Rajeev RavindranWith COVID-19 pandemic, businesses are dealing with a two-fold challenge, including a significant decline in sales performance and inability to resume or scale production. It has been a wake-up call for organizations who focused earlier on daily operations at the expense of building a digital-enabled resilient business. With workforce now remote, collaboration with customers and partners now online, how to analyze the market, develop products, and serve customers needs to change. How should organizations continue their Digital Transformation efforts, individually and collectively, for sustained growth and profitability?
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Transcript
Sanjog Aul [00:00:00]:
Hello and welcome to CTN. To learn more, please visit ciotalknetwork.com and the today’s topic is Digital Transformation During COVID 19 And Beyond. So with COVID 19 pandemic, businesses are dealing with a twofold challenge. We have a significant decline in sales performance and we have challenges in getting people to work or bring the sales production or scaling the production is a challenge. So with that said, we are already in the midst in many cases in our digital transformation related initiatives in different stages and different flavors and there have been issues with keeping the lights on. So should we just be hunkering down, stop those initiatives or actually use them to get by in the environment that we are in COVID 19 and beyond, that’s what we want to discuss. Workers are remote.
Sanjog Aul [00:01:00]:
The collaboration with customers and partners has actually gone online for the most part. The way we used to analyze the markets, develop products and serve customers, all of that is being fundamentally rethought or people are resetting their thinking but how are they doing it? What are they doing with their digital transformation efforts? To discuss that, I have with me Rajeev Ravindran. He’s the Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer with Rider Systems. Hey Rajeev, how are you?
Rajeev Ravindran [00:01:28]:
Hey Sanjog, how are you?
Sanjog Aul [00:01:30]:
Good, thanks, honored to have you. Now my first question is, let’s talk the basics. The channels that we use to engage with customers or the approaches we have been using traditionally to deliver customer experience. What changes do you see being made to them or how are they shifting, with COVID?
Rajeev Ravindran [00:01:51]:
Looked at some of the questions and the, so I need to start a little further back. So when this COVID pandemic happened and we decided that everyone’s going to work from home, it was immediate and so we were fortunate enough. I don’t know if it’s fortunate, but we are in a state that’s riddled with hurricanes. We’ve been prepared for this as part of our natural business continuity program. We’ve looked at if a hurricane hits and there’s damage to our headquarters and we can’t come back in, what do we do? So we’ve been preparing for this, which includes everybody working from home, connecting to remote sites, giving access to applications and also fortunately, three months before this, we completely switched over to Teams from Skype and we also increased the bandwidth.
Rajeev Ravindran [00:02:43]:
We made sure that we tested it not knowing that we were going to do this. So within a week, everyone was up and running. There was nothing we had to do from an infrastructure standpoint and as a result, the business because headquarters is not. They’re working from home but we have 39,000 employees and a lot of them are essential services and they’re out there doing the job as usual. So a lot of things haven’t changed. We are continuing to do business as we were before.
Rajeev Ravindran [00:03:13]:
Now there’s a decrease in business. We’re picking up different areas, but fundamentally we are looking at how we can help the customers. To talk a little bit about that, I want to talk about this application that we developed last year called Rider Guide. It’s a mobile application that creates a superior experience that allows you to manage all aspects of your fleet anywhere, anytime, on any device, including your desktop. So what it does is it finds rider locations, it compares rider contracted fuel prices and other market fuel prices. It logs your fuel receipts, call roadside assistance or use Roadside Assistance wizard to open up expedited cases. You can browse used vehicle inventory, rent a vehicle, manage your fleet access fleet detail. You can schedule maintenance.
Rajeev Ravindran [00:03:56]:
So it does quite a bit. So we are looking at thinking about customers and our employees and one of the new features we added was touchless check in. This was developed to ensure speed, accuracy and safety of the check in process and for our lease customers bringing in their trucks for service and maintenance. So with COVID it’s even more important, right? We need easy check in. When you drive on the lot and you open your Rider Guide application, it picks up your location and truck info and easily checks you in oryou can make, you can take a picture of the QR code on site at the rider maintenance shop and scan your truck and it populates truck data and history so you can quickly get in and out without having had anything, handing off or touching anyone.
