Throughout Ann Hewitt’s career, she has been willing to learn and take on greater challenges, leveraging her experience and analytical abilities to create a path forward. The SVP & CIO of FARO Technologies, Inc., a global leader in 3D measurement solutions, strives to build a sense of purpose aligned to the business needs and then rolls up her sleeves and works side by side with her IT team and peers to deliver the results necessary to achieve the objective. “I believe this type of approach builds confidence in everyone around me,”says Ann.

“Information Technology Executive with a proven track record in developing and executing strategies at a global level, in alignment with business objectives. Creates, and inspires innovation to drive profitability, while concurrently increasing efficiencies, and reducing complexities to lower costs, and increase speed to market.”

Ann has been a true inspiration for women in all industries, and whenever a situation presents, she is quick to share her own story with others. She encourages people to look beyond their current roles and be opportunistic in taking on challenges and new roles offered. She also empowers colleagues to find their voice and be confident of their contributions to the company’s success. “My advice is to share your successes to help inspire great leaders of tomorrow,” says Ann. “It is also important to build and support your own network, including on social media.”

Early in her career, the steadfast leader had the opportunity to be exposed to several publications from Tina Nunno at Gartner. “Later, I actually had the opportunity to meet her and talk in more detail about such topics as ‘finding your voice’ and ‘presenting in compelling ways,” Ann adds. “Recently stories of strong female leaders brought to life in movies like Hidden Figures (Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson) and On the Basis of Sex (Ruth Bader Ginsberg) resonated with me regarding how women persevered to make change. On a more personal level, growing up, my father instilled a sense of confidence and purpose. He grew up on a farm and achieved a Ph.D in Civil Engineering before finding his passion creating innovation at companies like John Deere and CADSI. With his first 2 children being female, we were taught that we could do anything, whether it was constructing things at home, changing a tire, or creating a successful start to a career with a technical degree.” Armed with such strong ideologies, Ann has been helping take FARO to new heights over the last 3 years.

FARO was established in 1981 by Simon Raab and Greg Frasier, true pioneers of early 3D measurement who launched the tech start-up from their garage as Ph.D. students. Derived from the ancient Greek word ‘pharos,’ meaning lighthouse, the Pharos of Alexandria stood on an island off Egypt and was one of the original 7 Wonders of the World. “A lighthouse is a powerful symbol of technology and enlightenment often used as a metaphor to gain awareness by illuminating the unknown using man-built precise measurement,” says Ann. “By extending the human ability to ‘see and probe farther,’ throughout history, lighthouses have served as a ‘source for inspiration’ and generated a profound impact on global business — saving lives, money, and goods delivered to market. For 40 years, FARO has developed precision technology to serve the needs of our customers. From our first 3D devices that enabled health care to measure the inner workings of the human body to the array of leading measurement solutions we provide today, FARO has continued to enable customers with the ability to ‘realize their vision and successfully navigate the world in all directions.”

As a female executive at FARO, Ann is proud that the company recognizes that inherent and acquired diversity leads to better innovation and transformational ways of thinking. “As a part of our commitment, we invest in formal programs designed to foster diversity through networking, talent management, and targeted career development,” states Ann. “It is important for me to ensure that we are not only hiring diverse groups of people, but we are spurring on creative thinking that happens when people with different perspectives and backgrounds come together.” IEWL

FARO Technologies

Management

Ann Hewitt
SVP & CIO of FARO Technologies

Description

FARO is the leading global source for 3D measurement, imaging and realization technology. For 40 years, FARO has provided industry-leading technology solutions that enable customers to quickly and easily measure their world, and then use that data to make smarter decisions faster. FARO continues to be a pioneer in bridging the digital and physical worlds through data-driven reliable accuracy, precision and immediacy.

“One thing I’ve found true throughout my career is that the product is most successful when diverse perspectives are embraced,” says Cait Porte, Senior Vice President of Product at Zmages. Porte is extremely passionate about increasing diversity on every level of her organization, from the board room to middle management. She has spent her Product career aiming to mentor, highlight, and advance successful women to be part of the leadership team and help drive decision making. Over her 15-year career, she has advocated for women in Product Management roles and mentored women as they make career changes. Says Porte, “I want my daughter to grow up and see people of all backgrounds and genders leading and managing companies. I want her to be able to see herself in any future she can dream up.”

And it’s not just about gender and diversity, it’s about driving company success. Genuinely connecting with customers, teammates, and partners is one of Cait Porte’s strengths. She has been able to transform the organization through her understanding of the market and bringing people together. While Cait has extensive knowledge of the eCommerce SaaS marketplace and technology infrastructure, her ability to align customers’ needs with technology that can empower them makes her truly unique. Cait has worked hard to get the right people in the right roles, identifying the strengths of her team members and placing them in Product Management or Product Design roles.

