Business Transformation & Operational Excellence in Insurance Summit (BTOESINSURANCE)

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

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

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.