). 

According to regulators, mobile 

services should be accessible in 

homes, businesses and along major 

transportation roads. 

To make its commitments a reality, 

Huawei has turned its attention to the 

remote towns and villages across 

Northern Canada. “That’s the place 


CLICK TO WATCH: ‘NORTHERN LIGHTS’ 

287 

where the connectivity is the weakest, 

so we’re trying to connect people in 

more remote and smaller communities,” 

Pereira says, noting how he and his 

team recently visited the north-western 

Canadian town of Inuvik, located 200km 

inside the Arctic circle. In this region, 

you can witness a midnight sun or the 

mesmerising lights of Aurora Borealis 

– but until recently the internet connection 

was exceedingly sluggish. Now, by 

partnering with Ice Wireless, Huawei 

has been able to deliver high-speed 

4G LTE services to the remote town. 

“Having access to high-speed internet 

can be life changing in a few ways,” 

observes Pereira. “With high-speed 

internet, you can open an online store 

or help your business grow beyond 

your own community, so it’s helping 

to connect the north to the economy. 

Another aspect that’s often overlooked 

is how it can help communities 

reconnect.” Pereira points out that 

many Inuit populations were extremely 

isolated before they had high-speed 

internet, whereas now with the rollout 

of 4G, Inuit communities are using the 

internet to sell and trade goods or 

connect with each other via Facebook 



288 

in their own language. “Aboriginal 

culture can be maintained and flourish 

because of the connectivity that the 

internet brings,” he says. 

In trying to provide Northern Canada 

– where temperatures can plunge to 

-40°C – with high speed internet 

access, Huawei has a mammoth 

challenge on its hands. “The biggest 

challenge is the environment,” admits 

Pereira. “When you build a network 

tower, it can get covered in thick ice 

in the winter so the equipment needs 

to be very tough and durable. You also 

need to power the station; sometimes 

these stations are in such remote 

places that you don’t have a power 

supply nearby so you need to find an 

alternative solution, like solar.” To take 

on this challenge, Pereira points out 


how Huawei relies on the expertise 

of its team (today the firm has around 

1,100 employees in Canada, with 

around 91% being Canadian citizens) 

as well as its renowned R&D capabilities. 

“We have around 193,000 employees 

around the globe and more than 

80,000 of them are involved in R&D. 

In many ways you could say we’re an 

R&D company,” Pereira adds. 

In many ways, the challenges faced 

in Canada’s north mirror those faced 

in Africa. Both places are remote, short 

on funds, and often not very populated. 

Fortunately, Huawei already has 

extensive first-hand experience in 

such environments. In 2017, it launched 

289 


Christopher Pereira 

Chris Pereira aims to connect people 

to ideas and opportunities through 

communication. He is an experienced 

media communications and branding 

professional from Canada with 

15 years of experience in China. 



290 

“WITH HIGH-SPEED 

INTERNET, YOU 

CAN OPEN AN 

ONLINE STORE 

OR HELP YOUR 

BUSINESS GROW 

BEYOND YOUR 

OWN COMMUNITY” 

— 





291 

CLICK TO WATCH: ‘AURORA BOREALIS PROJECT: EP1 – BARBARA’ 


䰀䤀䜀䠀吀一䤀一䜀䘀䄀匀吀 Ⰰ 刀伀䌀䬀匀伀䰀䤀䐀 

䠀唀䄀圀䔀䤀伀挀攀愀渀匀琀漀爀䐀漀爀愀搀漀 

吀伀倀匀倀䌀 ⴀ 䈀夀 

倀䔀刀䘀伀刀䴀䄀一䌀䔀 

䠀甀愀眀攀椀匀琀漀爀愀最攀 

伀昀昀椀挀椀愀氀圀攀戀猀椀琀攀 

䔀 ⴀ 洀愀椀氀㨀攀渀琀攀爀瀀爀椀猀攀挀愀䀀栀甀愀眀攀椀 ⸀ 挀漀洀

CLICK TO WATCH: ‘RURALSTAR LIGHTS THE WAY TO GREATER GROWTH, 

HOPE & HEALTH’ 

293 

RuralStar, an affordable base station to 

help bring internet connection to 

villages in Africa. “Similar to Northern 

Canada, we faced a lot of environmental 

challenges, though it was the complete 

opposite in terms of conditions,” 

explains Pereira. “It was very hot and 

dry; the equipment needed to be able 

to operate in 40-50°C weather and 

deal with dust storms and power 

issues.” On top of this, Huawei also 

has equipment at some of the highest 

points in the world, like the base camp 

of Mount Everest, so it’s well equipped 

to tackle rough terrain. 

“ABORIGINAL 

CULTURE CAN 

BE MAINTAINED 

AND FLOURISH 

BECAUSE OF 

THE CONNECTIVITY 

THAT THE INTERNET 

BRINGS” 

— 






COMPANY FACTS 

• Huawei Technologies 

hopes to help connect all 

Canadians to high-speed 

internet by 2030. 

Huawei Technologies has 

over 1,100 employees in 

Canada, 91% of whom are 

Canadian citizens. 

294 

Huawei Technologies has 

over 193,000 employees 

around the globe, with more 

than 80,000 R&D staff. 

Huawei’s equipment is sturdy, reliable 

and well made; it’s no wonder that the 

firm has dominated the market with its 

phone offerings like the new P30 

smartphone. “We grow by reflection – 

that’s part of the culture of Huawei,” 

explains Pereira. “We look at what 

we’re doing now and we see what we 

can make better in the next iteration. 