Cait is active in the Boston Product and Women in Technology space. She encourages women to find mentors and offers to mentor women starting in their product careers. Early in her career, it was challenging for Cait to find her voice because she couldn’t find women in leadership roles. “I sought out female peers and mentors in my space. I co-founded the Boston Women in Product group. If I wanted to see change, I didn’t want to sit on the sidelines waiting for it to happen.” Cait is encouraged to see a slight shift in recent years towards more women in Product Leadership roles.

Sherly Sandberg’s (COO Facebook, author “Lean In”) career and teachings has been something Cait has used to help her grow. As a business owner, mother, teacher, mentor, and sister (among other things), Cait struggles to find balance. Hearing from Sheryl in 2013 that there’s no way to ‘have it all’ was refreshing. In an interview from April 2013, Sheryl said, “The data on this is super clear: you can be a very successful parent with a great relationship with thriving children and have a full-time job. And you can be a great worker and a great colleague at work but not be there for 12 hours a day in person. And I think we have to let ourselves do that.” Hearing this made Cait realize that it was about finding the right balance between each role and molding her career to help support the things she wants to achieve. Armed with this unique mindset, she has been taking the organization to new heights.

Creator by Zmags was born after hearing from marketers worldwide that they were constrained by the resources, time, and money associated with bringing the best digital experience to their consumers.

Time and time again, Cait and her team heard from companies struggling to keep up with the pace of innovation. Creator revolutionizes how brands accelerate revenue by bringing interactive experiences to life online and wherever their customers are. Faster and without the need to write any code. Over the last five years, Cait and her team have helped retailers build and serve more than two billion pieces of content (and counting!) to drive up revenue and conversion. Creator has taken the restraints off marketing teams and allowed their creative vision to become a reality.

Godiva has focused heavily on its digital strategy over several years and has leveraged Creator by Zmags to lead this strategy. With growing customer demand for learning more about Godiva’s heritage, product quality, production processes, and interactive content such as recipes and entertaining tips, Godiva struggled to meet the scope of digital content regularly. To expand their content further, Godiva needed a scalable solution to generate rich content for an elevated site experience. Upon seeing Creator in action, the Godiva team realized that Creator could solve many of their immediate needs. Its drag-and-drop functionality reduced the amount of coding needed. Creator also has a Salesforce Commerce Cloud cartridge, meaning it integrates with their eCommerce platform for easy “shop the look” experiences, and it simplified publishing rich content pages. The tool was easy for non-technical staff to learn, including the marketing team, allowing for updates at any time.

Creator by Zmags is emerging as the fastest design-to-publish eCommerce content solution. The company recently launched a new way to convert all design files to interactive content with the click of a button. The team also launched Interactive Email – the world’s first and only truly interactive and shoppable email solution. With an eye toward building and growing the company, Cait is focused on hiring a more diverse set of individuals with unique skills and perspectives. Team and people play a significant part of how successful a company can be, and Cait is proud of how far the team has come in recent years. 2021 is shaping up to be an exciting year for Creator by Zmags and Cait has high hopes for 2022 and beyond.IEWL

Linda Muroski, President of Trelleborg Sealing Solutions Marketing Americas and Global Healthcare & Medical, enjoys pushing the envelope. As she puts it, “Status quo is not my strength; change is too exciting when it spawns success.”

Growing up in a multi-generational home in the suburbs of New York City in Hillsdale, New Jersey, Linda derived her strength and ambition from her grandmother, Lydia, whom she considers her earliest and greatest role model. Lydia, a first-generation American, marched for women’s right to vote during the suffrage period and worked as a substitute teacher and secretary at a time when fewer than 10% of working women held such professions.

Independence; however, did not come easily for Lydia. She encountered resistance, even from her father who insisted that a woman’s place was in the home, not the workforce. Lydia held her ground and encouraged Linda to do the same and to never let anyone hold her back. Taking this advice to heart, Linda has broken down barriers throughout her career, not only for herself but for other women as well.

While Director of Business Excellence for multinational chemical company, BASF, Linda founded a Women in Business chapter at the corporate headquarters, creating a network of female leaders across the industries in which they served. The program enabled women who were not in leadership positions to take on leadership roles within the chapter, providing them with unique experiences and opportunities they wouldn’t have had otherwise.

In her five years at leading global engineered polymers solutions company, Trelleborg, Linda has championed diversity, fostered collaboration, and empowered her team, resulting in greater accountability, increased employee satisfaction, and improved business results. Through these efforts, she nurtured the career paths of and promoted several exceptional women within her business, creating a more inclusive and diverse environment with a leadership team composed equally of women and men.

Linda joined Trelleborg Sealing Solutions in 2016 as President of Marketing Americas and immediately set the stage for growth by developing her strategy and marketing teams and focusing all commercial efforts on key market segments. Under her leadership, the business area exceeded its 2020 strategic plan in the US more than a year early through significant growth. In response, she challenged her team with a new, more aggressive goal to accomplish by 2025 one that to achieve, would require teamwork and the breaking down of well-established silos. To support this objective, Linda launched the Together 2025 initiative, comprising the four key pillars upon which the business is expected to deliver results; talent, innovation, market, and excellence.