Rajeev Ravindran [00:04:39]:
So this whole process, this came about fairly quickly. So now it goes back to how are your applications developed? Are they easy to. Are they modular enough where you can build on it pretty quickly and fortunately, the Rider Guide application I talked about, we could do exactly that. Now we have so many different business units. They’re all looking at this and saying how can we continuously improve and help customers? How can we keep our employees safe? So both those things are on our minds every day and any new ideas gets funneled into it and that becomes a priority. So the transformation is still happening but again, you have to have the foundation to be able to move quickly and fortunately in some of these cases we have been able to.
Sanjog Aul [00:05:24]:
So great response. Now when you try to talk about digital transformation, it can come in all shapes and forms and you could do it incrementally. You can do rip and replace or you could do something in between the two. As an organization, you may have chosen to make sure that your foundation was solid, which was making sure like under the hood, whatever is happening that stays predictable and yes, you can make incremental changes, but outside, when you’re talking to customers, they are anyways going digital. Their expectations are changing and imagine thinking 2019, till 2019 end, or maybe even till January or February, when Covid had not hit. We were thinking differently about what experiences we could possibly come up with or totally fundamentally reimagine them.
Sanjog Aul [00:06:17]:
Customer saying, you know what, I’m pulling back on my expectations or you are setting expectation for the customer, that I would love to promise you the moon, but now is not the time, you might have to wait and the customer is also understanding what’s the dynamic right now between the ones who are promising customer the experience and the customers themselves.
Rajeev Ravindran [00:06:39]:
So there’s two components to this. One, when we talk about digital, I want to just phrase up what digital means. It’s not just the technology. When you talk about digital, it’s really a mindset shift that you have to create within the organization. So everything is customer centric. So it starts with the customer and then when you build the application, it’s with the customer in mind. So you move away from a linear thinking to a digital thinking, which is driven mostly by the inputs that you get from the customer, creating agile teams to focus on the customer demand. So you start shifting to a design and thinking.
Rajeev Ravindran [00:07:15]:
So that’s the fundamental piece that you have to have in place first. Now from the external, the customer expectation is always increasing. Every year it increases. So in the transportation and logistics industry, we talk about new challenges and disruption all the time. So at Rider, it’s our job to overcome these obstacles and the pandemic has heightened awareness of the importance of a reliable and efficient supply chain. Now, if you look at it, supply chain, it’s now part of our general public vocabulary. Just at my house, the amount of Amazon boxes that’s coming to my door, it’s unreal. I joke, I can say, I tell my family, if I could sell all these boxes, I think I could make quite a bit of money.
Rajeev Ravindran [00:07:59]:
So this is what’s happening across. People are expecting it, they’re waiting at home, they expect a certain time, they want to be able to look at their shipment, where it is and so the expectation is going up and employees understand the role they play supporting essential businesses and embrace that sense of duty and it’s, so it’s easy to understand their purpose. So they’re all driven towards this goal. So we expect increased demand for more sophisticated logistics operations as well as elevated levels of visibility, transparency, collaboration across the supply chain as well as the rental and lease organization too. So new trends and opportunities will always emerge as a result, including an increase in near shoring growth in E commerce and last mile services.
Rajeev Ravindran [00:08:43]:
So I think the months ahead will remain challenging, but we can get through this. So we are constantly looking at these things. That make sense.
Sanjog Aul [00:08:51]:
Absolutely, now one is to make some changes to accommodate whatever happened through the pandemic and during this transition period from like normalcy disrupted to resuming normalcy or we could take the leap and say now there’s going to be a new normal in any of those circumstances. Do you think the organizations and leaders like you should think that this is fleeting or we should use this as an opportunity to bring some permanent shifts which will keep us more aligned to what we are pretty sure we are going to be doing even after this Covid vaccine is out and people resume normalcy.
Rajeev Ravindran [00:09:38]:
I think it’s situational and what I mean is that I think you have to look at your organization and if some companies because they hadn’t been preparing, they react and then that becomes a process change and that becomes the new norm to a certain extent but if you’ve been doing some of these things, I’m not saying that we’re perfect. There are things that we’re all constantly improving but if there are things that we’ve already set in place, the tweaks, there’s always tweaks. The way that we work today is very different from how we would have three months ago. So I think it depends on looking ahead and looking exactly what you said, looking at the customer expectations, how is the industry changing? Where are the disruptors and planning for that means that the way that you work because if you look at IT talent, it’s hard to get it in one location. So you have to spread out. If you look at managed service providers, they’re not all sitting locally, they’re spread out. If you look at your data centers, they’re not local. They’re usually spread out.
