Contino’s Report: How Key Leaders Transformed Their Companies Digitally
We are living in the most exciting yet challenging times. Technology is changing the whole world rapidly, and with each passing day, the world is transforming into a better, more comfortable, and connected place.
However, this process is not as simple as it seems to be. Technology brings a lot of challenges with it, but if you place the right person in the right job, you can achieve anything you want.
Contino partnered with Global Tech Advocates and Tech London Advocates to study the top 20 innovators in Europe. They compiled a detailed report on who these leaders were, what challenges they had to face, what they did, and their results. You can view more information here.
Let’s talk about some of these innovators.
Kathryn Tingle
Kathryn left Deloitte and joined Sainsbury’s as Senior Technical Programme Manager in 2016. As Kathryn joined the company, her task was to digitally integrate the company’s clothing and beauty products into Argos for deliveries and earn more revenue for the company.
She successfully integrated both companies’ ecosystems end-to-end with her team, syncing new products and financial reporting between both companies.
This transformation opened doors to more customers and eventually more success for both companies. This was all done because of Kathryn’s clear vision or what she calls “North Star”. She said, “Your “North Star” is the guiding light of your transformation that gives you a clear roadmap and helps to win hearts and minds.”
During the pandemic, Sainsbury’s powerful digital capability was tested to the limit due to the number of daily deliveries; with Kathryn’s vision, Sainsbury’s could increase their click-and-collect locations and nationwide delivery slots, where the elderly, vulnerable, and disabled customers were prioritised when there was limited access to stores.
Suren Siva
Credit Suisse is one of the top global investment banks and financial services firms based in Switzerland. Suren joined Suisse in 2011 as COO. Later, he was promoted to Director – Strategy and Innovation in 2016. He always believed in finding ripe opportunities to transform business processes.
Suren spent all these years studying the whole business process of the company and finding those ripe opportunities he called sweet spots. From the front end to the back end, Suren identified all the improvements and opportunities to transform the business process.
Suren also believes in building relationships and working with peers. It was this belief that brought Credit Suisse and FinTech Partners together to work on those improvements and opportunities identified by Suren. Together, they automated the processes and monetized data using artificial intelligence and machine learning, which helped the whole industry.
Carola Wahl
Carola is the Board Member and former Chief Transformation and Market Management Officer at AXA Switzerland. She believes in leadership and long vision. She said, “If you want your organisation to go through a significant transformation, the first person who needs to transform is the leader himself. Carola always looks for a long-term vision, even up to 20 years in the transformation processes”.
Keeping this vision in mind, Carola, along with her team, focused on digitizing the core processes and ecosystem of AXA. She knew big data was the future of transformation, so she distributed 30 data scientists across the business to collect and study the data and processes of the company.
The data helped them in planning future projects, incentives for the employees, and creating the budget. This approach works well for the organisation as it allows them to earn more than $50 million annually.
All of this became possible because of this belief of Carola:
“If you are one of the leaders of an organisation going through a big transformation, the first person that needs to transform is yourself.“
Paul Whyte
Paul was hired by the parent company of Best Food Logistics in 2017 as Managing Director. As he joined the organisation, his task was to transform Best from a loss-making company into a market-leading organisation.
Best Food Logistics works as the food delivery service in the United Kingdom. The sector traded on price throughout the world, and because deliveries were often late, they were at loss.
The main goal of Paul and his team was to optimise the delivery network. Like all other transformation leaders, Paul believes in the Future vision. So, keeping that in mind, Paul and his team worked on big data using a cloud-based approach.
They built a mobile app for its delivery network to optimize deliveries and collect deliveries data. Using this data, they created models to cut business costs and deliver on time. This transformation helped them increase the on-time delivery rate from 40% to 95%.
With improved delivery rates, Best Food Logistics increased the commercial rates, and this is how a loss-making company transformed into a market-leading organization.