We’re not afraid to make mistakes, 

but we are afraid of repeating those 

mistakes. Huawei is very tireless 

in its pursuit of innovation.” 

“WE GROW BY 

REFLECTION – 

THAT’S PART OF 

THE CULTURE 

OF HUAWEI” 

— 





295 

With over 50 contracts already 

signed around the world, the company 

is also streaking ahead of its peers 

when it comes to 5G. “Huawei is about 

12 months ahead of any other company 

in terms of end-to-end 5G solutions,” 

adds Pereira, highlighting that 5G 

will be at least 10 times faster than its 

predecessor so you can download 

a movie in seconds. It will also support 

driverless cars and other IoT networked 

devices. The rollout of 5G 

will undoubtedly be momentous for 

Canada but, with its latest project, 

Huawei is taking care not to leave 

the rural areas of the country behind. 

“In five years’ time, I hope we’ll be doing 

this interview over Skype from the 

Arctic,” says Pereira. “I hope we will 

have high-speed internet across this 

great country.” 


KPMG: 

PRAGMATIC 

296 

CYBERSECURITY 

SOLUTIONS 

FOR SMEs 

WRITTEN BY 

AMBER DONOVAN-STEVENS 

PRODUCED BY 

JAKE MEGEARY 



297

KPMG CANADA 

LEADING CYBER STRATEGY AND 

TRANSFORMATION PROGRAMS FOR 

KPMG, DARREN JONES DISCUSSES HIS 

EXPERIENCE AS BOTH A CLIENT AND 

CONSULTANT IN THE CYBERSECURITY 

INDUSTRY, AND HOW THE GLOBAL 

CONSULTANCY OFFERS PRAGMATIC 

AND SUSTAINABLE SOLUTIONS 

298 

O 

ne is always dealing with several 

clients at any time, assisting them with 

the different challenges or opportunities 

that they may be dealing with,” says Darren 

Jones, in leading Cyber Strategy and Transformation 

programs for KPMG’s clients. One of 

the key factors that make Darren Jones such 

a successful consultant for KPMG’s clients 

is his desire to empower those around him, 

combined with an empathetic understanding 

of a client’s experience. Before taking on the role 

of Director in the Cybersecurity consulting 

practice at KPMG, Jones had been a client of 

the firm. He was pleased with the professionalism 

and level of service provided by the firm, and now 

that he is with KPMG he shares that this background 

can be a surprise to those he works with: 

“I’ve been the person who’s either been working 



299

KPMG CANADA 

300 

“ONE IS ALWAYS 

DEALING WITH 

SEVERAL CLIENTS 

AT ANY TIME, 

ASSISTING THEM 

WITH THE DIFFERENT 

CHALLENGES OR 

OPPORTUNITIES 

THAT THEY MAY BE 

DEALING WITH 

— 

Darren Jones 

Director, Cyber Security Services, 

KPMG Canada 

together with consultants at implementing 

a solution, and occasionally 

the one accountable for the budget 

that the different consulting teams are 

working within.” He continues: “Having 

been ‘on the other side’ as a client 

of consulting services, I am wary of 

recommending or implementing 

solutions that don’t have a pragmatic, 

lasting value for the client.” This 

experience helps enable Jones and 

KPMG to deliver a focused and cost 

effective solution for all organizations, 

but especially SMEs. 

Jones’s 20-plus years of work within 

consultancy allows him to draw upon 

previous experiences to create new 

cybersecurity solutions for his clients, 

as well as using his broad existing 

network to widen KPMG’s clientele. 

For Jones, much of his personal sense 

of achievement has derived from 

supporting his clients in their 

technological journeys. He 

references working relationships 

that span decades with some of 

the most innovative creators and 

thought leaders in cybersecurity the 

world over. “That degree of intellectual 

engagement has always been an 


CLICK TO WATCH: ‘KPMG CANADA: LET’S DO THIS’ 

301 

exciting aspect of working in this field,” 

he remarks. 

BECOMING CYBER AWARE 

When it comes to cyber awareness, 

unfortunately some of Jones’s clients 

have come to him only after they have 

encountered a threat. “One particularly 

worrying detail in the uptick in instances 

of ransomware in recent months,” 

says Jones, “is the focus toward midsized 

and small municipalities, midsized 

and even small hospitals, and 

some not-for-profit organizations such 

as charities. When ransomware 

targets a larger scale organization like 

a bank or a government department 

that’s had access to millions of dollars 

to build their cybersecurity, there are 

instant response protocols typically 

in place. For SMEs and NPOs, however, 

security management can be 

either minimal or non-existent in some 

cases.” These themes around cybersecurity 

readiness were also borne 

out in KPMG’s recently published 

CEO Outlook Survey. To help encourage 

preventative measures in place 

of reactive ones, Jones shares that 

KPMG consultants offer a 15-point tip 


KPMG CANADA 

302 

and question sheet to SME clients to 

help to get them started on the journey. 

With the rise of attention that 

cybersecurity receives, the demands 

on Jones’s team have only grown. Yet 

he notes that there has also been a 

growing feeling of “cyber fatigue” from 

the constant fear mongering from 

companies and media over the last 

decade. For this reason, Jones says, 

KPMG has focused on promoting pragmatism 

in cybersecurity and cost 

effective, sustainable solutions. To 

ensure that a solution is sustainable, 

the cyber strategy needs to be communicated 

across all levels of a company. 