Rajeev Ravindran [00:10:39]:
So there’s from an IT perspective there’s some of this remote working has already been in place. How do we expand that and the goal again is to be able to move quickly with the business or the environment. So I think the answer is I think I see some bigger changes coming that we’ll have to conform to because right now I have no one on campus from an IT perspective and things are working really well. In fact, it’s running better. My productivity has gone up. System outages are much less which would be which I wouldn’t expect because we always believe, hey, everyone needs to be together, we need to see each other.
Rajeev Ravindran [00:11:21]:
There’s more sense of urgency but that hasn’t been the case. It’s been completely opposite.
Sanjog Aul [00:11:27]:
Now, based on what you just said, let’s build upon this. Let’s take a quick break, listeners. When we come back, let’s talk about when the workers are going remote. As you said in your case as well, people have gone remote. What would you change in the organizational structure and even our human resource policies or anything that you do to work with the workers, keeping them more engaged, more productive, more up to speed on what they need to know in terms of skills and talents and knowledge so that they can continue to deliver at par or better than before? Please stay tuned, listeners. We’ll be right back and explore.
Sponsor [00:12:05]:
today, enterprise technology is both strategic and global. Each week on CTN CIO Talk Network IT Thought leaders from around the world share their experience with listeners as they discuss with sunjog all how they are trimming costs and partnering with business to innovate and help IT become more competitive, better care for customers and improve the corporate bottom line. If you want to keep up with it thought leadership, listen to CTN CIO Talk Network with Sunjoke all@ciotalknetwork.com. You are listening to CTN CIO Talk Network with Sun Joe Gal. To learn more about our program, please visit CIO talknetwork.com Now back to the show.
Sanjog Aul [00:13:02]:
Welcome back. We have been talking about the Covid environment, the changes in the way we are thinking about how we would serve our customers, even how we would take care of our business processes or rethink or reset them. Now let’s talk about the very people which make those things happen. Now with that said, how about looking at the aspects of workers going remote? How should we change our organizational structure, the human resource policies and any other way that we can further optimize how an individual who works with our organization works at their best. So what have you been thinking and what have you been doing, Rajeev.
Rajeev Ravindran [00:13:42]:
When we said everyone’s going to work from home, one of the biggest concerns we had was productivity and we can spend two hours talking about what productivity is. I broken it down mentally into two components. There’s workforce, productivity, which is the total amount of goods or services that workers can produce in a certain period and this personal productivity, this is the relevant working on the right things output of an individual in a certain period. So if you look at all the inputs coming in when somebody’s working from home, you have time clocks, you have physical workspaces, you have meetings, you have devices that you can measure. There’s chats, workstation and then there’s applications that you can measure. All this goes into looking at what’s the performance against target, what are the activities and what are the outputs. So this, I broke this down to two areas.
Rajeev Ravindran [00:14:31]:
One you have the metrics, tools and tracking. So for that we have project dashboards, we have project health scoring, we use Power BI to measure everything. We gauge weekly critical projects and then we have plan view which does our time tracking and resource management including the utilization across all areas, capital expenses, business support, production support and this is evaluated weekly for time approval and task management for all resources, senior managers and below. So we’re able to look at this from a project standpoint as well. In addition to that we use ServiceNow for ticket tracking. So issues come in if we have a severity one that brings down a critical application, how quickly, when did the ticket come in, how quickly was it resolved and is it a, was it permanently fixed? So we root cost analysis and then we have agile DevOps which does we do detailed activity track including commitments versus delivered backlog management for agile teams too and then this technology score cost by division which indicates productivity by area and business support, production support and this is also fed in by the planned reapplication.