Linda subsequently reorganized the business to better serve customers based on their unique needs, redirecting resources and empowering frontline personnel to create value for customers, ensuring an exceptional customer experience. The result is improved service levels, an increased focus on creating value, and a lower cost-to-serve.

At the same time, having Identified the healthcare market as a significant growth opportunity, Linda integrated two bolt-on acquisitions to augment Trelleborg’s technical expertise and manufacturing capabilities, forming the global Trelleborg Healthcare & Medical business unit, establishing Trelleborg as a leading supplier to medical device, pharmaceutical and biomedical manufacturers worldwide. Formation of the entity required development of a highly functioning leadership team and rapid integration of the acquired businesses, comprising five manufacturing facilities, marketing and sales operations. Under her guidance, Trelleborg Healthcare & Medical has coalesced to deliver innovative solutions and consistent, high-quality products that help improve patient lives worldwide.

Today, Linda continues to push the envelope and challenge her team to create value through talent development, a focus on strategic markets, innovation, and excellence. IE

Trelleborg Sealing Solutions

Management

Linda Muroski
President

Description

Trelleborg Sealing Solutions is a global developer, manufacturer and supplier of precision seals, bearings and molded components. Our comprehensive sealing portfolio of elastomer, silicone, thermoplastic, PTFE and composite technologies includes aircraft seals, engineered seals and gaskets, hydraulic piston and rod seals, scrapers/wipers and wear rings, liquid silicone rubber (LSR) parts, mechanical face seals, O-Rings, pneumatic seals, rotary seals, silicone tubing and hose and static seals.

Nicole R. Braley, Chief Marketing Officer, Inception Fertility, is a fast mover. It’s important for this steadfast leader, especially when taking on a new role in a new industry, to lean into transferable skills. For Nicole, that meant quickly assessing the big picture and determining what she could do immediately to jumpstart Inception’s marketing initiatives while beginning to plan for the long term. “My ability to offer a fresh perspective from outside the industry was welcomed. Many women executives are still the only women in the room,” says Nicole. “But my focus is on allowing my work speak for itself. Inception is an entrepreneurial setting that values everyone’s ideas, including my thoughts as a new executive to the organization.”

“Inception Fertility LLC, is a fast mover. It’s important for the steadfast leader, especially when taking on a new role in a new industry, to lean into transferable skills.”

Inception isn’t just one brand—it’s a family of brands, businesses, and service lines that comprise the premier fertility services provider for North America. Being new to the CMO role, defining a brand architecture was Nicole’s first challenge, including process standardization across brand identities. As the person who oversees commercial efforts, it was important to Nicole to establish a standardized lead generation process and incorporate it into Inception’s ERP to nurture those leads and measure defined objectives to track ROI.

After two years of IVF, along with frustration and tears, TJ Farnsworth, Founder and CEO of Inception, welcomed his son, Wyatt, into the world. His birth was the beginning of Farnsworth’s journey toward founding Inception Fertility with the goal of improving each patient’s experience of starting or growing a family. Inception strives every day to ensure that each patient, for which the company has the privilege of caring, has nothing less than a five-star experience. As CMO, Nicole works to ensure that exceptional messaging about patient experience, coupled with extraordinary CX across the patient journey, is a top priority.

Built by patients, for patients, Inception is working towards its purpose to achieve the highest bar in science and technology to enhance each patient’s experience and achieve better outcomes. “Part of my role is to oversee our client experience, which for us means patients aspiring to be parents. That patient experience is at the heart of all we do, so I make sure it’s the center of every campaign,” explains Nicole. “Part of my role is helping ensure we’re setting the highest industry standards in technology and science, and that those standards are communicated to the market for all of our brands and service lines as we continue to rapidly expand.”

Nicole thinks it’s important to feel connected and aligned with the customers. Inception’s patients are incredibly diverse, which allows them to understand so many different fertility journeys—no two families are alike. Like many, Nicole has friends and coworkers who have experienced infertility and the uncertainty and stress that comes with that often arduous journey. “It’s a privilege to come to work every day knowing we’re helping build families,” she says.

When asked for a piece of advice for future CMOs, Nicole advises them to lead with gratitude. “Ask your team what you can do for them today. That doesn’t just mean leaving thank-you notes and bringing in breakfast on Friday morning (though these are great things to do)—it also means holding your team to the highest standards and leading by example,” she explains. “Transparency is also key to leadership. Take yourself ‘on the road’ and showcase the hard work you and your team have been executing. Show how you’re driving the business forward.”

Inception is an innovator in the fertility space. “Just this year, we’ve rebranded one existing business line and launched an entirely new one that offers industry-first approach to fertility financing—and its only February!” adds Nicole. “Coming into a new CMO role, my job wasn’t to turn over the apple cart. It was to bring fresh perspective, be open to learning, and to elevate how we talk to the market, patients, and our employees.”IE

Inception Fertility

Management

Nicole R.Braley
CMO

Description

Inception Fertility, LLC (Inception) is a family of fertility brands committed to helping patients build their own families. Built by patients for patients, Inception’s purpose is to achieve the highest bar in experience, science and medicine in an effort to enhance each patient’s experience and achieve better outcomes.