As an example, Jones recently delivered 

an awareness talk entitled ‘Cybersecurity: 

How You Can Help’ which was presented 

to staff at one of KPMG’s long 

term municipality clients. 

Discussing his experience working 

with clients on change management, 

which is vital in introducing any new 

strategy, Jones comments: “It’s important 

to build structures and measures 

to ensure the implementation will 

proceed with proper acknowledge- 


ment of governance; to ensure the 

ongoing vitality of measuring success; 

and to have a whole strategy wrapped 

around that implementation.” He notes 

that putting these elements in place is 

key to helping to ensure dialogue with 

clients moves beyond empathy into the 

practical implementation of solutions. 

Jones emphasizes the importance of 

not only creating solutions that are 

cost effective, but also ensuring a client 

feels positive about the future resulting 

from the solution: “It’s using that 

frame as a way of helping the client 

to not only see a positive future, but 

visualize what’s positive about the 

future for them.” This is particularly 

important, he says, as KPMG does 

not operate solutions for its clients, 

so it is imperative that they are 

pleased with and are ready to take 

ownership of the result. 


Darren Jones 

Darren is an accomplished IT leader with over 25 years 

of experience both in industry and as a consultant. With 

demonstrated abilities in motivating and leading 

technical personnel, project managers and consultants, 

Darren has worked in a diversity of roles — as 

Director of the CIO Solutions consulting function at 

a large consulting firm, a senior executive and 

investor in fintech start-ups, leading the Security & 

Critical Infrastructure Solutions function at a major 

stock exchange, the VP of Information Security 

Solutions for one of the world’s first integrated managed 

solutions providers, and as the Senior Manager and lead 

for eSecurity Architecture Solutions practice area at a 

big 4 firm. This breadth and depth of experience 

provides Darren’s clients with a perspective 

that is at once strategic and pragmatic. 

303 


KPMG CANADA 

304 

“KPMG AS A FIRM 

CERTAINLY RECOGNIZES 

THAT IT WILL HAVE 

SUBSTANTIAL NEEDS FOR 

TECHNOLOGY AND 

AI-DRIVEN SOLUTIONS TO 

SUPPORT THE LOCAL 

COMMUNITY AND BUILD 

SMART CITIES.” 

— 

Darren Jones 


KPMG Canada 



305

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yorku.ca/continue

“HERE WITHIN KPMG 

WE ARE DEVELOPING 

A CENTRE OF 

EXCELLENCE FOR 

CYBERSECURITY 

IN MUNICIPALITIES” 

— 

Darren Jones 


KPMG Canada 

EDUCATING ON CYBERSECURITY 

To encourage this approach to cyber- 

security in consultants and to sustain 

knowledge development in the industry, 

Darren has been working with York 

University to provide mentorship to 

students and graduates. Jones started 

working as a curriculum advisor to York 

University at the beginning of his tenure 

with KPMG. “This certificate program 

is offered to undergraduate students 

who wish to augment their existing 

studies by pursuing the specific 

certificates being offered, and it was 

also being introduced as something 

for postgraduate or working professionals 

to participate in. We have divided 

our curriculum into two segments: one 

focused on cybersecurity fundamentals, 

and the other on offering an 

advanced certificate in cybersecurity.” 

Four years on from the program’s 

conceptualization, Jones shares that 

KPMG has hired one graduate who has 

come through the program, Frances 

MacTaggart, who affirms the benefits 

of the course: “I couldn’t more strongly 

recommend the combination of certificates 

(Fundamentals and Advanced) 

to those who are new to the field, 

wishing to make a career change or 

those who are wanting to further 

prepare for the CISSP designation. 

York University’s Cybersecurity 

Certificates are an outstanding way 

to increase your knowledge and depth 

of understanding.” 

LOOKING AHEAD 

A well implemented cybersecurity 

solution ensures that a company can 

look forward with confidence at 

opportunities to innovate, instead of 

focusing on previous errors. As KPMG 

looks ahead to the future, Jones 

shares that the firm will assist in the 

creation of the security foundations of 

smart cities. “KPMG as a firm certainly 

307 


KPMG CANADA 

CA$1.5mn 

Approximate 

revenue in 2018 

1869 

Year founded 

308 

6,500 


of employees 


ecognizes that it will have substantial 

needs for technology and AI-driven 

solutions to support the local community 

and build smart cities.” Jones urges 

that, as larger cities enlist private and 

public sector partnerships to build and 

operate smart city solutions, they be 

cognizant of the risks. While they will 

have their own specific concerns 

regarding cybersecurity as individual 

organizations, they need to be aligned 

by a single, overall strategy that can 

manage the public’s expectations and 

ensure citizen engagement and trust. 

“Here within KPMG in Canada, we are 

developing a centre of excellence for 

cybersecurity in municipalities,” says 

Jones, and with KPMG’s impressive 

collection of awards and its pragmatic 

focus, the firm is set to cement itself as 

a cornerstone in implementing these 

cybersecurity strategies. 

