Blog: Cleo’s Top 50 Digital Transformers List of 2019
The end of the year might be upon us, but that also allows us a chance to reflect on the year that was 2018. And as we look back this year, what stands out are the many technological rock stars out there that deserve some recognition for driving IT modernization efforts at their companies.
Over the month of November, Cleo had opened nominations for the 2019 Top 50 Digital Transformers List, as a way to recognize individuals who have made enormous strides to bring their companies into the modern age and improve the way they do business. From improving onboarding times for partners and customers to migrating to the cloud, these are the visionaries that looked beyond the way business is done and made a commitment to evolve.
In no particular order, below is a list of the top 50 Digital Transformers we’re recognizing as leading the charge to transform their companies to be more agile in the digital age.
Terri Sandine
Mohawk Global Logistics
Terri Sandine, the manager of application development for Mohawk Global Logistics, a supply chain and logistics company, knew Mohawk needed to better manage an increasing number of new partner data requirements. Sandine’s modernization efforts increased client loyalty and attracted new clients with an average ROI of $5000 per month.
Yohan Ponniah
Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield of New Jersey
Ponniah is the application director at Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield of New Jersey, the only licensed Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association plan in the state. To better meet existing customer needs, Ponniah explored the benefits of migrating to the cloud, and from this, Horizon now provides improved customer service and stays ahead of its competition in the health care industry.
Jen Niethammer
TaylorMade
Niethammer is the senior EDI and compliance coordinator at TaylorMade, a golf club and golf accessories manufacturer. Neithammer helped Taylormade move to the cloud thereby reducing VAN charges, improving new trading partner setup processes, and lowering the time TaylorMade reconciled responses from its customer base.
Michael Donham
Octapharma
Donham, the director of IT at Octapharma, a pharmaceutical company, brought all of its communications and data transformation functions in house. By automating core data processes, Donham and Octapharma are able to deliver data in formats its distributors require, and reliably integrate communications better than ever.
Ben Sanders
O’Rourke Sales Company
Sanders, the VP of technology at O’Rourke Sales Company, a multi-channel distributor, found solutions to rapidly deploy integrations with multiple partners simultaneously. Through these efforts, Sanders was able to save O’Rourke time and money, increase employee efficiency, and improve business flexibility and speed to market.
Neelu Sethi
Reddy Ice
Sethi is the CIO at Reddy Ice, the largest manufacturer and distributor of packaged ice products in the United States. With a growing number of new trading partners, Sethi saw the need to modernize EDI and data integration processes to become more transparent and responsive to customers during peak seasonal demands.
Scott Heffren
Prairie Farms
Heffren, an EDI analyst and programmer at Prairie Farms, a dairy cooperative, searched for ways to simplify its approach to file transfers. Without specialized staff to handle network hardware and communications setup, Heffren still managed to offer trading partners more protocols to communicate and meet partner needs more quickly.
John Barbagallo
Wells Enterprises Inc.
Barbagallo, the senior systems analyst at Wells Enterprises, a large ice cream and frozen treat manufacturer, saw the need to accelerate business processes through better integration between many different formats, such as EDI and flat-files. His efforts had led Wells Enterprises to onboard new trading partners more quickly, and accelerate internal data flows.
Raimond Kranenburg
BrainSurf Informatics Inc.
Kraneburg, the applications specialist at BrainSurf, an outsourced IT company, needed a large amount of options to communicate with his company’s trading partners. Kraneburg managed to improve communication for orders, shipments, and invoices, while realizing success through less manual entry errors and faster response time to acknowledge orders.
Todd Hendershot
Steel Technologies Inc.
Hendershot, the CIO at Steel Technologies, a steel production company, worked to improve EDI data transactions and visibility throughout its partner network. Because of this, Steel Technologies is no longer in the dark on reporting and audit trail capabilities, and features automation, data orchestration, and file movement on top of one single platform.
