25 operational excellence thought leaders to follow in 2024

PEX Network is delighted to present 25 operational excellence thought leaders you should know about in 2024.

This year’s list features people from all over the world in academia, manufacturing, technology and science, among other fields — all of whom are leading transformative change within their chosen specializations.

Methodology

The PEX Network team compiled the list by selecting key areas that are transforming operational excellence initiatives in 2024, such as advanced technologies, digital transformation, sustainability, research and change management.

The 25 people listed below were then selected based on a number of factors including experience, achievements in their sector, awards and public profile. A key consideration was ensuring the list contains a variety of regions, industries and job roles, with the aim of celebrating the huge diversity that exists in the global business community.

We’ve compiled the list in alphabetical order, highlighting why each individual is influential in operational excellence, along with our pick of their top articles, interviews, podcasts and webinars.

Click on a name to go to them directly or scroll through to read the full list.

Patrick Adams

Lecturer, University of Arkansas

Patrick Adams is an internationally recognized leadership coach, consultant and professional speaker, best known for his human approach to team-building practices. He is also a lecturer at the University of Arkansas, where he teaches supply chain process improvement.

In 2018 he founded consulting practice Lean Solutions, through which he works with leaders at all levels and with organizations of all sizes to achieve higher levels of performance.

Adams is the author of the best-selling and Shingo-award winning book Avoiding the Continuous Appearance Trap, a practical guide to understanding an organization’s operations, and hosts The Lean Solutions Podcast, where he speaks to a number of special guests each week to uncover solutions that help implement action plans for lean process improvement and continuous improvement projects.

• Listen to Patrick Adams’ The Lean Solutions Podcast

Revathi Advaithi

CEO, Flex

Revathi Advaithi is the CEO of Flex, a multinational company that provides design, engineering, manufacturing and supply chain services to brands across many industries including automotive, healthcare and communications.

Advaithi is responsible for leading the company’s strategic direction, delivering value to shareholders and ensuring its technology and supply chain operations are responsible and sustainable.

Before joining Flex in 2019, Advaithi held various leadership positions at Eaton and Honeywell. She is a co-chair of the World Economic Forum Advanced Manufacturing CEO Community, is on the Board of Directors of Uber and is a member of the MIT Presidential CEO Advisory Board. An advocate for women in STEM, she has been named one of Fortune’s Most Powerful Women for five consecutive years since 2019.

• Find out more about Revathi Advaithi on LinkedIn.

Nadia Al-Amoudi

Executive director for strategy and operational excellence, NCECKSA

Nadia Al-Amoudi is executive director for strategy and operational excellence at NCECKSA, Saudi Arabia’s National Center for Environmental Commitment Monitoring.

The organization has a remit to promote sustainable development throughout the Kingdom, an integral part of Saudi Arabia’s 2030 Vision to diversify its oil-led economy. In her role, Al-Amoudi leads strategic partnerships with the private, governmental and non-profit sectors, as well as change management, continuous quality improvement and risk management projects.

Al-Amoudi has 20 years of experience in operational excellence initiatives, including government roles at the Ministry of Industry and Mineral Resources, and the Ministry of Economy and Planning, working in business development, economic research and strategy.

• Read more from Nadia Al-Amoudi on LinkedIn

Nao Anthony

Senior manager – operational excellence, Commonwealth Bank

Nao Anthony joined Australia's Commonwealth Bank in 2016. Here he is most proud of having the opportunity to enhance customer experience while embedding process thinking among stakeholders. 

Anthony’s career spans almost two decades, and has given him a wealth of experience in both digital and non-digital transformation programs. He is a certified Lean Six Sigma Master Black Belt from the University of New South Wales in Australia, and a PEX Network Advisory Board member. 

Speaking at All Access: Intelligent Automation & RPA, Anthony discussed how to decide when there is a need to digitize. "The first question that I would ask is, is there a need? Who is your customer and are we linking to the customer journey?" he said.