Rajeev Ravindran [00:15:43]:
Then on top of all this I get a weekly accomplishments nothing huge technology leap but we use Excel spreadsheet and from all these different criteria, here are the key items that we implemented or we resolved and in my leadership meeting with my boss and my peers, we talk about hey, here’s all the accomplishments for the week, so everyone’s aware. So from a productivity standpoint, there is a very strong measurement that tells us that hey, we are moving forward. Now that’s the tools, the more important piece is the human touch. How do you connect with your employees, keep their spirits up and motivate them? So we’re in our fourth month of working from home. Through this pandemic,
Rajeev Ravindran [00:16:27]:
they’ve been worrying about their loved ones, their job, the economy, civil unrest, nightly curfews, and if you’re in Florida, to top it all off, it’s hurricane season. It’s never ending for them so they’re going through a lot of so I think that the constant communication and empathy is critical. So the leadership meets every day on this topic and each diversion talks about how the people are doing what we are doing to help them. So it’s a constant. It’s not just a ones and done and Rider also has an Internet platform. It’s a communication portal that’s accessible to all employees and it can be accessed from any device and this has created a sense of community in a tough environment.
Rajeev Ravindran [00:17:07]:
So at the leadership level, including the CEO, we’re constantly communicating with employees. Employees across the nation share their stories. It’s all on the portal. Customer segments thanking Rider for the business continuity, tips and tricks for working from home, how to stay safe and the list goes on. So they can always they can use it from the iPhone, iPad. It’s constantly updated so that communication continues and so from an IT perspective, now continuing the scheme of communication, biweekly staff meetings and biweekly one on ones enabling touchpoints for the resources and the managers to raise any concerns and it’s not just work focused.
Rajeev Ravindran [00:17:42]:
The first question I always tell my leadership to ask is how’s the family doing? Is there anything that they need? Is there anything that we can do? That’s the lead in questions that should happen and then we have biweekly executive project reviews to cover critical topics and decision. Daily standups, it’s stand up in front of your screen, but daily standups, sprints, retrospectives and planning ceremonies all continue. For agile teams, the business continuity meetings are held with IT leadership twice weekly monthly scorecard meetings focused on SLA metrics and essential services and the IT leadership is an extended team including HR and finance meet twice a week. So all this is going on at the same time. Now the biggest success that we will have is that we have a huge ERP application going live. The human resource part is going live in two weeks
Rajeev Ravindran [00:18:33]:
and this is all done remotely for the past three weeks, including road shows. Everything was done using teams and the productivity and how and we’re on time and on time with the release. There’s knock on wood, there’s no hiccups and that’s the amazing part. The biggest piece is the people. They’re all committed. They know that they’re part of essential services
Rajeev Ravindran [00:18:58]:
and I cannot even begin to tell you how focused are people and how committed to Rider they are. None of this could have happened without them. They’re all in. Now on the flip side of that, I feel that there’s a lot of burnout. So typically in a day when you leave work, you have half an hour, 45 minutes to drive home. That’s your decompression time before you get home and then you leave, typically it doesn’t always happen in IT, but you leave your work at your doorstep and you’re with your family. Now,
Rajeev Ravindran [00:19:27]:
your home is your work environment. So from the time for me, for example, I sit there at 8 o’ clock in the morning on my first call and I go till sometimes till 8, 9 at night and fortunately my kids peek in once in a while to see if I’m still alive and they’ll bring me lunch or dinner. Sometimes we go through that. So how do we stop ourselves from doing that and really have some time to decompress? That’s a current challenge. So the productivity is up, but it’s gotta give somewhere and I see that people are working extremely long hours. So again, this is,
Rajeev Ravindran [00:20:02]:
we have to make sure that we are focused on that so that our people don’t have burnout.
Sanjog Aul [00:20:08]:
So you are, I would call you lucky as an individual and as an organization that people by design are driven and yes, there could be sometimes people are scared. They don’t know what’s gonna happen to the business or what’s gonna happen to their job. So those things could come up but then coming from the trenches, have any ideas come from the people to help you help them get through this, or is it only coming from the ivory tower?
Rajeev Ravindran [00:20:33]:
No, it’s both ways. We have very open dialogues, even though we have a hierarchy in place. The way that I’m trying to drive the culture in IT is it’s a flat organization. Anyone that has an idea can bring it to us and either we’ll say it’s not a good idea, or we’ll say, yeah, I think this is a good idea, let’s put it off for later or we implement it. So one of the applications that saved us to a certain extent, we have a fuel application. We do probably a billion dollars in fuel. We fill not only Rider trucks, but we have customer trucks to refill and one of the employees came to me and said, hey, it’s a legacy handheld system.
Rajeev Ravindran [00:21:16]:
It’s running on Windows CE. We need to do something about it. So he laid out his plan and this is an individual contributor that came to my office just to pass his idea and see if it made sense and while he was talking about it just, it really made sense. So I said, hey, let’s look into it and maybe we can build a prototype. So he and two other people went and built a prototype for over three months in their own time.
