Biography

José Pires serves as the Global Excellence & Innovation (E&I) Leader for Andeavor Corporation, where he oversees the global identification, prioritization and execution of mission critical business improvements and innovations that add value to the company, business partners and external clients in multiple markets.

Prior to his current role, Pires held Excellence and Innovation leadership positions in large, global companies in the electronics (Sony), semiconductor (Cymer-ASML), food (Nestlé) and infrastructure (Black & Veatch) industries. Throughout his career, Pires developed and refined E&I as an award winning program for innovation, leadership development, strategy execution and value creation globally.

Pires is an advisory board leader and keynote speaker for several global conferences on innovation, operational excellence, leadership development, strategy execution, business transformation, customer engagement and growth acceleration.

He holds a Bachelor in Engineering Physics from the University of Kansas and a Master in Business Administration focused in Investment Banking and Entrepreneurship from the University of San Diego.

Biography

Oliver Maeckel is Partner / Vice President at Siemens Advanta Consulting. He has been with Siemens AG since 1997. The focus of his current work is, in particular, the digitization of project business processes and the optimization of the development and delivery of "first-of-its-kind" large-scale projects. Over the last years, he and his team were able to decrease risks and to speed up project business processes in the pre-sale, sales and execution phase using digital technology.

Biography

32 years with Unilever : Global Director of Innovation Alliances and Partnering: Design, Implementation and execution of major Innovation Alliances, relationship and legal enablement

From bench R&D to industrial implementation of chemicals innovation, Foods InnovationDevelopment of and implementation of global innovation process and global IT innovation support tools.Project leadership of major FMCG innovation projects from start to post launch including full business case development and multi million Euro investments.Full development and implementation of major capital investments.Collaborative and Open Innovation. Modern rapid innovation approached across the whole innovation paradigm. Change agent and Innovation pioneer at Unilever and externallyPeople motivation and management in innovation cultures

Biography

Jeff Machols is the Senior Vice President of Continuous Improvement for Voya Financial, a financial investment management company. He has been in the role since July of 2017 and is responsible Voya’s Continuous Improvement and Lean capabilities. His leadership and commitment to developing people and high-performance teams have been key to driving Voya’s cultural transformation.    

Prior to his current Role, Jeff held multiple Information Technology leadership positions at Voya, ING and CitiStreet.  Before joining Voya (CitiStreet), he had multiple application development roles in the manufacturing industry.  He is one of the original committers of the Apache Directory Services project and authored “Subversion In Action”.

Jeff lives in Jacksonville, Florida and holds a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from Rochester Institute of Technology and an MBA from the University of North Florida. 

Biography

Larry Boyer is the author of The Robot In the Next Cubicle: What You Need to Know to Adapt and Succeed in the Automation Age. As a business leader and advisor he connects technology, analytics and economics to business operations & strategy to lead digital transformation and increased sales and profitability.

Larry is expert at working across disciplines and organizational boundaries to bring together information and people to foster innovation. He has worked as such notable companies as PricewaterhouseCoopers, Freddie Mac, IHS Markit and Aetna. Larry holds degrees in physics, economics, and public administration.

Larry is both Certified Business Economist® and certified coach. He has beenon the board of advisors for the Rutgers Big Data program, TECH Pakistan, and OPEN BDA and is amember of the Forbes Coaches Council. Connect with Larry to position yourself or your business forsuccess through disruption.

Biography

Prof. Dr. Isabell M. Welpe has been the chair of the Strategy and Organization research group at the Technical University of Munich, Germany since 2009 and the Academic Director of the Bavarian State Institute for Higher Education Research and Planning (IHF) since 2014.  In 2017, she was elected among the 40 leading HR-Personalities (Award of the Journal Personalmagazin) and in 2019 she was awarded with the Bavarian State Medal for Services to the Bavarian Economy.

The expertise of Professor Welpe includes digital transformation of companies, business model innovation, tokenization of assets, emerging digital technologies, the impact of blockchain on the economy and organizations and the future of leadership and work/organizational design.