Rahul Anandani
AT&T
Anandani, a principal technical architect at AT&T, worked to ensure AT&T could confidently comply with new and changing federal mandates. Without its digital transformation strategy, previously, AT&T had encountered firewall issues, as well as vendor protocol and encryption incompatibilities.
Sean Ketcham
Dot Foods
Ketcham is the senior e-Commerce analyst at Dot Foods, a food service distributor. Ketcham drove a project to automate orders from customers who were unable to transmit EDI documents. Modernizing this process has allowed Ketcham to phase out manual order entry and save Dot Food significant time and money.
Michael Hegarty
Lipari Foods
Hegarty, the director of ERP and CRM of Corporate Strategy at Lipari Foods, a food distributor, had a goal to become easier to do business with. By centralizing data processes, and enabling automated data transformation and orchestration, Lipari now can provide faster responses to partner requests.
Glenn Jansen
Hogan Transport
Jansen, the director of IT at Hogan Transport, a logistics and transportation company, sought a way to manage data flows from one central platform. With Jansen’s help, Hogan Transport is able to seamlessly process the data from all internal and partner systems.
Lynn Scheu
Kimball Electronics
Scheu, the director of IT system support at Kimball Electronics, an electronic manufacturer, needed to easily make AS2 and SFTP transfers, while providing a wide range of protocols for any of its future needs. By modernizing its communication processes, Kimball has reduced partner and customer support calls and has become easier to do business with.
Bonnie Ramsay
Halvor Lines
Ramsay, the CIO of Halvor Lines, a transportation and logistics company, looked for a way to accelerate internal processes. By migrating integrations to the cloud, Halvor Lines has reduced its data entry time by over 65 percent and has found its EDI implementations are easier than ever to accomplish.
Ken McMenamy
Dotcom Distribution
McMenamy, the Vice President of IT for Dotcom Distribution, a third party logistics provider, managed to automate the transformation of data in order to improve integration workflows between new applications and their partners.
Anthony Gaetano
Evenflo
Gaetano, the IT Director at Evenflo, a manufacturer of child care products, has over 120 trading partners and 300 maps, which he was able to move to his cloud solution in just a few short months. Evenflo can now spin up new trading partners at a faster rate than ever.
Carl Snyder
KeHe Distributors
Snyder is the manager of IT Customer initiatives for KeHe Distributors, a specialty and natural food distributor, which needed to streamline communications among trading partners and expand its data protection capabilities. Snyder led the efforts to migrate all of KeHe’s communication traffic to meet its customers ever-increasing security needs.
Noelle Brault
Southeastern Freight Lines
Brault is the manager of software development for Southeastern Freight Lines, an LTL and trucking company that had an older EDI translator. Brault found a modernized solution to make it easier for both IT and business users to search for EDI documents that are sent and received.
Julie Delrow
Miller Electric
Delrow is a systems analyst at Miller Electric, which leads the welding industry in building advanced, solution-focused products for welding safety and health. After its EDI integration software reached end of life, Delrow found an easy-to-use solution to manage integrations in house, which also helped to drastically decrease partner onboarding times.
Prakash Kota
Autodesk
Kota, the CIO of Autodesk, a global software company, knew his company needed to consolidate multi-point and homegrown platform systems. Kota managed to lower TCO, integrate its financial system, and eliminated multiple points of failure to meet commission and sales SLAs.
John Kordash
TraceLink
Kordash is the CIO and vice president of Cloud Operations at TraceLink, a track-and-trace pharmaceutical software solution. Kordash saw that Tracelink needed a platform with simple connectivity, complete end-to-end visibility and better business collaboration. Kordash’s vision helped make secure connections with customers easier, and offers Tracelink more insight into customer activity.
Justin Weber
Venture Logistics
Weber is the COO at Venture Logistics, a transportation company that needed to replace its legacy EDI platform, eliminate transaction bottlenecks and reduce customer onboarding costs. Weber led the efforts to streamline cross-functional patterns, which increased IT and business user visibility into data processing statuses, and enhanced customer service efforts with dashboards and reporting tools.