Marianne Halvorsen, Senior Vice President of Aon, is passionate about making a lasting impact on people. At Aon, she is determined to provide superior products and foster and nurture client relationships that transcend typical business services. When sourcing clients, she aims to identify what is important to them to tailor her services to fit their needs best. When a client has an issue outside of Marianne’s area of expertise, she never hesitates to tap into her vast network to give her clients the resources to tackle any problem, hence taking the company towards enhanced ROI.

“Aon plc (NYSE:AON) is a leading global professional services firm providing a broad range of risk, retirement and health solutions. Our 50,000 colleagues in 120 countries empower results for clients by using proprietary data and analytics to deliver insights that reduce volatility and improve performance.”

Marianne has always stressed the importance of leadership and has ensured to impart her advice to the women of the business’s future. She provides leadership and networking workshops on weekends through her nonprofit organization, Growthsource Academy; although Marianne speaks five languages, English sometimes poses a challenge. Yet, being a true innovator and a leader, she views this as an opportunity to connect with people intuitively. It has improved her ability to identify her client’s thoughts and feelings through tone, body language, and facial expressions. Her best advice for young female professionals is to identify ways to contribute to others’ success to find their source of inspiration. These are the qualities that have assisted her in taking Aon to new heights.

Aon’s culture is predicated around an exceptionally talented group of individuals determined to support each other and service their clients’ needs. Connecting on a personal level with her coworkers is a fundamental way to improve working relationships. Marianne sees her coworkers and clients as partners, both on a journey together to deliver the best results for all. Furthermore, the collaborative environment at Aon cultivates a culture of growth and acceptance, which allows for better results.

According to Marianne, to empower clients’ economic and human possibilities, one must think about the immediate impact of their work on their communities. “They should consider: Who is benefitting most from my actions? How can I improve my current process? Then, think about how their work can be replicated in other markets,” she explains. “It is important to scale up your aspirations and goals as you generate success. Step outside your comfort zone, set a daunting, but achievable goal, and do whatever it takes to achieve that goal.” She adds, “Be sure to make strong, personal connections with as many people as you can along the way because at some point either you or a client may need a specialized skill, and having a vast network is a priceless asset.”

Frequently, clients have complex claims and premium issues that jeopardize significant portions of their businesses. Marianne recalls a case when a newly signed client had their Directors’ & Officers’ program priced incorrectly by the previous insurance broker. The premium owed was double the price the client believed. In response, Marianne dedicated her week to set up meetings and presentations with many insurance brokers, carriers, and underwriters to determine a solution that would put her client’s concerns at ease. Her persistence paid off, and the client had a correctly priced premium that fits within their budget. “The first step in being successful in the insurance industry is working on the right team with quality experts that appreciate and listen to their clients’ needs,” she says. “The next critical component to building a stronger industry is to leverage partnerships in a variety of sectors that can help identify potential risk, reduce that risk and/or transfer that risk by being creative with solutions and services.” All clients have different needs, concerns, and issues, so being flexible and creative are two excellent ways to contribute to the industry.

Marianne thinks that the risk companies continue to evolve, and the insurance industry is working hard to keep pace with solutions that match these changing needs. “One area that is of interest for the days to come is the SPAC boom. Currently, I have double digit SPAC clients, and my experiences have given critical skills to provide exception D&O insurance services to various specialized clients,” she adds.IE

Alon Plc

Management

Marianne Halvorsen
Senior Vice President

Description

Aon plc (NYSE:AON) is a leading global professional services firm providing a broad range of risk, retirement and health solutions. Our 50,000 colleagues in 120 countries empower results for clients by using proprietary data and analytics to deliver insights that reduce volatility and improve performance.

Harman Singh Arora, Co-Founder of AxesTrack Software Solution’s, who has completed his masters from IIM Lucknow, has had a riveting start up story. Since its incorporation the company has grown with a series of new product developments and technological innovations in the GPS Analytics domain. His interest in technology and location analytics made him hungry to engage with the world around him in new and creative ways. “As an entrepreneur it was important to choose mentors and coaches wisely. Carrying the legacy of leadership at AxesTrack, I focused on perseverance, passion and commitment which are required to do any great work,” adds Arora.

Looking back at his achievements, Arora can trace how he has been able to create history by culminating AxesTrack and becoming one of the most trusted brands in the tracking and location analytics space among numerous esteemed partners and well satisfied customers. Today, AxesTrack boasts of having 1 Lakh and counting vehicles to its credit with a quarterly growth of 40 percent. AxesTrack is committed to continue its rapid advancement in the GPS and Location based Analytics market. “We offer an array of solutions that help in management of logistics operations, passenger transportation, fleet management, supply & distribution as well as pickup and drop services,” asserts Arora proudly.