"When we do conventional customer journey mapping we talk about customer personas — how do customers feel? Even if [the company] is B2B or B2C, there is a customer journey that that the organization takes them through, and whether you need digitalization or not is completely dependent on where you are in your strategy."

• Hear Nao Anthony discuss how leaders can foster agile thinking in Transformative leadership in the digital era. He will also be participating in a breakout session at All Access: BPM 2024 on September 10, where attendees can meet him to discuss BPM and business transformation

Jiju Antony

Professor of quality and operational excellence, Northumbria University

Professor Jiju Antony is a recognized leader in Lean Six Sigma methodology. He is currently serving as the vice-president of research at the International Academy for Quality, and is professor of quality and operational excellence at Northumbria University’s Newcastle Business School in England.

Antony is the editor-in-chief of two publications: the International Journal of Lean Six Sigma and the International Journal of Quality and Reliability Management. He has authored more than 650 papers and authored/edited textbooks that have gained more than 40,000 citations. In 2020 he received a Lifetime Achievement Award for his contribution to Lean Six Sigma from the International Lean Six Sigma Institute in the UK.

We asked Antony to share the best professional advice he has ever received: “Operational excellence (OPEX) should not be viewed as a collection of tools and techniques, rather it should be viewed as a philosophy which should be embedded into every fabric of the business. In other words, the cultural transformation of an organization through the utilization of OPEX should be the ultimate goal of a successful journey.”

• Read Jiju Antony’s research paper Lean Six Sigma: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow

Lee Bogner

Global Chief GenAI + ECommerce Strategic Enterprise Architect, Mars Inc., 
Educator at Hofstra University and MIT

Lee Bogner is a distinguished leader in the enterprise and startup digital sectors, currently serving as the chief enterprise eCommerce architect and principal generative AI engineer at confectionery and pet food company Mars Inc. Here he advises on strategy, governance, policy and delivery. 

Bogner is also adjunct assistant professor of information systems and business analytics at Hofstra University in NYC, a PEX Network Advisory Board member, and he was recently appointed as an applied generative AI learning facilitator at the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Speaking at All Access: AI in PEX, Bogner explained how Mars approaches the use of AI technology. “It’s helping us with some of the fun stuff,” he said. “Our M&Ms characters have been a staple of movie theatres and television commercials for years. Now, with generative AI, M&Ms are having chats with each consumer.”

• Hear Lee Bogner discuss how today's enterprises can implement AI methods. He will also be participating in a breakout session at All Access: BPM 2024 on September 10, where attendees can meet him to discuss BPM and business transformation

Ekaterina (Katie) Curry 

Managing director, head of operations, Millennial Specialty Insurance

Ekaterina (Katie) Curry is a managing director and operations executive at Millennial Specialty Insurance, where she builds and scales best-in-class teams of analysts, operators and agents to drive profitable growth by deploying lean and agile tools as well as low code automation.

Curry is a former OPEX Award winner for leading the best digital transformation project in under 90 days, and a PEX Network Advisory Board member.

Earlier this year she spoke to PEX Network editor Michael Hill about the benefits of business process management (BPM). “BPM is an unsung hero that can actually help with many business priorities,” she said. “It makes the invisible, visible through its use of KPIs, metrics and data to enable better decisions. It creates a culture of incremental improvement based on data. It measures and quantifies risk and it can even drive innovation, spurred by BPM data.”

• Read more from Ekaterina (Katie) Curry in What BPM means to business leaders. Meet her to discuss all things BPM and business transformation in a breakout session at All Access: BPM 2024 on September 10

Mayra de Souza

Founder and CEO, Coletivo Ação

Mayra de Souza is the founder and CEO of Coletivo Ação and one of Brazil’s leading experts in Agile and Lean methodologies. As a coach she has trained more than 6,600 people at major organizations such as Softplan, Volkswagen and Banco do Brasil, supporting them to drive organizational and cultural transformation through change management, product and people management and strategic planning.