Troy Trachsel
EA Sween Company
Trachsel, a JD Edwards Developer at EA Sween Company, a food producer, saw the need to decrease onboarding and deployment times. Turchsel helped modernize EA Sween’s EDI platform, which enabled business continuity with its new ERP, and significantly reduced onboarding times.
Jeff DeSandre
CSS Industries
DeSandre, the CIO and vice president at CSS Industries, a consumer products company, knew his company needed a streamlined IT environment. Using a hybrid approach, current business EDI keeps moving, while allowing all new acquisitions to be migrated directly to its cloud with a “no touch order” that has operational efficiency.
Mark Denton
One Stop Stores
Denton is the head of IT at One Stop Stores, part of the UK’s largest retailer group, Tesco. But Tesco needed to upgrade its infrastructure, rollout new stores faster, and accelerate potential franchises. Denton led the way to reduce integration development time, and move OneStop from batch to real-time operations with a new ERP/PoS system.
Ozzy Zaheer
Charlie’s Produce
Zaheer is the chief technology executive and director of IT at Charlie’s Produce, the largest independently owned produce company in the Pacific Northwest. Zaheer led a cloud migration project that now provides Charlie’s Produce more reliability, support, and responsiveness to handle all of their customers’ needs.
Shawn Buske
Jabil Inc.
Buske is the senior IT manager for Jabil Inc., a company that provides electronic manufacturing services throughout the globe. To better handle SAP data dumps and delivery, Buske found a solution to not only manage the processing of large files, but provide secure high-speed data transfers.
Luther Brown
nVision Global
Brown, the CEO of nVision Global, made a commitment to connect, integrate, and exceed nVision’s global customer expectations. By modernizing their IT strategy, Brown improved the security and speed of all internal and customer data transfers.
Jack Mehltretter
Gibraltar Industries
Mehltretter, is the head of IT at Gibraltar Industries, a manufacturer of building products. By consolidating integrations onto a single platform, Mehltretter helped expand the company’s ability to handle more use cases in order to meet new business needs and ultimately bring in more revenue.
Paolo Quaranta
Rana Meal Solutions
Quaranta is the CIO at Rana Meal Solutions, a manufacturer and distributor of pasta, that has been rapidly expanding throughout the US. Facing many compliant needs, rather than deal with custom coding, Quaranta turned to a solution that has since simplified Rana’s onboarding processes, and ensures better long-term value and quality products for its customers.
Barnaby Mortensen
Clarity Software Solutions Inc.
Mortensen, the director of Infrastructure at Clarity Software, a healthcare communications company, helped to normalize the data, formats, and printed information on the cards that patients carry around. To achieve this, Mortenson upgraded Clarity’s integration platform to better accept and process partner data.
Ramesh Reddy
FreshThyme Farmers Market
Reddy is the CIO and vice president of IT at FreshThyme Farmers Market, a natural/organic grocery & retail chain. Reddy led the efforts to implement and automate EDI, while also providing a platform which improved scalability and reduced on-going operation costs of manual entry.
Ken Molter
Ryder System Inc.
Molter is a director at Ryder System Inc., a provider of transportation and supply chain management products. As the company looks to embrace new modern the technologies to provide better services, Molter ensures B2B integration processes connecting all of Ryder’s ecosystems are optimized and pushing the company ahead of its competitors.
Marvin Watkins
Cree
Watkins is an enterprise application integration manager at Cree, a company that makes consumer and business grade lighting products. With Watkins’ help, Cree is able to optimize and automate all data transactions through a centralized cloud platform.
Josh Reader
Mercury Electronics
Reader, the IT manager at Mercury Electronics, a leading provider of electrical and electronic contract manufacturing services, needed to find a way to reduce partner onboarding time. Through his efforts, Reader implemented a robust and user friendly data integration solution to speed up order to cash by automating core onboarding processes.
