Umbrex is pleased to welcome Brian Piotrowski. Brian is a highly experienced senior executive with over 25 years in manufacturing industries. He also spent 5 years as a Sr. Engagement Manager/Expert in the implementation, RTS, and digital solution practices at McKinsey & Co. Before his recent beginning as an independent consultant, Brian worked for several large corporations including Archer Daniels Midland, H.J. Heinz, General Mills and Cabot Microelectronics with roles pertaining to engineering, operations, and general management. Brian’s expertise lies…

  As all areas of business move into digital technology, Ramesh Subramanian explains why the digital transformation requires infrastructure engineers to expand their software skills.  Several years ago I started my career as a C++ programmer but to be relevant as a software engineer today would require many more software engineering skills. The same logic holds for Infrastructure engineers. About 94% of enterprises (and 50% of Governments) use some form of cloud (private/public) today. And as per an estimate from…

  Jared Simmons explains why simplifying assumptions could be the key to unlocking value faster and freeing up your knowledge workers to innovate. I learned the power of simplifying assumptions early in my career. As an engineering student, I watched my professors fill boards with Greek letters and symbols, exponents and integrals, constants and variables. Then, in the last 10 minutes of class we worked a real problem together. The first step of solving the real problem was always to…

Amanda Setili shines a light on an initiative that sparked employee engagement, inspired innovation, and motivated collaboration.    What does a 110-year-old company do to increase the rate of innovation from less than one new business per year to 50?  The answer, says David Lee, Vice President of Innovation and New Ventures at UPS, is to launch a program that taps into the brilliant growth ideas lurking in the heads of many of its 480,000 employees.  The program is called…

Susan Drumm provides four steps to ensure you will get honest feedback from your team. Do you think you can get your team to give you honest feedback? Like no-holds-barred honest?   Many of my clients tell me they struggle to get real feedback from their direct reports and I’m not surprised. Does this story sound familiar? One of my senior clients recently received the results of his 360 report and was surprised to learn that his team felt they weren’t being…

Jesse Jacoby identifies a few of the core issues that can arise when bringing a new manager into the workplace. Good things are possible when new managerial blood is brought into an organization. For one thing, there are often fresh ideas. You know yourself how easy it is to get so close to something that you can’t see the forest for the trees. You can’t see a solution that’s obvious to someone from the outside. And, of course, if you…