AxesTrack was started out with very simple and standard GPS tracking solutions for all types of vehicle users, be it, commercial vehicles, private cars or cargo vehicles. As their solutions and services were marketed, they understood that the most acute need of sophisticated tracking and location analytics solutions was in the logistics space. AxesTrack’s Logistics Management Solution is a comprehensive platform to manage and monitor logistics operations catering to multiple types of stakeholders. Further, AxesTrack adopts a consultative approach to solution development, thereby building custom modifications in their solutions to solve customer specific problems and challenges.

” With a passion to constantly push the boundaries of technology in the location analytics space, and commitment to work with our customers to solve their challenges, AxesTrack is on track to achieve its aims. “

Complete and comprehensive ‘professional’ Fleet management solution
AxesTrack’s Logistics Management Solution, its flagship product, is a unified web and mobile platform to manage and monitor any Logistics operation. The solution is integrated with the customer’s ERP and any plant automation systems to provide comprehensive and seamless flow of information across all internal and external stakeholders.

With multiple modules ranging from Planning, Operations, Traffic, Finance and Analysis, the solution touches upon different functions of the client’s organization. Each module is self-sufficient and yet integrated to each other creating a very flexible architecture that allows us to customize the solution to include client specific functionalities. The company strongly believes in partnering with their clients, rather than being a vendor and consequently adopts a consultative approach to marketing. By developing a thorough understanding of their client’s operations and pain points, AxesTrack suggest the best basket of modules, develop features to solve their challenges and provide solutions that are truly beneficial to the customers.

The company’s Logistics Management Solution has different modules to plan vehicle requirement, manage in-plant logistics operations, monitor traffic and shipments, manage freight and finance and analyze performance. With a basket of web and mobile solutions for each stake holder in the value chain, every member has real-time and comprehensive information. With a wide-ranging feature set and ERP integrated AxesTrack’s solution influences and enables quick and informed decision making across functions and stakeholders.

In an instance, one of AxesTrack’s clients in the building materials industry had a very unique problem, for which they wanted a location analytics based solution. The client’s logistics operations involved delivery of goods by trucks from their manufacturing facilities to their dealer locations. For this purpose, the client had pre-negotiated freight rates between the two locations. However, deliveries weren’t always happening at the dealer location and instead re-routed at the behest of the dealer. This led to a lot of confusion and consequently loss in freight payments. AxesTrack worked closely with the logistics and marketing teams of client and developed algorithms to accurately identify the actual delivery location of a shipment, thereby bringing control over deliveries and visibility over freight responsibilities resulting in considerable savings for the client.

Guiding the Future
Arora, with his years of entrepreneurial experience advises all budding entrepreneurs to pursue their passion, prepare a To DO list,ask for advice, maintain healthy relationships while always learning to admit their mistakes and move on. “In order to survive you have to be open to failing and learning new things every day.There are many lessons that one can learn from being an entrepreneur. The most important lesson I would say was the importance of passion in a start-up. It takes a lot of experience, innovation, team-work, networking and capital to build a start-up successfully, but the most important ingredient of a successful story is passion,” he explains. It is natural for the founders to have passion, but it is equally important to imbibe that in every employee of the company.

Today, AxesTrack has come a long way to be able to say that every member of the company is as passionate as the founders. With the free and open culture at AxesTrack since its inception, Arora admits, this was not the most difficult lesson, but the most interesting one. AxesTrack employs more than 100 people across all offices and has a very open culture with a flat hierarchy that promotes efficient decision making and focusing on Encouraging discussions and creativity at the workplace, appreciating the top performers on regular basis. This culture has helped promote team spirit to bind the employees together since we have employee friendly policies and practical guidelines.

The company aims to be recognized as one of the world’s leading technology service provider to Logistics and Commercial fleet operations. “With a passion to constantly push the boundaries of technology in the location analytics space, and commitment to work with our customers to solve their challenges, AxesTrack is on track to achieve its aims,” concludes Arora.

Megan R. Nichols,
Freelance Technical Writer

IoT and connected technologies allow for more robust streams of data, which in turn offers detailed information about day-to-day operations in the enterprise world. The real benefit earned through these innovative technologies is the opportunity to leverage real-time data.

The term “real-time” means what it implies. The information presented is the most up-to-date you can get, streaming in via live feeds. Retailers, for instance, can see how many people are within their store, where they’re located and what they’re doing. Manufacturers can see the bulk of their operational equipment and identify which systems are malfunctioning. Most importantly, these monitoring systems are accessible remotely, meaning the necessary parties don’t have to be on-site or nearby.

Real-time information is invaluable in the supply chain, especially with perishable goods that must be stored under strict, consistent conditions. The more data that’s available about shipments, goods and processes, the better teams can react. Removing contaminated goods from the main supply can now happen at unprecedented speeds.

The combination of real-time data and advanced analytics is how IoT will help to improve and modernize the cold supply chain.