Dave Birkenheuer
Article
Birkenheuer is the vice president of operations for Article, a company that simplifies the direct to consumer furniture buying process. Birkenheuer helped Article implement a scalable, fully featured enterprise ready B2B cloud platform for all data integrations with built-in access to real time order life cycle visibility and dashboards.
Dudley Flanders
Zero Mountain Inc.
Flanders, the CIO at Zero Mountain Inc., a frozen food leader, became intrigued with the idea of migrating to the cloud. Despite a limited staff, Dudley led efforts to modernize areas of the enterprise to achieve data movement and transformation consolidation, to allow limited IT resources to focus on other mission critical tasks and projects.
Mike McLean
Demoulas Supermarkets Inc.
Mike McLean is the IT Manager at Demoulas Supermarkets Inc., a chain of 79 supermarkets in New England that was experiencing pains with its technology’s deployment and support. With McLean’s help, the company has managed to consolidate integration processes and reduce support cost and compliance penalties.
Joanne Bambic
Penske Logistics
Bambic, the senior systems programmer at Penske Logistics, a transportation services company, is helping the company grow by providing Penske the ability to accept any data format, and accelerating partner onboarding through process automation.
Matt Dee
Direct Care Innovations (DCI)
Dee, CTO at Direct Care Innovations (DCI), a home care management and HCBS billing company, was looking to provide a new managed billing service to help DCI customers focus on other important tasks. Faced with different government mandates and regulations, Dee found a secure solution that kept the company compliant, while allowing them to administer rapid responses to their customers.
Laura Romero
Plex Systems Inc.
Romero, the director of global partners & programs at Plex Systems Inc., a cloud-based ERP solution for manufacturers, was looking to reduce customer latency and began a resilience initiative in order to reduce risk, while improving administrative efficiencies.
Steve Thomisser
Jack Henry & Associates
Thomisser is a file transfer operations manager at Jack Henry & Associates, a provider of technology solutions and payment processing services. With Thomisser’s help, Jack Henry found a corporate standard to consolidate and replace all one-off file transfer processes to scale their business with more effective use of resources and less risk.
Siri Edupuganti
XPO Logistics
Edupuganti is the senior manager of IT client support at XPO Logistics, a global logistics company that had an immediate requirement to support some of its biggest customers with over 2 million transactions per month. Edupuganti helped consolidate integrations to a single secure platform, which also allowed XPO better visibility over all end-to-end data exchanges.
Sean Lowe
Principal Financial Group
Lowe is the IT application architect at Principal Financial Group, a global financial investment management company. As the company was looking to improve file sharing capabilities, and better integration with cloud applications, Lowe led the effort to modernize data integration processes with superior collaboration, and scalability to easily handle future cloud integrations.
Greg Swanson
Target Inc.
Swanson is a senior engineer at Target Inc., the second-largest discount retail store in the United States. Target was looking to become more agile using DevOps and tapped Swanson to implement a highly secure platform with database independence that is extremely robust, scalable, and flexible.
Chad Haxton
The Royal Group
Haxton is the CIO of the Royal Group, a corrugated packaging and display manufacture that is part of Schwartz Partners. Through Haxton’s leadership, the Royal Group has completely reoptimized its entire order-to-cash process by centralizing integrations with multiple internal applications and external business partners on a single platform.
Dawn Major
RealPage Inc.
Major is the director of RUM (Real Page Utility Management) Product Management at Real Page Inc., a leading provider of property management software solutions. Major led the efforts to make the company’s product more streamlined by consolidating all secure communication and data transformation workflows, freeing company resources to focus more on product development.
Joe McQuaid
Parts Town
McQuaid is the director of ERP applications at Parts Town, an in-stock inventory of OEM commercial kitchen parts. McQuaid has made strides to automate transactions throughout the company’s trading partner network, to make itself much easier to do business with.
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