Rajeev Ravindran [00:21:44]:
This is what is being implemented right now across the whole country and one of the strategies that I have is it should be device agnostic. Just anything that we do when we talk about mobile, it should run on Android, it should be able to run on Apple, it should be run on desktop and the application was built in such a way that you can use anything. So if a tablet breaks, we don’t have to go back to a manufacturer to get that exact device. We can just, I joke, but we can go to Best Buy and buy the latest tablet, put MDM on it and you’re good to go. So that was an idea that started from a worker and was supported across the organization. So the other piece of this is we have great employees, but the leadership is very supportive.
Rajeev Ravindran [00:22:33]:
IT is an actual partner with the business. It’s not a taker. So I think that helps as well. So ideas can usually move through the whole organization.
Sanjog Aul [00:22:47]:
Let’s take a quick break listeners. We’ll be right back and let’s talk about the impact on our approach to handling our physical and IT infrastructure because we may have started building foundation, maybe we would have gone to the cloud when it gone talk about IT infrastructure. Maybe we built our big or small offices or campuses, but now we don’t know whether people want to come back even though you open the doors because they got a taste of it and even companies are saying we don’t want all people to come back because that could help them save money. It’s easier to manage. People get work life balance. We can get better retention and work life balance given to all people including the management.
Sanjog Aul [00:23:33]:
What is the type of change which organizations should be thinking of in terms of the physical and IT infrastructure, now and post pandemic which will become the foundation and which will serve as a good foundation for going digital fully. Please stay tuned. We’ll be right back.
Sponsor [00:23:53]:
Today, enterprise technology is both strategic and global. Each week on CTN CIO Talk Network IT Thought leaders from around the world share their experience with listeners as they discuss with sunjog all how they are trimming costs and partnering with business to innovate and help it become more competitive, better care for customers and improve the corporate bottom line. If you want to keep up with it thought leadership, listen to CTN CIO Talk Network with Sunjoke all@ciotalknetwork.com. You are listening to CTN CIO Talk Network with Sunjo GA to learn more about our program, please visit CIO talknetwork.com now back to the show.
Sanjog Aul [00:24:48]:
Welcome back. Physical and IT infrastructure, we had a different dream or a vision about what it’s going to be when we are growing as a company, we are shrinking as a company or whatever we are doing with IT infrastructure, going to cloud, people had totally different sets of visions and strategies. Come pandemic and even the way things are looking post pandemic, companies are fundamentally thinking, should I bring people back to a physical office or should we let them be there? What should be the change in the infrastructure we bring? How scalable should we make our IT infrastructure so that it gives us the best bang for the buck and allows the business to still prosper moving forward because business must go on. What are you guys thinking at Rider and what do you recommend other people do to even shape this thinking process because you may not have all the answers yet.
Rajeev Ravindran [00:25:45]:
You started with the infrastructure and you talked about cloud. The way that the infrastructure is laid out currently for us, a lot of our applications are either remote in our own data centers, which is fully accessible by us, or we have cloud. For example, this ERP implementation that I talked about, it’s all cloud based. So connectivity to any of the equipment is not, you don’t have to be physically present. You can do it remotely. So that’s the key. So the ebbing and flowing of that, it really depends on your company and how much infrastructure you have
Rajeev Ravindran [00:26:21]:
but even if you have it on premise, the question is really about accessibility and I talked a little bit about the fact that we haven’t had to come in to the organization to do any of the work except get physical equipment out of the building once in a while. It’s rare, so the infrastructure is there and that was part of the planning that we talked about for disaster recovery and business continuity. So that was in place. So we’re fortunate that way and then the second piece is the communication. Are you able to communicate with each other and teams has been invaluable in that in addition to teams, people use texting, email, all that is still in effect.
Rajeev Ravindran [00:26:59]:
So that’s the infrastructure side. So the people coming back to work, that’s for Rider, as I mentioned before, we have over 39,000 people and a small percentage is in the office. The primary concern for Rider is the safety of its people and the remote sites, they have to be because they are essential services. They do have to be out in public. We have spent a lot of time making sure that they’re safe with the personal protection. A lot of extensive cleaning, equipment, locations.