Through Coletivo Ação she provides online, in-person and hybrid workshops to organizations around the world. Along with Andy Barbosa, she is the author of Strategic Inception, a book and a methodology for collaborative strategic planning to enable inspection and continuous improvement.

• Find out more about Mayra de Souza at Coletivo Ação

Kevin Desouza

Professor of business, technology and strategy management, Queensland University of Technology

Kevin Desouza is a professor at the School of Management at Queensland University of Technology in Australia. His extensive experience includes academic roles at the Brookings Institution in Washington, the China Institute for Urban Governance at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, and the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Desouza has written, co-authored or edited nine books, including Agile Information Systems and Intrapreneurship: Managing Ideas Within Your Organization. He has also written for Harvard Business Review, Forbes, Wired and the Wall Street Journal, and has published more than 130 journal articles.

His favorite professional advice is somewhat unusual: “Write your obituary and revise it every year after a day or two of isolated reflection,” he says. “Your obituary gives you the north star and helps you focus on what you want to accomplish. It focuses you to move away from filling your day with activities that do little to advance what you want to accomplish.”

• Find out what Kevin Desouza is talking about on LinkedIn

Jean-Marc Érieau

Director of process mining and execution management, MANN+HUMMEL Group

Jean-Marc Érieau is the director of process mining and execution management at the MANN+HUMMEL Group, a global leader in filtration solutions. Here he is tasked with driving the company’s value-driven Lean enterprise and advanced processes along with the organization’s process mining Center of Excellence, bringing with him more than 25 years of experience in operations, supply chain and digital transformation. 

During a session at this year’s All Access: Process Mining and Process Intelligence webinar series, Érieau spoke about the relationship between people and automation. “Maybe there's another dimension when it comes to the people running the process, because sometimes they just fear the automation,” he said. “They [feel they] are maybe losing control over the process. That's why it's sometimes an easier step to make a semi-automated process where you just generate tasks."

• Hear more from Jean-Marc Érieau in Are you up to speed with process mining?

Binny Gill

Founder and CEO, Kognitos

Binny Gill is the founder and CEO of Kognitos, a company he established in 2021 with the purpose of helping people to instruct computers in natural language. Kognitos’ software uses intuitive prompting so that automations can be trained to work the way humans do, through instructions, experience and examples.

Gill is a prolific inventor in computer science, with close to 100 patents to his name. Prior to starting Kognitos, he was the CTO of cloud services at Nutanix, a cloud computing company where he led the product portfolio, growing from a team of 20 to 6000 employees. He previously spent eight years working for IBM Research.

In 2023, Kognitos’ Koncierge software won the Ventana Research Digital Technology Digital Innovation Award for providing "a new approach which addresses many of the challenges of previous automation platforms." 

• Catch Binny Gill speaking at OPEX Week in January 2025

Ricardo Henriques

Professor and executive program director, Católica Lisbon School of Business and Economics

Ricardo Henriques is a professor and executive program director of Business Automation for the Future of Work at Católica Lisbon School of Business and Economics university in Portugal. He also leads transformation teams at energy company EDP, overseeing process management,  digital acceleration, automation and process intelligence initiatives.

An expert in process mining and intelligent automation, Henriques co-authored Process Mining in Action with Dr. Lars Reinkemeyer, and is a recent addition to PEX Network’s Advisory Board.

“By integrating cutting-edge technologies such as RPA, advanced analytics or AI, organizations can achieve unparalleled levels of operational excellence," he wrote in a recent blog on intelligent operations. 

“This transformation not only enhances efficiency and productivity but also fosters innovation and agility, enabling businesses to respond swiftly to market changes and customer needs. Intelligent operations powered by digital acceleration are crucial for companies aiming to stay competitive and drive sustainable growth in an increasingly digital world.”