309 


310 

POLARIS 

TRANSPORT: 

SCALABLE DIGITAL 


OF CORE LOGISTICS 

PROCESSES 

WRITTEN BY 

MARCUS LAWRENCE 

PRODUCED BY 

JAMES BERRY 



311

POLARIS TRANSPORTATION GROUP 

CTO DAVE BRAJKOVICH DISCUSSES 

HOW POLARIS TRANSPORT, VIA 

DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION UNIT 

NORTHSTAR DIGITAL SOLUTIONS, 

IS DRIVING LOGISTICS INNOVATION 

312 

C 

anada’s Polaris Transportation Group, 

renowned for its cross-border less than 

load (LTL) service, is at the cutting edge 

of technological innovation in the supply chain 

sector. In January 2019, the company launched 

NorthStar Digital Solutions (NDS), both an in-house 

digital laboratory and separate business entity, to 

drive the advancement of its technology platforms, 

intelligent document processing, Robotic Process 

Automation (RPA), Machine Learning (ML), Artificial 

Intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT) and 

Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) capabilities, 

among others. 

Dave Brajkovich, CTO at Polaris and NDS, says 

the new company offers Polaris, as both a customer 

and an owner, a level of innovative dedication that is 

demonstrably lost by internal and integral IT teams 

attempting to steer a digital transformation. “It’s not 

uncommon that, under one IT wing, things can 

quickly become disjointed – IT begins to manage 

network, infrastructure, application, and helpdesk 



313


314 

“WE’VE PROVEN THAT WE 

CAN TAKE A COMPANY 

THAT FROM A VERY 

SEGREGATED, SILOED 

SYSTEM TO A COMPANY 

THAT IS LEAN, EFFICIENT 

AND TECHNOLOGICALLY 

SCALABLE” 

— 

Dave Brajkovich, 

CTO, Polaris Transport 

which distracts from a focused transformation,” 

he explains. “We saw an 

opportunity to drive technology and 

optimization as a separate entity, and 

become a profit center that can take 

the solutions we’re providing to Polaris 

and package them up as Software-asa-Service 

(SaaS) solutions for transportation 

and customs brokerage clients, 

and beyond.” The close relationship 

between Polaris and NDS enables a 

flexible and practical testbed for 

innovation, with newly developed 

solutions being piloted, tested and 

production hardened at Polaris before 


eing sold on to external companies. 

“We end up learning a lot from these 

programs and enhancing the technology 

to fit and solve business needs 

rather than creating technology and 

finding a problem to solve.” 

A main staple for Polaris is customs 

document processing for clearing 

freight to cross the US and Canadian 

borders, and this offers a perfect 

example of the company’s successful 

transformation efforts. As this can carry 

myriad complexities and duplication 

in work efforts, Polaris needed to 

streamline the task and reduce the 

touchpoints of handling paperwork. 

The process of moving paper is highly 

inefficient and labor intensive for all 

players involved, including the Client, 

Carrier, Customs Broker and Border 

Agencies. “By implementing our RPA 

and ML platform (a powerful WorkFusion 

enterprise grade automation engine 

with the NDS IP workflow solution), 

to manage Straight Through Processing 

(STP) for our intelligent document 

processing, our turnaround time and 

error rates were significantly reduced 

to levels beyond our expectations,” 

says Brajkovich. “It also added capacity 315 



316 

for our staff to focus on exception 

management rather than clerical administration. 

We can now run this operation 

24/7 and scale to the business order 

demands, and we’re proud to state that 

we are now driving 80% of our customs 

paperwork processing through fully 

automated workflow.” 

Of the aforementioned technologies, 

Polaris’s DLT platform is perhaps the 

most emblematic of the firm’s ability 

to bring complex concepts through to 

fruition quickly and effectively. “Our 

CEO, Dave Cox, had an inkling to learn 

more about blockchain,” says Brajkovich. 

Following an event that illuminated the 

tech’s qualities, Cox began to see a 

potential use case for it within Polaris. 

The firm subsequently partnered with 

IBM to generate various DLT-based 

solutions applicable to their operations, 

with significant success. “One of our 

use cases for a minimal viable product 

was an outcome to achieve consolidation 

and reconciliation for the interline 

invoicing process,” says Brajkovich. 

“We found that the process was lagging, 

though not in terms of digitizing the data 



Dave Brajkovich, CTO 

Brajkovich’s technology career spans 30 years and has mainly 

been focused on engineering, designing and building core 

transactional systems for some of the world’s leading fortune 

500 companies. With key strengths in leadership and 

management of multi-talented teams he has excelled in moving 

the needle continuously by ensuring practical deployments 

of technology with a direct impact on improving operational 

workflows along with providing an enhanced client experience 

as the ROI. Brajkovich has been an influential change agent for 

technological improvements, such as advanced planning and 

scheduling, manufacturing, distribution/supply chain and 

financial applications. With exposure to multi diverse markets, 

engineering, manufacturing, healthcare, energy, financial 

investment management and transportation has given 

Brajkovich a rounded edge to be a key player and contributor 

for advanced technology offerings and helping business 

understand and adopt enablers for future growth and 

advancements. Brajkovich’s focus is to strengthen and maintain 

a robust technical ecosystem for the enterprise group and its 

affiliated companies, making it a uniquely different provider 

of freight services and lifecycle management with enhanced 

digital product capabilities. Emphasis will be placed 

on bleeding edge technologies such as Robotic Process 

Automation, Machine Learning, AI, and Blockchain. Recent 

positions held include Executive Director roles with Sun Life 

Canada, Air Liquide and Dynacare Labs where his focus was on 

IT technology foundations and business application synergies. 

Brajkovich lives in Hockley Valley, Ontario with his wife and 

two daughters. His additional interests include assembly and 

operation of drone helicopters and he is an avid motorcyclist. 

