Operational Excellence in Insurance

Biography

Pranay Butala is currently AVP of Operational Excellence within Guardian Life’s Group business.  His team is accountable for helping Group business in three key areas: 1) strategic consulting to help proactively identify areas of cost reduction and other efficiencies at the enterprise level, 2) program leadership through various engagements ranging from process improvement to M&A future state modeling, and 3) developing operational excellence talent organically within the business.

Pranay’s previous experiences are from 20 years through consulting and the pharmaceutical industry.  He was previously a partner within Cognizant’s life sciences division, accountable for AstraZeneca’s marketing and sales portfolio. Prior to Cognizant, he was a director in marketing technology at Pfizer Pharmaceuticals New York City office, as well as spending an early career at Accenture’s and Deloitte’s strategic consulting arms.   Pranay has a MBA in Strategy and Operations from Purdue University’s Krannert School of Graduate Management, and a BS in Biochemical Engineering from Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, NJ.  He also ASQ Six Sigma Black Belt certified.   

Biography

David Seth Feierstein joined NCR Corporation in February 2016 leading the newly formed Transformation Office and Zero-Based Budgeting initiative.  From August 2013 to January 2016 David was the Global Head of Zero Based Budgeting, CAPEX and Working Capital at Kraft Heinz and was instrumental in the Kraft integration and Heinz transformation delivering over $550 million in SG&A cost savings during his tenure.  From July 2011 to August 2013 David worked at Goldman Sachs Capital Partners, the private equity arm of Goldman Sachs and from July 2007 to July 2011 at J.P. Morgan’s Investment Bank in the Mergers & Acquisitions and Natural Resources groups.  David continues to serve as an advisor to multiple companies including those owned by Berkshire Hathaway, Blackstone and other large private equity funds on the topic of Zero-Based Budgeting. David currently lives in Atlanta.

Biography

Anil Nair is an operational excellence executive, with expertise and experience in delivering robust and sustainable results for a balanced scorecard across the supply chain. He has over 20 years of rich and progressive leadership experience in Lean Six Sigma program design, development & deployment, Operations Management, New Venture implementation, and integrative operating system design & development covering QMS/EMS/SMS/CSR elements, deployment, certification & maintenance to ISO 9001, 14001, 18001, R2 & 26000 standards, across diverse industries, including engineering & construction, aviation, printing, education, and distribution and logistics.

Anil is currently Sr. Director of Global Quality, Lean, EHS, and Corporate Social Responsibility for Ingram Micro (NYSE:IM), a Fortune 100 company, recognized as world’s largest wholesale technology distributor and a global leader in IT supply-chain, mobile device lifecycle services and logistics solutions with $46B in revenue and operating in almost 40 countries. In this role, he leads global deployment and overall program management of Quality & Lean Operating System, Safety Management System, and Corporate Social Responsibility program.

Prior to this, he served as Sr. Director of Purchasing and Process Excellence at Career Education Corporation (NASDAQ:CECO), a $2B education company based in Hoffman Estates, IL, from 2009 to 2013. He led the transformation of Procure-to-Pay operations involving multiple programs and channels at 80 campuses and corporate office nationwide. This included deployment of PeopleSoft Financial e-Procurement workflows, P-card program design & deployment, ensuring SOX regulatory compliance for financial transactions, and leveraging economics of scale and process improvements.

Anil lives in Chicago, IL with his son, and enjoys swimming, golf and traveling across the globe. He also enjoys volunteering as a Math tutor whenever he gets the opportunity. 

Biography

Matthew Morgan joined Bridgewater Associates to implement a new process excellence program in 2012.

Before joining Bridgewater, Matthew led global Business Improvement at Parsons Brinckerhoff, a $2.6 billion engineering company. There, he developed and deployed a new process improvement function where none had previously existed and a global business management system to drive continual improvement and process standardization across many business units overseeing the firm's 150+ worldwide offices.

Previously, Matthew worked as a strategy consultant at McKinsey & Company and as a Lean Six Sigma professional and operations leader at Starwood Hotels, including managing a $30 mil, 300-person turnaround operation. A former Army intelligence officer, Matt has written 9 books on Afghanistan, terrorism, and related topics. He graduated with a BS from West Point and MBA from Harvard Business School.

Biography

Beth Schmidt is the Vice President of Process and Project Management at Mutual of Omaha.  She has responsibility for the analysis and delivery of projects that support New Business processes. She also has a team of lean process improvement facilitators who engage in everything from major business unit transformation to project process mapping. 

In addition to having a passion for process efficiency, Beth is passionate about high performance cultures.  She was one of the original founding members of the Omaha Culture Ambassadors, a local group of like-minded individuals that is quickly growing to other cities around the country.  She is a certified facilitator of culture change for Mutual of Omaha, and a Master Culture Champion.   