• Read more from Ricardo Henriques in The intelligent operations model

Peter Herweck

CEO, Schneider Electric

Schneider Electric topped this year's World's Most Sustainable Companies list compiled by Time magazine and Statista, in recognition of the firm’s commitment to helping its customers become more energy efficient.

At the helm is CEO Peter Herweck, who explained that sustainability is embedded in everything the company does. “We consider the environment, society and good governance in our decisions and daily operations” he said. “That's why we're pushing hard to make even more progress on our sustainability goals and ensure everyone contributes to creating a positive and enduring impact.”

Herweck was appointed to the role of CEO in 2023, having first joined the German energy management firm in 2016 to lead its industrial automation business. He left in 2021 to become CEO of the industrial software group AVEVA, before returning two years later. 

Since returning to Schneider Electric, the company has been included in the Dow Jones Sustainability World Index for the 13th consecutive year, ranking #1 for sustainability in its industry.

• Find out more about Peter Herweck on LinkedIn

Florence Hudson

Executive director, Northeast Big Data Innovation Hub at Columbia University

Florence Hudson is executive director of the Northeast Big Data Innovation Hub at Columbia University, where she oversees funding projects in big data, health, responsible data science, education and data literacy. She also lectures in civil engineering and engineering mechanics, and is the founder and CEO of FDHint, a consultancy focused on innovation, advanced technology, diversity and inclusion.

Having begun her career as an aerospace and mechanical engineer, Hudson had the role of vice-president and chief technology officer at IBM, and special advisor to the NSF Cybersecurity Center of Excellence at Indiana University.

Hudson is a sought-after keynote speaker, and has edited two books including Women Securing the Future with TIPPSS for IoT.

• Catch Florence Hudson speaking at Business Transformation Exchange USA in October

Caspar Jans

Director, process management, Celonis

Caspar Jans is an expert in BPM, in particular where this intersects with human performance and improvement.

Based in the Netherlands, he currently develops, integrates and supports the sales of Celonis' software's process management capabilities. Before this he was senior director of transformation solutions EMEA at Software AG.

Jans is a seasoned public speaker and thought leader, and all his published articles, which predominantly focus on BPM, can be found on his website.

We asked Jans what advice he has for running a process Center of Excellence: “Always put yourselves in your end user's shoes, and try to figure out how to support and enable them,” he says. “You can combine this with the best professional advice I ever received: You cannot please everybody at the same time, prioritize and have the bigger picture in mind, then reverse engineer your way back to the first step you have to take.”

• Caspar Jans is speaking at All Access: BPM 2024 on September 10. He will also be participating in a breakout session at the end of day one where attendees can meet him to discuss all things BPM

Thomas Kohlenbach

Senior product specialist, Nintex

Thomas Kohlenbach is a passionate business improvement advocate who has helped organizations around the world to decrease operational costs and drive cultural change.

He is senior product specialist at Nintex, a leading software firm for process management and automation. He has over 12 years of experience in implementing initiatives related to continuous improvement such as Kaizen, Six Sigma, change management and system integration, across automotive and financial services industries.

We asked him how he sees the role of operational excellence evolving in the next five to 10 years: “It will evolve to be more digitally integrated, adaptive, human-centered and aligned with broader corporate goals like sustainability and customer satisfaction,” he told us. “Companies that can successfully navigate these changes will be well-positioned to achieve competitive advantage in the years to come.”

• Check out Thomas Kohlenbach's blog for PEX Network on the importance of process documentation

Sangeeta Krishnan

Senior analytics lead - consumer health, commercial, North America, Bayer

Sangeeta Krishnan has worked with both Fortune 500 organizations and not-for-profits, helping them build their operations and monetize data products from the ground up. She is currently senior analytics lead for consumer health, commercial, North America at pharmaceutical giant Bayer.

She published her first book, Thriving in a Data World: A Guide for Leaders and Managers, in December 2022, where she explains the foundations needed to be successful in managing and engaging with data analytics initiatives.