317 


“WHAT WE’VE CREATED 

IS A UNIVERSAL 

SYSTEM WHERE WE 

CAN GUARANTEE THAT 

MY A IS THEIR A” 

— 



because it moves through electronic 

data interchange (EDI) transformations 

anyway. The challenge is that EDI is 

not dynamic – it’s very static, it comes 

in batches and waves – and so the 

freight can be received by points of 

delivery where we may not get the 

data back into our systems accurately 

or in a timely fashion.” 

This problem causes both delays and 

a labor-intensive process of collating 

documents to confirm payments, with 

those documents changing hands 

repeatedly. The solution is a DLT-based 

smart contract platform that runs 

those transactions through Polaris’s 

hyperledger cloud and relays the data 

to all relevant parties. “What we’ve 

created is a universal system where 

we can guarantee that my A is their A,” 

says Brajkovich, highlighting DLT’s 

ability to serve as a single, current 

source of truth. “Everything is tracked 

and traced: it’s immutable, it’s not 

going to change, but it can be revised. 

As the information flows from one 

system to another, we know exactly 

where that data flow is.” Not only does 

the solution provide this reliability and 

traceability, but it massively increases 

the speed with which parties can 

access the relevant information. 

“Once the transaction is completed, 

we have a full audit trail,” summarizes 

Brajkovich. He adds that the process 

minimizes paper wastage, maximizes 

accuracy and eradicates data-based 

disputes, as well as having the 

flexibility for additional partner 

channels to be added as necessary. 

NDS is currently developing additional 

IoT-driven solutions to augment with 

this process, offering real-time tracking 

data without necessitating additional 

human input. “Our claim to fame here is 

that we’re very strong integrators,” says 

Brajkovich as he explains the foundation 

of the firm’s IoT success. “We have 

talent that understands not only the 

319 



320 

operations and processes involved with 

the transportation and LTL freight 

movement, but we have a very strong 

enterprise service technology layer 

that enables us to connect multiple 

technologies and platforms through 

APIs (application programming 

interfaces).” With IoT naturally creating 

numerous endpoints at the edge of the 

network, this knack for integration 

significantly accelerates NDS’s and 

Polaris’s time to market for additional 

IoT capabilities. “Currently, we are 

active through an IoT process for our 

electronic logging devices (ELDs), used 

for truck driver mandates and tractor 

data logging. We capture data from the 

ELDs, as well as from Blackberry 

devices tracking our trailers’ capacity, 

volume and location. We have between 

160 and 180 trailers, and they’re all 

tracked.” The data is routed back 

through the company’s legacy API 

system, exemplifying the company’s 

ability to integrate technological 

solutions successfully. Looking forward, 

Brajkovich says NDS’s IoT ambitions 

are yet to be satisfied, and plenty of 

exciting new innovations are on the way. 

The firm is piloting a new product that 

tracks drivers’ locations through their 


1994 

Year founded 

200 


of employees 

HQ 

Mississauga, Ontario 

Canada 

mobile devices, enabling visibility of 

delivery routes, delivery cycles, and 

access to various timeframes for cycle 

completion. “It’s quite revolutionary 

in commercial freight movements,” 

says Brajkovich. “Most clients don’t get 

that kind of visibility. They have to call 

customer services, who themselves 

have to track those trucks and have 

more room for inaccuracy. This way, it’ll 

be a holistic view of where our trucks 

are.” In addition to this novel approach 

to visibility for clients, NDS is developing 

a brand new form of IoT technology. 

“We’re working with a couple of GPS 

manufacturers to develop a disposable 

GPS tracking device that we could 

directly tag to the freight, as well as 

working with telco companies that 

could provide us with low-cost cell 

coverage at a palatable price point that 

clients can absorb,” enthuses Brajkovich. 

“In return, they would get active 

tracking at the freight level.” He notes 

that perhaps the most vitally innovative 

element of this research and development 

is the proposed disposability. 

“When it is received at the last mile, the 

GPS will simply turn off as its battery 

expires and can then be easily disposed 

of,” he says. Enabling visibility in such 

321 



322 

“THE ABILITY FOR US TO BE 

ABLE TO LOOK INTERNALLY 

AND EXTERNALLY, AND 

REALLY PRIORITIZE THE 

MOST VITAL PROJECTS 

MEANS WE CAN LEAP 

INSTEAD OF BABY-STEP 

EVERYTHING THROUGH” 

— 



a dynamic, seamless fashion would 

stand to differentiate the firm’s prowess 

even further from the competition. 

Ultimately, Brajkovich credits NDS 

and the strength of its partnerships with 

the success of Polaris’s technological 

innovations. “NDS, powered by strong 

partners like WorkFusion, Softchoice, 

Stratiform, Simnet and Fiorano has 

enabled us to launch some really 

dynamic offerings using tools that 

might not be at the bleeding edge, 


323 

but certainly within the cutting edge,” 

he says. “We’ve proven that we can 

take a company from a very segregated, 

siloed system that’s hard to integrate 

and communicate within, to a company 

that is lean, efficient and technologically 

scalable. The ability for us to be 

able to look internally and externally, 

and really prioritize the most vital 

projects means we can leap instead of 

baby-step everything through.” Polaris 

Transport, in that regard, has landed 

upon a holy grail of digital transformation: 

agility, scalability, and a time to 

market that brings core innovations to 

the fore, benefitting both the company 

and its all-important clients. 