Prior to joining Mutual of Omaha, Beth was the Director of Application Development at Farm Credit Services of America which has steadily been one of Omaha’s Best Places to work.  She has 15 years experience in delivering software solutions, from programming to project management to team leadership. Beth holds a Master’s Degree in Adult Learning and Organizational Performance with a dual emphasis in Leadership, and Training and Development.

Biography

Dalton Li joined MassMutual in November of 2012 as Vice President, strategy and corporate development and is responsible for leading the strategy and thought leadership behind the MassMutual Way, an enterprise wide lean management system.  Dalton is responsible for designing the systems and principles for the MassMutual Way to ensure a long term culture of continuous improvement with a relentless focus on the customer.  Dalton is also responsible for coaching the CEO, the executive leadership team and developing change agents to role model the behaviors of lean leadership and implementing lean practices.

Prior to joining MassMutual Dalton spent over six years at McKinsey as a leader in the North American operations practice.  At McKinsey, Dalton deployed lean in several industries including manufacturing, consumer packaged goods, pharmaceuticals, information technology and financial services.   Before McKinsey, Dalton spent six years in the US Navy as a submarine officer aboard an award winning submarine and as an assistant professor of Naval Science at Fordham University and SUNY Maritime.

Dalton holds a B.S. in Systems Engineering and M.S. in Operations Research Engineering from George Washington University.  

Biography

Leslie Dowling joined USAA in January of 2013 leading the performance consulting practice supporting 25K+ employees. Over the next 2 years, Leslie’s understanding of business process, quality, continuous improvement and change allowed her to take on the staff operations functions supporting 5 unique lines of business. During this time, Leslie and her team regularly drove 10-15% productivity improvements year over year resulting in $100M+ in expense reduction and cost avoidance to the company. Early in 2016 Leslie was asked to lead the planning, business architecture and strategic change management functions for the enterprise. The team is proud of their recent work to measure, bring awareness, and manage change saturation for 29K employees and nearly 12M members.

Prior to joining the USAA team Leslie led process improvement, learning, performance, quality and change teams in large, complex organizations like UnitedHealth Group, Express Scripts, and Qwest Communications. Leslie continue to serve on multiple advisory panels and not-for-profit boards.

Biography

Jean joined Vanguard in November 2002 as a municipal bond analyst in the Fixed Income Group.  Today, she leads the process excellence (PE) team for the Investment Management Group.  Prior to her association with Vanguard, Jean worked as portfolio manager for Rochdale Investment Management and credit analyst at The Hartford.  Jean began her career as a rating agency analyst for Moody’s Investors Service.  She holds a B.A. from Stanford University and a M.P.P. from Harvard University. 

Biography

Deb Lindway is the Enterprise Director of Lean Six Sigma at KeyBank in Cleveland, Ohio.
In this role, Deb has built a team and program focused on deploying a Lean Six Sigma pragmatic approach to enable business transformation across core business units. This approach improves efficiencies and ratio performance with focus on both revenue growth and expense reduction priorities.  Supported by alignment to the CFO, Deb and her team partners closely with business and finance leaders on strategic priorities. Improving client experience, simplifying E2E processes and achieving shared business value realization are a few of the goals achieved.

The Enterprise LSS program has delivered over $50MM in financial benefit covering revenue and expense reduction in 3 years.  Prior to joining KeyBank, Deb was with Bank of America in multiple senior leadership roles and functions including Consumer Channel Technology, Enterprise Operations and Business Banking.   She obtained her Six Sigma certifications at GE during her 13 years in their materials business and holds MS and BS degrees in Chemical Engineering. 

Biography

David Robinson began work for Kaiser Permanente in 2006 as a program manager for information technology.  In 2008 he transferred into a process improvement role where he provided expertise to the finance organization.  David is currently the director of Organization Excellence in Enterprise Shared Services Buy to Pay, and also serves as an organization development consultant and process improvement expert.

David has 18 years of experience implementing complex enterprise-wide programs and projects, 12 years of experience leading large cross-functional and multi-organizational teams through quality-improvement initiatives and six years of experience partnering with leaders to create strategies to improve the health and development of their organizations.

David holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Spanish and a Master of Science degree in organization development.  He is certified in Accelerating Implementation Management (AIM), holds a Six Sigma Black Belt, and is a Project Management Professional (PMP). He is also a veteran of the United States Air Force, where he served as an airborne Spanish linguist.

Biography

Stuart Janzen is Senior Solutions Architect at Pethealth Insurance, Inc. , where he was recently selected as a 2017 OPEX Week award finalist for his work in transforming a highly ineffective claims process by automating 98% of the tasks, reducing labor by 65%, elimination 100% of duplicate data entry, vastly improving customer satisfaction, and speeding the entire process up by 75%.

For the last 18 years, Stuart has been creating efficient solutions within BPM framework and environments.  By identifying and analyzing poor processes, Stuart has created and implemented new transformative processes in the transportation, education, health care, manufacturing, oil and gas, government, banking and insurance industries.