Rajeev Ravindran [00:27:29]:
So we are ahead of that and I also mentioned that the leadership team meets on a daily basis and these are the discussions. Are we taking care of our people in our locations? Are we safe? What more do we need to do? So that happens all the time that’s happening right now. So whether the people come back to the office, when and where, I don’t know. Right now, everything is functioning well. We Rider, like I said, safety is the most important thing for our people. So we’re waiting and watching and seeing how the environment changes and we’ll make our decision then but this is a constant discussion at our table as well.
Rajeev Ravindran [00:28:08]:
Talking to people we’ve done surveys for all the IT people and the general consensus is, some of them do want to come back to work mostly because of the environment. They may have a small apartment or a house and they have kids and the noise level may be intrusive. So those, they’ve said, hey, they raised their hands, we’d like to come back. Majority of them are happy where they are. They’ve adjusted very quickly and I think people have adjusted because we know we’ve always had work from home and the telecommuting is a little different, I think, than what we’re going through because everyone is remote. So there’s a different paradigm here.
Rajeev Ravindran [00:28:47]:
So you can’t really compare the typical work from home where majority of the people are still in the office to this. We’re all in it together and I think because we’re all in together, there’s different norms being created across people. So there’s certain level of expectation and part of that expectation also may be leading to the old work piece I talked about before too, I’m not sure but for us, we know what we want to do in terms of how we serve the business but as far as our people are concerned, we are very cautious. We’ve already redesigned the building to be touchless.
Rajeev Ravindran [00:29:22]:
We’ve looked at plans for how we bring them back if we need to. Only essential people and then where their placement would be, how they would sit, how many people in a conference room. So we’ve gone through the whole design of coming back to work, but we’re not ready to implement it because we’re still watching.
Sanjog Aul [00:29:43]:
Now, that said, now let’s look at the other side where data and analytics, which is utilized, or people say digital is nothing else but data and analytics. So when you look at that as a function, I’m sure you were in the regular world measuring quite a few things to see how your operations is going. You might be measuring how the customer is engaging, et cetera. Come Covid and beyond, would you have refined, would you have redefined, would you have fundamentally introduced some new parameters, some new dimensions to your data collection and or analysis so that you stay equally competitive, equally knowledgeable and equally vigilant on what’s happening given the disruption that’s happening at multiple levels?
Rajeev Ravindran [00:30:37]:
Going back to that whole digital example I gave you. So supply chain has an application that data scientists have built that maps out the whole US and it looks at where the pandemic is prevalent and where our shops are located and is it close to an epicenter of an outbreak, do we spend and how are the customers reacting in that area? So this analytics being built, and that’s why I said everyone’s looking at the applications and the business saying how can we constantly update it? So these are the projects that crop up to say, is there a better way? It could be routing, it could be reprioritizing customers, it could be looking at new opportunities because others have, there’s a lot of companies that have also fallen by the wayside because they couldn’t keep up. They couldn’t keep up with the shutdowns. So are there things that we can help those customers that’s been stranded? So that analysis is going on and this is done a lot with data. So we have a map that tells you real time what’s happening in our whole ecosystem.
Sanjog Aul [00:31:44]:
Now, one is to build the spot solutions like for supply chain, you did it. Another is to think strategically. The dimensions that you used to use for data and analytics, data collection and then downstream analytics, they were built based on some strategy that what do you need to know about your business? How do you want to, how far ahead do you want to stay of how customer is going to be reacting so you can anticipate their demand and improve your supply chain and improve other areas of your business. Anything which pandemic did that would have a material impact in the way the very factors that you’re going to look at the areas which you’re going to measure.
Rajeev Ravindran [00:32:32]:
So it’s a good question. We, we’ve been doing that already, so it’s not completed. There’s multiple areas that’s actually looking at what is the future strategy for the imagined customers as well as improving our efficiency but I’m not aware of the pandemic being placed on top of that yet. They may be, some of the different areas may be doing it, but I’ve seen the analytics that we do. Even the pre pandemic to current that strategy is still ongoing. So we’ve, data is one of our big strategies and we are looking at right now we’ve
Rajeev Ravindran [00:33:09]:
some of the things that we’ve done that’s not specific to this is we’ve created data lakes so that the business. So with data we’re trying to have the business folks become self serving. They can, they don’t have to rely on IT. So we’ve built data lakes. We are implementing multiple data lakes now. We started with one and there’s a lot of excitement over it from the business because they can look at, they can slice and dice data as they want to. So we’re going to continue doing that but I don’t think that we’ve placed the pandemic piece on it specifically in relation to the data analytics or AI yet.