Biography

Scott Whitmire is a senior enterprise architect with over 40 years of system architecture and development experience, including a number of major applications. He has designed and built large applications for several industries, including healthcare, research, aerospace, manufacturing, professional practice management, financial services, wholesale, retail, and telecommunications.

Mr. Whitmire serves on the Boards of Directors for the Association of Business Process Management Professionals International (ABPMP International) and Iasa Global, the association for IT architects. He is an industry thought leader on the practice of business architecture with expertise in troubleshooting and measurement, and has developed both full courses and multiple parts of multiple bodies of knowledge.

Mr. Whitmire is a Senior Member of the IEEE, an Iasa Fellow, and holds the CITA-P and CITA-D certifications. He has mentored many architects and engineers. He has published one book (so far), "Object Oriented Design Measurement," as well as numerous papers, articles, and presentations. He is a frequent speaker at business and IT architecture events. He has written extensively on business and IT architecture at https://scottwhitmire.wordpress.com.

Biography

I am the Chief of Digital Tools and Platforms at UNICEF. Previously located in New York and now in Valencia, Spain, we enable thousands of internal and millions of external users across 190 countries.

Biography

Dr. Abramov has an internal drive to improve things around him. Throughout his career, he has developed and implemented processes to improve organizations and operations and their effectiveness by leading significant changes.

Dr. Abramov joined Adama in 2012 as Executive VP for Global Operations. ADAMA Agricultural Solutions Ltd. is one of the world's leading crop protection companies, with a revenue of ~4 B$.

A large part of Eli’s role at Adama has been to deliver on the company purpose of "Creating Simplicity in Agriculture” through operations. 

During the 6 years, under Eli’s leadership as an Executive VP for Global Operations, Adama has become the best in class within its Industry on all aspects of Supply Chain and Inventory management. In addition, the Operations team have managed to drastically reduce the cost of goods which reflects in huge improvement on all aspects of the business performances.

Before Joining Adama, from 2009 to 2012, Dr. Abramov has served as CEO of Baran Group, the largest and leading Engineering and project management Group in Israel. The Group serves many different industries (Chemical and Petrochemical, Energy, Water, Infrastructures, Telecom and more). 

Dr. Abramov holds a Ph.D. (Summa cum Laude) in Materials Science and Engineering, 

Ben- Gurion University of the Negev.

Eli is also a member of the Executive Board of the Israeli Manufacturing Association and serves as the Head of the biggest Union within the association responsible for the Chemical, Pharmaceutical and Environmental Industries

On a more personal note, Eli is a strong proponent of giving back to the community, and serves as Chairman of the Executive Committee for the Sami Shamoon College for Engineering.

Biography

A former Research Director at leading IT industry analysis firm Gartner, Mark has an extensive background in enterprise architecture, business process management and change management, having held executive positions with a number of technology companies.

Mark has authored or co-authored four books on business and process management, including “Thrive! How to Succeed in the Age of the Customer” and “In Search of BPM Excellence” and  “People Centric Process Management.  Widely respected for his knowledge and views on business change, he is the creator of “Next Practice” and has variously been described as a ”BPM Guru”, a “Thought Leader” and a “Master of Mindset”. 

Mark is passionate about the people aspects of change, he has spent much of the last ten years travelling the world, learning, teaching and researching the cultural aspects of change and how executives perceive business and process improvement In this capacity he has literally taught hundreds of people and been fortunate to interview and interact with many CEO’s .

Biography

I am a software developer at heart who has been innovating process automation deployed in highly scalable and agile environments of industry leaders such as T-Mobile, Lufthansa, ING, and Atlassian. I contributed to various open-source workflow engines for more than 15 years and I'm the Co-Founder and Chief Technologist of Camunda – an open-source software company reinventing process automation.

I am the author of "Practical Process Automation" and co-author of "Real-Life BPMN". Additionally, I am a regular speaker at conferences around the world and a frequent contributor to several technology publications. I focus on new process automation paradigms that fit into modern architectures around distributed systems, microservices, domain-driven design, event-driven architecture, and reactive systems.