Staying in the Know With Wireless Sensors

Certain goods — perishable foods especially — must be handled, stored and transported under stringent conditions. Meats, for example, even after treated and preserved must remain in cold storage throughout their supply chain journey. Any transport vehicles, storage locations and units, handlers and beyond must preserve the appropriate temperature. If a refrigerator or cooled transport malfunctions, then the meat may become contaminated. If it’s not pulled after that, then when it hits store shelves that could potentially introduce foodborne illness to customers, among other issues.

Naturally, supply chain providers and vendors have survived thus far without the use of IoT. But the argument isn’t necessarily that they cannot make things work without the technology. Instead, it’s that these devices will revolutionize efficiency, controls and monitoring. Imagine a distributor referencing their transport vehicle, at any time along its route. Managers can see the current conditions of goods stored within, view alerts — perhaps about a temperature drop or coolant leak somewhere — and then take action if needed. That’s exactly the kind of solution that IoT and “smart” connected sensors will allow for.

IoT can combine with more coolant systems like industrial chillers, which are designed to cool water or air to keep the surrounding environment cold. In doing so, the systems become incredibly efficient, and monitoring solutions become equally capable. It’s the ultimate solution if you will.

Thanks to IoT, everyone along the supply chain can now remain in the know, at all times, thanks to advanced wireless sensors. The information is collected, reported and processed by remote systems — machine learning and AI may even play a role.

These solutions also help to foster automation and efficiency in the field. Manual checkups are not necessary because the information is streamed in real-time to everyone that needs to know. If and when anomalies are detected, alerts or notifications are sent to the appropriate contact who can take action. A driver, for instance, might see an alert that they left their truck cargo door open. A property manager might see that a refrigerator or cooling solution is malfunctioning. Because they receive these alerts almost immediately upon detection, they can react faster to help preserve the goods and prevent future issues.

Demands Are High for Efficient Cold Storage Systems

Statista estimates that the global food and beverage market willgrow by 10.3% annually,eventually amassing $153 million in revenue by 2023. At the same time, more and more consumers demand access to fresh produce and organic goods. These trends increase the need for refrigerated and cooling systems significantly.

But the food and beverage industry isn’t the only field that relies on cold storage. Pharmaceutical companies must also store their goods under similar conditions, and the need for cold storage in the field also increases.

Therefore, the shared demand for more efficient and more capable cold storage systems across these industries continues to rise, which helps spur the demand for IoT-powered solutions.

Not to mention, there have been several scares recently related to supply chain events — such as the recent e.coli outbreak. Even though these situations weren’t caused by cold storage failures, they highlight the need for greater controls and operational efficiency, at least when it comes to eliminating risk.

Nagendra P. Bandaru

These days, all of us live a digital life. We drive, guided by our talking sat-nav systems, our smartphones let us video conference at any time across the planet and our wearable health monitors tell us how many calories we have gained today! Fast-evolving technology landscapes, dynamic economic environments and increasing customer demands are changing the world like no one ever imagined. This has created the need for modern day businesses to rethink the way they operate. They are no longer looking for only cost savings and service improvements. They need a lot more to stay ahead of the competition and satisfy the digital-savvy customer. Recognizing these needs is leading to the emergence of new and robust pricing models to meet changing customer expectations. For long, businesses wanting to outsource their non-core processes followed the traditional Fixed Price Model or the Time and Materials (TnM) Rate Card Model of outsourcing. Here, these companies would pay service providers for back office operations like, managing servers, developing applications, monitoring networks, etc. at a fixed price or for the time or costs incurred. In such contracts, the payment to a service provider was estimated on an average FTE rate-per-hour, irrespective of the outcome of the project. Companies were mostly concerned about service providers meeting their operational KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) determined by the service levels, cycle times or the time taken to manage a transaction. The project requirements were well-documented and, typically, did not change during the course of the project implementation. In short, the responsibility of delivering quality customer experience continued to lay with the organization itself and not the service provider. However, much has changed in the last ten years. With the number of service providers increasing exponentially, innovation in services grew alongside. Today, price is no longer the deciding factor for outsourcing processes. Enterprises are expecting more value in terms of lower risks, better benefits and overall output. And, service providers are being billed proportionate to the actual outcome delivered by them – such as support incidents addressed, defects fixed, test cases completed, etc. This enables enterprises to seek ROI on every dollar that they spend. They now look to their service providers to deliver business outcomes. In response, service providers are going beyond managing processes to establishing innovative, non-linear and agile business models. One that has gained tremendous traction over the years, the Outcome Driven Pricing Model, focuses on business outcomes instead of activities or tasks accomplished. In this Model, Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and KPIs become table stakes. Companies choose to variabilize fixed costs of outsourcing and, as a result, the onus of managing costs for higher margins lies squarely with the service provider, and not the enterprise. This new pricing model forced service providers to bring in innovation to help enterprises achieve growth targets for their businesses. This means that service providers now have their skin in the game and are taking on bigger risks to guarantee clear outcomes and not just an output to the organisation. In pursuit of market success and customer satisfaction, enterprises are also exploring a hybrid model that combines Fixed Price with the Outcome Driven Model. What this means is that while service providers are paid per FTE or per transaction, a large portion of their revenue is also linked to the outcome of the business. Enterprises have the benefit of managing their processes through service providers at the lowest cost possible. However, this put tremendous pressure on service providers to reduce their investment cost in the business, which led to investments in digital technologies as an important lever to increase efficiency. Service providers tapped into their domain experience to develop innovative digital solutions that cut costs effectively, resulting in a win-win situation for both them and the companies they serviced. One of the first steps was to automate straight-through-processes (STP) from initiation to completion of a transaction. This not only saved costs but also made processes more agile.