324 

SSR MINING: 

LEVERAGING 

TECHNOLOGY 

AMIDST 


IN THE MINING 

SPACE 

WRITTEN 

BY 

SEAN GALEA-PACE 

PRODUCED BY 

JAMES BERRY 



325

SSR MINING INC. 

DAVID THOMAS, DIRECTOR OF IT 

AT SSR MINING, DISCUSSES HOW 

TECHNOLOGY HAS BECOME AN 

INFLUENTIAL COMPONENT TO 

OPERATIONS SINCE FIRST BEING 

EMBRACED IN 2013 

326 

A 

s a firm that has undergone significant 

transformation over the past few years, 

SSR Mining knows first hand the importance 

of embracing the latest trends in order to stay 

ahead of competitors. With the increasing influence 

technology has had on industries the world over, 

SSR Mining has come a long way since it first 

began to leverage new software and processes 

in 2013. David Thomas, Director of IT at SSR Mining, 

believes that, due to its smaller stature in comparison 

to bigger companies in the region, his firm has 

utilised this to its advantage. “The key benefit of 

how we operate is that we’re smaller. Leveraging 

infrastructure, such as cloud services that we don’t 

have to invest large capital in, makes us nimbler,” 

he says. “This means that a few years later, if we 

want to change and do something that’s slightly 

different because of new technology, we have the 

capabilities to do that. If you compare that to bigger 

companies, a lot of them have invested hundreds 

of millions of dollars in capital to build infrastructure, 

however, then they’re locked in. The landscape has 

changed for us smaller companies as we can get in 



327


“THE KEY BENEFIT 

OF HOW WE 

O PER ATE I S TH AT 

WE’RE SMALLER” 

— 

David Thomas, 

Director of IT, SSR Mining 

328 


CLICK TO WATCH: ‘MARIGOLD MINE’ 

329 

there and do what we want and move 

with the times – I think it means we’re 

really lucky and in a really great place.” 

Based in Vancouver, Canada, the 

mining firm focuses on the operation, 

acquisition, exploration and development 

of precious metal resource properties 

in the Americans and oversees three 

producing mines: Marigold in Nevada; 

Seabee Gold Operation in Saskatchewan; 

and the 75% owned and 

operated Puna Operations joint 

venture in Jujuy Province, Argentina. 

Since its launch in 1989, the Marigold 

mine achieved production of over 

205,000 ounces of gold in 2018. 

The Seabee Gold Operation produced 

over 95,000 ounces of gold in 2018, 

and Puna Operations achieved 

commercial production in December 

2018 and produces silver. 

Thomas points to SSR Mining’s 

ability to combine a proactive and 

reactive approach that differentiates 

his company from its rivals. “We’re 

quite fortunate because we can be 

followers and leaders,” explains 

Thomas. “In 2013, we invested a little 

bit of money into the cloud despite our 

size and the fact we were operating 



330 

just one mine at the time. Our move 

towards the cloud gave us the opportunity 

to move around our technology 

for various projects, such as predictive 

analytics or general artificial intelligence 

(AI) and machine learning (ML) 

type projects.” With mining often 

considered as one of the slower 

industries to adopt new technology, 

it wasn’t until 2013 when SSR Mining 

really put its foot down towards 

digitalisation. “Back then, we had no 

tech. We had an email system and 

that’s pretty much it. But, one thing 

we saw back then was the fact that we 

could seize the opportunity to move 

into the cloud. When we acquired our 

second mine operation, Marigold, we 

were positioned to start moving that 

operation’s IT into the cloud straight 

away. During the acquisition, we began 

to transition from the previous owners’ 

technology to the cloud. As Amazon 

and Azure introduced new things, we 

were able to take advantage of some 

of those new tools and features in our 

other operation too.” 

Looking back to how operations 


were previously conducted prior to 

new technology being introduced, 

Thomas acknowledges the challenges 

he’s faced over the years. “Previously, 

we didn’t have an Operational Excellence 

team like we do today,” he says. 

“Making that connection with the 

business was a big challenge because 

we’ve got IT-orientated people and 

then at the other end of the scale are 

mining-focused people, too. For us, 

we had to bring those teams on the 

extreme ends together and talk about 

the challenges. For example, our 

Marigold mine has a dispatch system, 

331 


David Thomas, Director of IT 

After six years of Civil Engineering and running a high-rise 

building computer design department in the mid 90s, 

Thomas graduated from the University of Technology in 

Sydney with an Engineering Degree and a Masters Degree in 

Engineering Management. After graduation he quickly moved 

into the Information Technology field in Melbourne Australia, 

working in the bill payment and consulting industries, 

before moving to Canada in 2005 where he led numerous IT 

departments and IT Consulting teams in mining, shipping, 

forestry and finance. With a deep background and education 

in both Engineering and Information Technology, 

Thomas provides both IT leadership and strategic IT 

transformation for SSR Mining Inc. 



$400mn+ 

Approximate 

revenue 

1946 

Year founded 

332 

14,000+ 


of employees 



333

Manage, Solve, 

and Deliver I.T. 

We take pride in putting our customer 

service front and foremost by creating 

simple solutions for complex connections. 

Discover your solution

similar to a taxi that tracks the destination 

of where you’re going. It’s important 

that we implement the right software 

that will enable us to improve. We had to 

have a much more conducive approach, 

and being able to do that gave us the 

ability to enhance our processes and 

automate emergency systems so that, 

if there’s a problem out on site, they can 

press a button and get support.” 