Sanjog Aul [00:33:50]:
Okay, so it’s a work in progress. It’s something which may be happening somewhere within the organization or have you seen the management and your other leaders talking among themselves to see what material impact would it have in the way you want to run your business because data and analytics is not just a cool function. It is supposed to be the very driver on how do you carry out every function within the organization, isn’t it?
Rajeev Ravindran [00:34:18]:
Yes, it is and the data strategy is part of the enterprise from our part of Rider’s strategy as well and it’s about delivering the right data at the right time so that we can make business decisions, that’s the key piece of it. How do we create relevant data, because it’s, if you look at it’s 97 year old company, if you look at the volume of data that we have, it’s huge, telematics. How do we give the customers insight into where their truck is, where their fleet is and if you look at the Rider guide application I talked about, we’ve started down that path.
Rajeev Ravindran [00:34:53]:
So data is always the forefront of discussions and from a management standpoint they believe in data. It’s critical to the success of the business. The only thing I was saying before was that I haven’t seen the, apart from the applications that’s built around helping us through the pandemic’s effect on analytics, that’s the only piece that I haven’t seen but you’re right, it is a constant communication regarding data and how it’s going to affect, how it’s going to help the business.
Sanjog Aul [00:35:21]:
Let’s Take a quick break listeners. When we come back, let’s talk about this function which is enterprise performance management. You look at operations, you look at different ways your money goes in and out or people work in certain ways to make it more productive. So basically like a dashboard you would have created for your organization, not just a tool. We are talking, we’re talking about this whole enterprise performance management function. Should we measure an organization differently today and post Covid? Should we reduce our expectations or change our benchmarks and accordingly relay that to the outside world that this is how we will operate? What are we doing in that area? How you should go about checking and resetting your measures, your benchmarks for enterprise performance management? Let’s explore when we come back. Please stay tuned.
Sponsor [00:36:22]:
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Sanjog Aul [00:37:18]:
Welcome back Rajeev, when we talk about the enterprise performance management which means that we may have at some point and I’m sure even just say in February, if you were to look back and say how do I measure where we are, how are we performing as a business? You may have some metric, some benchmarks, some results over time which you have looked them as a baseline to see how better we can get and continue to do those initiatives to get better come Covid and given it could have a long tail impact on the business, is it fair for anyone to place the same exact expectation on the business and if not, in what ways can we start rethinking this whole enterprise performance management function? Especially keeping in mind that you’re trying to go digital, you’re trying to tackle Covid and the benchmarks and metrics that you’re supposed to have while they will change but they should not become unrealistic.
Rajeev Ravindran [00:38:23]:
I’m not speaking about rider to answer this question, but I was just wondering. I understand the question. So a lot of businesses have lost revenue so I would assume that they’re all trying to make up that gap and in order to make up that gap. The workload has to be the same or more. Wouldn’t that be the case?
Sanjog Aul [00:38:49]:
It may be but the people who are doing the work, the kind of expectations that will come. So work is perhaps look better if looked in a context that the same customer who wanted to work with you, they may need different kind of services at a different scale or at a different price and maybe a different product because their needs might have changed. That means the measures of saying we are totally satisfying this customer, that might be out of the window altogether or it might need material shifts.
Rajeev Ravindran [00:39:27]:
I haven’t seen that piece of it because part of Rider’s goals is always to make sure that we go above and beyond for the customer and it’s a trickle down. So we have new businesses still coming online and we are opening up, especially on the supply chain side. We are working weekends and nights as we have done in the past when a new customer goes live. That really hasn’t changed. In fact, we are looking at hiring more people to help with the growth in that area. So I think the customer expectations, and we touched on this in several of the different aspects as we’re going through this conversation. I think the customer expectations are still high.
Rajeev Ravindran [00:40:05]:
Now they may have some changes that they need to implement because they’re not functioning the same way they were. So Rider is always partnering with them to make sure that their needs are met as well. So there is some ebb and flow within individual customers but as a whole, I think we are still marching forward to make sure that we satisfy our customer needs because typically it’s a trickle down, as I said before. I don’t see that ebbing that much from the IT perspective, we are still all hands on deck for many of the implementations. Does that make sense?