Krishnan was recognized as a finalist in the Women in IT Awards 2018 in the Data Leader of the Year category.

• Sangeeta Krishnan is taking part in the opening panel of All Access: BPM 2024 on September 10

Matt Lewis

Founder, global chief artificial and augmented intelligence officer, Inizio Medical

Matt Lewis is an AI expert and entrepreneur dedicated to driving enterprise value and enhancing patient outcomes through innovative applications of technology and AI.

In 2005, he spearheaded the development of a clinical decision support tool endorsed by the American Medical Association and US Congress, bringing together software developers, global experts in osteoporosis and analysts. After joining Inizio Medical he established its Medical Analytics and Innovation (MAI) team, which has the deepest bench of AI and scientific strategy talent across the industry.

He now leads the Augmented Intelligence practice; he is also co-chair of the International Society for Medical Publication Professionals (ISMPP) AI Task Force and a member of the AI Society Board.

We asked Lewis for his thoughts on mentoring the next generation of operational excellence professionals: “All relationships, whether it's mentorship or coaching or any kind of alignment with the organization, have to begin with trust. And trust really begins with some type of common interest and a challenge that needs to be presented, whether it's a professional problem or a career problem, or something else that they just want to chat about.

“It's also worthwhile for people to think about finding mentors that may be outside of the traditional operational excellence environment. To get that broader, expert generalist perspective can be helpful for people who are looking to advance their career.”

• Matt Lewis will be speaking at All Access: Digital Adoption in October

Briana Malloney

EVP business agility transformation, M&T Bank

Briana Malloney is executive vice president for business agility transformation at M&T Bank. With more than 20 years of experience, she has implemented or advised on more than 30 major information-driven transformations, including scale models for startups, corporate business model shifts and compliance-mandated conversions.

She was previously managing partner, head of finance cloud platform – transformation and ESG at SAP Fioneer, and executive data and transformation director at AgFirst Farm Credit Bank.

Her notable achievements include developing an IT cyber and risk management framework that integrated machine learning and robotic process automation (RPA) for enhanced monitoring and measurement. She also successfully executed a single go-live replacement of an entire core operations system, turning around a project that was 200 times over budget and three years behind schedule, all within nine months.

• Find out more about Briana Malloney on LinkedIn

Vineet Mehra

Senior platform product owner - inland transportation, Maersk

Vineet Mehra is the senior platform product owner for Inland Transportation at global logistics firm Maersk, where he is responsible for defining the product vision, strategy, and roadmap for the end-to-end supplier payment and invoice life cycle solutions.

Mehra is a certified Lean Six Sigma practitioner and an expert in agile and Prince2 project management methodologies. He is passionate about co-creating solutions with business stakeholders and teams and has a wealth of expertise in robotic process automation, AI and machine learning.

A PEX Network Advisory Board member, in June he discussed how automation  benefits people at All Access: Intelligent Automation. "It's not just the outcome of automation that the job will be reduced, but then it's also about how automation can give you better access to data and information that you didn't have,” he said. "Then you can invest your time in doing a lot of better analytics and supplier management and vendor relationship management activity. So, there's constant needed for us to keep training and keep the user base slightly more informed about what the automation is for and what it is not for."

• Hear more from Vineet Mehra in Building trust: Ethical automation to fortify customer & stakeholder relationships. Catch him speaking at All Access: BPM 2024 on September 11.

Anna Maria Oberländer

Assistant professor, information systems and digital transformation, University of Bayreuth

Anna Maria Oberländer is assistant professor for information systems and digital transformation at the University of Bayreuth in Germany. She also co-leads a research group and co-manages the Digital Innovation Lab at the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Information Technology FIT. Before her academic career, Oberländer worked at Siemens, Allianz and McKinsey & Company.