Deep domain knowledge and process expertise became critical to the success of the new model. Service providers are now expected to offer the right solutions that increase efficiency, reduce operational expense, and ensure faster time to market with high return on investment (ROI). This called for standardized yet highly configurable services, which allows businesses to even out transactional and legacy systems globally, while shedding the burden of backend operational processes and steering the focus to value creation.

Nearly every new technology is disruptive to the extent that it’s expected to replace older technologies. Sometimes, as with the cloud, old technology is simply rebranded to make it more appealing to a new market. Let’s remember that cloud computing had previously existed in some form. At one stage it was called on-demand computing, then it became application-service provisioning.Now there’s edge computing, which some people are also calling fog computing. Some industry commentators feel it will replace the cloud as an entity. Yet the question is, will it really? The same viewpoint emerged when television was invented. TV was expected to be the death of radio. Yet people still tune into radio stations by their thousands every day. Of course, some technologies are disruptive in that they change people’s habits and their way of thinking. Once, people enjoyed listening to Sony Walkmans, but today, most folks listen to their favorite tunes on smartphones.

Complementary Models

So the two approaches may in fact end up complementing each other. The argument for bringing data computation back to the edge comes down partly to increasing data volumes, which lead to ever slower networks. Latency is the culprit. Data is becoming ever larger. So there will be more data per transaction, more video and more sensor data. Virtual and augmented reality will play an increasing role in its growth, too. With this growth, latency will become more challenging than it was previously. Furthermore, although it may make sense to put data close to a device such as an autonomous vehicle to eliminate latency, remote storage via the cloud remains critical. The cloud can still deliver certain services, such as media and entertainment. It can also back up data and share data emanating from a vehicle for analysis. From a broader perspective, creating several smaller data centers or disaster-recovery sites may reduce economies of scale and make operations less efficient.Doing so may mitigate latency, but the data may also reside in the same circles of disruption, with devastating consequences when disaster strikes. So for the sake of business continuity, some data storage or processing may have to occur elsewhere, away from the network edge. In the case of autonomous vehicles, and because they must operate regardless of whether a network connection exists, it makes sense for the vehicle to perform certain types of computation and analysis. But the cloud still backs up much of this data when a connection is available. So, the edge and cloud computing are likely to follow a hybrid approach rather than a standalone one.

Edge to Cloud

Saju Skaria, senior director at consulting firm TCS, offers in a LinkedIn Pulse article (“Edge Computing vs. Cloud Computing: Where Does the Future Lie?”) several examples where edge computing could prove advantageous. He certainly doesn’t think that the cloud will disappear: “Edge Computing does not replace cloud computing….In reality, an analytical model or rules might be created in a cloud then pushed out to Edge devices…and some [of these] are capable of doing analysis.” He then goes on to talk about fog computing, which involves data processing from the edge to a cloud. He suggests people should remember data warehousing, too, because it handles “the massive storage of data and slow analytical queries.”

Eating the Cloud

Despite this argument, Gartner’s Thomas Bittman seems to agree that the “Edge Will Eat the Cloud”: “Today, cloud computing is eating enterprise data centers, as more and more workloads are born in the cloud, and some are transforming and moving to the cloud….But there’s another trend that will shift workloads, data, processing and business value significantly away from the cloud. The edge will eat the cloud…and this is perhaps as important as the cloud computing trend ever was.”Bittman also says, “The agility of cloud computing is great—but it simply isn’t enough. Massive centralization, economies of scale, self-service and full automation get us most of the way there—but it doesn’t overcome physics—the weight of data, the speed of light. As people need to interact with their digitally-assisted realities in real-time, waiting on a data center miles (or many miles) away isn’t going to work. Latency matters. I’m here right now and I’m gone in seconds. Put up the right advertising before I look away, point out the store that I’ve been looking for as I drive, let me know that a colleague is heading my way, help my self-driving car to avoid other cars through a busy intersection. And do it now.”

Data Acceleration

He makes some valid points, but he falls into the argument that has often been used about latency and data centers: they must be close together. Wide-area networks, however, will always be the foundation of both edge and cloud computing. Also, Bittman clearly hasn’t come across data-acceleration tools such as PORTrockIT and WANrockIT. Although physics is certainly a limiting and challenging factor that will always be at play in networks of all kinds, including WANs, you can now place your data centers at a distance from each other without increasing data and network latency. Latency can be mitigated, and its impact can be reduced no matter where the data processing occurs and no matter where the data resides.