Sanjog Aul [00:40:42]:
No absolutely, so that’s your point of view because you’ve not seen that much change and which is fine. So because we have like you coming from Rider and you’ running business in a certain way. This question was posed for the simple reason that life is not same and work is not same. Business expectations, customer expectations, partner expectations are not same. So what changed and if it changed materially, what are we doing or what should companies be doing to tackle it?
Rajeev Ravindran [00:41:13]:
So the two areas that I’ve seen material changes, one is in security, in our information security area. That is one area we’ve had to ramp up because we’ve seen a 300% increase in attacks. So those folks, again, they were working around the clock. We had to augment that team with more people. Just so that we can manage the volume. Fortunately, we had all the checks and balances in place to prevent some of the intrusions.
Rajeev Ravindran [00:41:41]:
Now, this also goes back to our initial conversation about working from home. I do see that increase in work because the productivity has gone up. The productivity is going up, people spending more time without breaks and so that’s where I see the impact on how we need to change it and I don’t have an answer to that yet, because on one hand, we are closing the gap on the revenue, at the same time, the people are, they can’t continuously work this way. I think when,
Rajeev Ravindran [00:42:07]:
we have a major ERP implementation, which even on a good day is hard and so now we are implementing the HCM in two weeks, and then we are doing finance in January 2021. So it’s another six months of all hands on deck because it’s a big project. So if you look at the workload that we are managing, it’s huge. So from an IT perspective, I don’t think it’s slowed down, if anything’s increasing.
Sanjog Aul [00:42:40]:
All right, so let’s talk about leadership and culture. You did touch culture for a little bit. Let’s focus on leadership. So if this was my last question and you had to give your advice to people that you running digital transformation initiatives, you had been running it, or starting now, depending on what stage you are at, you have Covid hit you and it’s not gone away anywhere yet. It’s got still whatever long tail cycle that’s left. What changes in leadership style would you bring so that people step up, they join hands, they come together with a collective mindset and work towards helping the company grow. In the process, they also prosper. What would it take? What a leadership style would make all that happen?
Rajeev Ravindran [00:43:33]:
Yes, this is something that, and I think it’s close to my heart and I think it’s very important and when we talked about productivity, one of the things that I talked about was the human touch. So I think leaders should immerse themselves in emotional intelligence at this point because of the pressures that the people have on them. I talked about everything from worrying about their loved ones to the job, economy, civil unrest. So this is all weighing on them. So the first part of leadership is really empathizing with them and really understanding where they are and how you as an individual, as a leader, can help them. You may not be able to do anything based on their predicament, but just having someone to listen to and understand calling people out and calling people and saying, hey, I know you worked on this for three days straight.
Rajeev Ravindran [00:44:25]:
I really appreciate it. Thank you. If you can give them a spot bonus, just say, hey, thank you for everything that you’ve been doing. I think it goes a long way when they hear from their leaders that constant communication and the sincerity with which you deliver some of these messages I think is critical. Staying close to them, people understanding that we are not in this alone because they’re isolated. They don’t see their peers. All they see is the faces on the screen and it is that you over communicate in these cases. Over communicate and the meeting their needs with especially work clearing their roadblocks.
Rajeev Ravindran [00:45:04]:
I think all this is critical. So the emotional intelligence piece, so actively listening.
Sanjog Aul [00:45:09]:
So we’ve got a minute left, Rajeev, so we will have to wrap it up but yeah.
Rajeev Ravindran [00:45:13]:
So I would say think about the people first and if you do and you put them in the forefront, they will do anything and everything for you. That’s the bottom line.
Sanjog Aul [00:45:24]:
On behalf of the show and our listeners, thank you, Rajeev for sharing your thoughts and about the organizations that need to continue and continue their operations and optimize their digital transformation efforts during Covid 19 and beyond. So thank you so much.
Rajeev Ravindran [00:45:40]:
Thank you. I appreciate taking the time to do this.
Sanjog Aul [00:45:43]:
And listeners hope you enjoyed. Hope you got some nuggets out of it. Please like us on Facebook, search for CTN and be sure to follow us Twitter and LinkedIn group. Thank you again for listening to CTN. This is Sanjog Aul, your talk show host. Till next week, take care and God bless.