Her research is deeply rooted in understanding and designing digital transformation and innovation in established companies, and her academic contributions are regularly published in international journals and at conferences, including the European Journal of Information Systems and the International Conference on Information Systems. A notable example is the paper she co-authored on employee-driven digital process innovation and factors that influence this during crises such as the Covid-19 pandemic.

• Read more from Anna Maria Oberländer in The influence of mental models on employee-driven digital process innovation during times of a crisis

Dr. Christoph Roser

Professor, production management, Karlsruhe University of Applied Sciences

Christoph Roser is a professor of production management at the Karlsruhe University of Applied Sciences in Germany. 

He has decades of experience of implementing, researching and teaching Lean manufacturing, including five years working for Toyota in Japan, three years consulting throughout Europe at McKinsey and another five years as a Lean expert and manager at Bosch. 

He is also the author of All About Lean, a highly acclaimed, award-winning blog that discusses the fundamentals of Lean manufacturing with the aim of helping people solve manufacturing problems. He tells us he has two favorite bits of advice: “To solve problems, someone must dive deep into all the details to understand the problem first. Also: respect people, especially assistants. They can help you a lot when you want to change an organization.”

• Read more from Christoph Roser at All About Lean

Doug Shannon

Global intelligent automation and generative AI thought leader

Doug Shannon is an accomplished thought leader in intelligent automation, with a proven track record in building self-healing automation processes. He has been recognized as one of the top 50 intelligent automation leaders globally.

Shannon is a Gartner Peer Community Ambassador and a member of the Theia Institute, a cyber security and AI ethics think tank based in Washington D.C. He is also a PEX Network Advisory Board member.

Commenting on the impact of AI in the last year, Shannon said: “2023 can be summed up by seeing how we all navigated the AI/generative AI power race, where participants were propelled by a dual ambition. Maximizing the overall capabilities of AI models and mining that same model’s footprint for grounding, feature focus and widespread accessibility.

“The outcome of this competition is poised to redefine the previously understood world of AI, as it is now shaping the future of technology and delivering an impact on various domains, cultures and markets.”

• Watch Doug Shannon discuss the impact of AI on intelligent automation

Marc Stromberg

Co-founder, sales and key account management, GBTEC

Since its creation in 2005, GBTEC has emerged as one of the leading global providers of BPM software. Marc Stromberg is the company’s co-founder and key account manager.

Stromberg has more than 20 years of BPM experience. After studying economics, he worked as a BPM consultant for SECO Consult and IDS Scheer, the latter being one of the largest BPM software vendors founded by professor August-Wilhelm Scheer.

At GBTEC he has overseen the company’s growth from its headquarters in Germany to opening branches in Austria, Australia and Spain, and gaining a significant presence in the Middle East and the US.

• Hear more from Marc Stromberg in the webinar case study Make processes your superpower - The business transformation story of the leading partner in the world of metals

Albanesa Ymaya

CEO and senior consultant, Ymaya Lean Academy

An accomplished industrial engineer, Albanesa Ymaya is the creator of the 3PLT+4K Business Transformation Model.

With over 21 years of experience, she has been a key figure in the application of the Kaikaku approach to project management (which translates from Japanese as "radical change"). A former student of Japanese Sensei Ritsuo Shingo (whose father created the renowned Shingo model), she co-created numerous training programs based on TPS with him, and even worked with him on a book shortly before his death.

Based in the Dominican Republic, she is the founder and CEO of Ymaya Lean Academy and regional director for the Caribbean at the International Love and Kindness Project Foundation.

Ymaya says her greatest professional achievement is reaching her current position while consistently having a positive impact. “I take pride in having left behind meaningful footprints, rather than scars, and in having helped to develop other leaders within the industry.” 

• Albanesa Ymaya will be participating in a breakout session at All Access: BPM 2024 on September 10, where attendees can meet her to discuss BPM and business transformation

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Read more: 

• PEX Network's top 50 thought leaders in operational excellence for 2023
• 4 leadership tips from operational excellence leaders