Having partnered with tech giants 

such as Microsoft and Amazon Web 

Services (AWS), Thomas believes what 

makes a successful partnership is the 

“LEVERAGING 

INFRASTRUCTURE, 

SUCH AS CLOUD 

S ERV I C ES TH AT 

WE DON’T HAVE 

TO INVEST LARGE 

CAPITAL IN, MAKES 

US NIMBLER” 

— 

David Thomas, 

Director of IT, SSR Mining 

335 



336 

ability to understand what the other 

expects. “A good partnership will 

involve mutual communication at all 

times and a joint ability to deliver 

something that works well together. 

I know when it comes to some of these 

smaller AWS or Azure partners, we 

would choose a vendor that has the 

skills and abilities internally to do the 

job, but that can also align with our 

nimbleness,” he explains. “A lot of our 

infrastructure dovetails into Microsoft 

and AWS. Amazon can give us a nice 

little angle in terms of IoT endpoints 

and it offers us a much larger vendor 

footprint, too. With AWS, we would get 

involved with the cyber types when 

it comes to industrial.” 

With a determination to not rest 

on its previous successes, Thomas 

affirms SSR Mining isn’t at the finish 

line yet and he still considers it a small 

and medium-sized enterprise (SME), 

despite revenues of over $400mn in 

2018. “In mining terms, our revenue is 

relatively small. I think once you get 

into the $2-4bn range of market 

capitalization, that’s when you can be 


considered a big company. In terms 

of market capitalization, we’re currently 

around $2bn so we’re not quite there 

yet. I almost consider us like a shopping 

advert – we do more for less.” Looking 

to the future, Thomas has clear ideas 

about how his organisation can 

continue to thrive in the mining space 

over the next few years and beyond. 

“I’m sure the gold industry will drive 

the success of the company through 

mergers and acquisitions; however, 

in terms of our operations, I believe 

our workforce and the safety of our 

workforce is a key aspect for success,” 

he notes. “It’s about ensuring strategic 

objectives are aligned with the 

operation base and being able to work 

closely with the teams that we have 

recently developed in the last two to 

three years, such as the Operational 

Excellence team. We need to evolve 

as well as help with sustainability in the 

next couple of years.” 

337 


338 

ASCENDANT 

RESOURCES 

rejuvenation 

through 

Mining 101 

WRITTEN BY 

MARCUS LAWRENCE 

PRODUCED BY 

RICHARD DEANE 



339

ASCENDANT RESOURCES 

Chris Buncic, CEO and 

Co-Founder at Ascendant 

Resources, discusses the 

rejuvenation of the El Mochito 

mine in Honduras and the 

Mining 101 approach that 

has powered its success 

340 

T 

he El Mochito mine, located in the Las 

Vegas municipality of Honduras and 

around 88km southwest of San Pedro 

Sula, has undergone a dramatic rejuvenation at the 

hands of Ascendant Resources which acquired 

the site in December 2016. Under Ascendant’s 

management, El Mochito’s zinc production has 

doubled and its revenues are growing rapidly. 

Not only that, Ascendant has become the leading 

miner in Honduras, a country whose mining 

potential has been sorely overlooked according 

to CEO Chris Buncic. He earmarks both capital 

investment and the shift in management styles that 

defined the takeover as being of vital importance 

to the mine’s renaissance. “After we closed the 

acquisition, we set upon a program of optimization 

and rehabilitation of the asset, as well as retraining 

operators,” says Buncic. “It was a very peoplefocused 

change.” In tandem with introducing an 

array of new equipment – a long overdue endeavor 

at El Mochito – Ascendant brought the mine to free 



341


“As we ramped up 

production, people 

have reaped the 

benefits through 

incentives” 

— 

Chris Buncic, 

President, CEO and Co-Founder, 

Ascendant Resources 

342 

2006 

Year founded 

$85.6mn 

Revenue in 2018 

1,242 


of employees 

cashflow positivity within a year of 

closing the deal. 

Ascendant has approached the 

project with a ‘Mining 101’ mentality, 

zeroing in on the basics to ensure 

any additional developments are built 

upon strong and efficient foundations. 

“We assembled a new management 

team that has performed consistently 

over the last two and a half years, and 

we replaced nearly all of the underground 

trackless equipment,” says 

Buncic. “Some of the trucks and 

scoops had been subject to as many 


CLICK TO WATCH: ‘ONE X ONE WITH CHRIS BUNCIC, 

ASCENDANT RESOURCES PRESIDENT AND CEO’ 

343 

as four overhauls; in a typical lifecycle, 

this would only have been done twice, 

but because of their age we were 

having availability issues. The key 

metrics of the journey have been 

availability of the equipment and its 

proper and consistent utilization.” 

It is equally essential to have both 

equipment at hand when it is needed, 

and trained staff who are available 

to capitalize on it. “We added a fourth 

shift underground for the truck drivers, 

meaning there are now four overlapping 

eight-hour shifts. Those shifts 

are staggered over the course of the 

day, and changeovers at the truck 

underground rather than on surface. 

This cuts out travel time, meal times 

and so on, and has resulted in productivity 

time increasing from 15 to 22 

hours per day.” Simply adding additional 

work hours is far from the sum of 

Ascendant’s work with its staff. “In the 

five years prior to the acquisition, there 

had been six general managers each 

with their own priorities and projects,” 

explains Buncic, highlighting the 

general sense of uncertainty and lack 


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of clear direction to which workers at 

El Mochito had become accustomed. 