So let’s avoid viewing edge computing as a new solution. It’s but one solution, and so is the cloud. Together, these two technologies can support each other. One commentator says in response to a Quora question about the difference between edge computing and cloud computing, “Edge computing is a method of accelerating and improving the performance of cloud computing for mobile users.” So the argument that edge will replace cloud computing is a foggy one. Cloud computing may at one stage be renamed for marketing reasons, but it’s still here to stay.

Hamilton MannDirector, Digital Marketing
and Digital Transformation at Thales Group

Digital Transformation is a crucial topic for companies in today’s rapidly changing and complex environment. Beyond the technologies, digital transformation is about a huge change in culture. That’s why, in 2016, we decided to launch our first Digital PoC (Proof of Concept) Factory in order to accelerate the Digital Cultural change in Thales.This Group-worldwide initiative aims at accelerating our Digital Transformation and putting an emphasis on bringing to life the benefits of digital by quickly transforming great ideas into concrete proof, demonstrating that new digital concepts can be implemented. In addition we can offer concrete value which will take shape and evolve into viable products and services.Participation has been beyond our expectation: this major initiative has brought together all the Thales Group’s business areas on every continent.

For this first Digital PoC Factory 221 digital PoC ideas were initially submitted by mid-May and early June. The Thales Group Digital Transformation Office pre-selected 92 PoCs. The teams used the rest of the summer period to work on their respective projects. And by the end of September, 52 teams presented the results of their work during what we call the “Thales Pitch Day”.This first Pitch Day was such a collective performance, leveraging various meeting formats (on-site, videoconferencing and both of them), taking place simultaneously in 3 Thales locations, welcoming 200 participants, mobilizing all parts of the Thales matrix and all set up with the precious help of many Thalesians.Some very promising results were delivered and highlighted by the teams, very much in alignment with our Thales Digital Transformation focus areas.Considering the Top ranked PoCs based on the selection criteria, we ended up selecting 5 PoCs Digital Transformative Initiatives + 1, the Thales Digital PoC Factory itself, and a portfolio of 21 Digital Initiatives to be incubated and nurtured at a Corporate level for some of them, or at Global Business Unit levels for others.

A few key points and lessons learnt so far:

A Digital PoC Factory initiative is a strong catalyst in order to develop the “test-and-learn” mindset and enhance agility beyond internal processes under time and resource constraints, by conducting quick, inexpensive experiments to gain valuable insights.

The approach established to run the Digital PoC Factory provides the opportunity to leverage internal existing digital assets by challenging the ability to make the best use of them.

The constitution of the Digital PoC Teams is a great opportunity to reveal digital champions, empower people, perform through cooperation across organizational boundaries and encourage cross-functional collaboration by flattening hierarchies. It allows us to build productive environments to generate new ideas and, above all, to unleash a tremendous creative potential at another level.

Digital PoC Projects are a key lever to put the emphasis on game-changing ideas and challenge conventional wisdom/thinking and well-established and/or existing rules of the game, by reexamining ways of doing business, further understanding where the new frontiers of value are, de-segmenting our current view of the market, and rethinking how to use new capabilities to improve how customers are served, while getting some real stuff done.

The Digital PoC Factory journey is the opportunity to develop and strengthen more connections with the outside world in order to stay in touch with the best expertise & practices. It helps to foster a “get-out-of-the-building” mindset to not reinvent the wheel.

The Pitch exercise is a tangible vector of the digital cultural change. It helps to develop storytelling skills. In addition, it anchors new conversations focusing on the value proposition created while pitching the value, not the features, and being more and more obsessed about solving the problems of our customers and our non-customers.

The video pitch format is a great way of showcasing the benefits of an idea. We’ve all seen a video that has gone viral on Facebook, YouTube, etc. Having video pitch format creates a viral loop which maximizes the exposure of the work that has been done by the PoC teams in a way that could not have been achieved with a PowerPoint presentation.

The outcomes of the teams will make up a productive learning platform to share and discuss the concrete benefits of going digital while considering the main challenges to be addressed with a view to potential deployment in mind.Finally, setting up a first Digital PoC Factory is a Proof of Concept project in itself!

Throughout this journey we experimented with new ways of working by trying new things, fostering open collaboration and cultivating a “Fail fast, fail cheap, fail often” culture by building agility, speed and experiential data.Therefore, we have decided to run a 2nd edition of the Thales Digital PoC Factory this year. We are convinced it will indeed continue to help us accelerate our digital cultural change which is key to our success in Digital and unleash the collective genius of Thales’s employees throughout the Group to serve our customers all over the world.In closing, I would like to quote something that I read a few years ago and that has become a source of inspiration for me. It was written by Rob Siltanen and Lee Clow (made popular by Apple) and it illustrates in a meaningful way the premise behind the digital cultural change: make the impossible possible.

“Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do”