Not only has the new and successful 

management team brought a fresh 

era of stability, but Ascendant has 

also been proactive in its approach 

to supporting staff significantly 

improving morale. “In 2017, we 

renegotiated our collective bargaining 

agreement with the workers’ 

union, which had been long overdue. 

They were unhappy with the situation 

before we took over, so we had lots 

of positive benefits come through 

that,” says Buncic. “As we ramped up 

production, people have reaped the 

benefits of the higher production 

rates through incentives. Everyone is 

happy in sharing the success of the 

mine, and it’s certainly something 

we’re happy to continue to foster.” 

This attentiveness to its employees 


Chris Buncic, President, CEO and Co-Founder 

Chris Buncic is one of the founding partners in the formation 

of Ascendant Resources Inc. and its acquisition of the 

company’s flagship operating El Mochito mine from 

Nyrstar NV in 2016. Prior to cofounding Ascendant, 

Mr. Buncic served in senior management roles at 

several Canadian corporations in the technology and 

resources sectors. His depth of experience also includes 

six years in Institutional Equity Research at leading 

Canadian independent full-service brokerage firms 

Cormark Securities Inc. and Mackie Research Capital 

Corporation. Mr. Buncic is a CFA Charterholder, has 

an MBA from Schulich School of Business and 

B.A.Sc. from the University of Toronto. Mr. Buncic 

is a member of the Professional Engineers of 

Ontario and the CFA Society. 

345 



346 

“We brought in a new 

management team 

that has performed 

consistently over the 

last three years, and 

we replaced nearly 

all of the underground 

trackless equipment” 

— 

Chris Buncic, 





347

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349 

extends to the local municipality 

through a range of highly successful 

corporate social responsibility (CSR) 

initiatives. In each of the past 10 years, 

El Mochito mine has won the prestigious 

Empresa Socialmente Responsible 

(‘Socially Responsible Business’) 

award from the Foundation for 

Corporate Responsibility in Honduras 

(FUNDAHRSE). “We give back 

to communities to a very large degree,” 

enthuses Buncic. “We operate 

a hospital and two schools, and we 

run smaller programs with respect to 

school lunches and environmental 

efforts. We have 11,000 hectares of 

forestland on our property, and we 

do a lot of reforestation and environmental 

preservation on that land.” 

As for the mine itself, incremental 

infrastructural upgrades have been 

vital to the leap in production, the sharp 

rise in the quality of the ore produced, 

and the efficiency with which that 

produce is brought to the surface. 

“We have been able to access some 

new high-grade areas of the mine that 

were not previously available, and our 



350 

grade has improved materially from 

5.3% when we took over the mine to 

as high at 7% in Q4 2018,” says 

Buncic. Part of this success can be 

traced to Ascendant’s Lagoa Salgada 

mining project in Portugal, itself 

located within the famed Iberian 

Pyrite Belt. “At Lagoa Salgada, we 

conducted gravity and induced 

polarization (IP) work which we found 

to be very effective in finding additional 

anomalies and targets to follow 

up. We brought the same group that 

conducted that study over to El 

Mochito, and their underground, 

gravity and IP studies have opened 

up the potential of the western part 

of the mine.” 

In February of this year, the company 

completed a 700-meter tunnel from 

the Esperanza ore body in the 

northwest of the mine to the crusher. 

The tunnel provides a more direct 

route between the sites, circumventing 

the original winding route comprised 

of rough terrain. Not only has 

this opened up a previously unexplored 

part of the mine and minimized 

the wear and tear of the associated 

machinery, but it is emblematic of the 


“One of the things 

our team has been 

good at is identifying 

new opportunities” 

— 

Chris Buncic, 



351 


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353 

infrastructural upgrades that have 

been pivotal in the mine’s rejuvenation. 

“It’s a good example of the ways that 

our team is strategizing as it looks to 

find high-grade material to bring into 

the mine plan as soon as possible,” 

says Buncic. 

In the long term, Buncic stresses 

that Ascendant’s commitment to 

maximizing the value of El Mochito 

is far from over. Whilst maintaining 

the production rates it has achieved, 

continuing to seek out high-grade 

ore bodies and evaluating areas where 

costs can be saved, Ascendant is 

“In 2017, we 

renegotiated 

our collective 

bargaining 

agreement with 

the workers’ 

union, which 

had been long 

overdue” 

— 

Chris Buncic, 





354 

“It was a 

very peoplefocused 

change” 

— 

Chris Buncic, 



working hard to boost its profitability 

per ton. With respect to this, Buncic 

highlights the expansion plan posited 

in a Preliminary Economic Assessment 

(PEA) released in October 2018 that 

seeks to cut costs to below $1 per 

zinc equivalent pound. The plan is 

split into three components: opening 

a more direct mine shaft in the east 

of the mine; installing a large and 

efficient water pumping system with 


355 

clarification capabilities; and expanding 

the plant to bring its capacity up 

to an average of 2,800 tons per day, 

boosting the mill’s production by 27% 

while simultaneously cutting costs by 

the same margin. “One of the things 

our team has been good at is identifying 

new opportunities,” says Buncic. 

“We’ve done that with El Mochito, 

we’ve done it with Lagoa Salgada. 

In the mining space today, there are 

a lot of great opportunities, and we 

have an excellent network of partners 

who want to work with us across the 

financial gamut as we look to grow 

the company.”

Business Chief USA August 2019

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