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With centuries of tradition behind it, tennis as a sport has been highly resistant to change. Other sports have been quick to embrace the use of data and analytics to transform how athletes are recruited, trained, and prepped for competitions, how they adjust to changing circumstances during play, and how they break down successes and failures after competition.

“It’s fair to say that tennis has lived up to its roots as a traditional sport,” says Mat Pemble, executive director of IT for the International Tennis Federation (ITF), the sport’s governing body. “We’ve not been one of the fastest sports when it comes to embracing new technology and data analytics, particularly on court.”

Still, the appetite for innovation is there. Electronic line calling is a prime example that Jamie Capel-Davies, head of science and technical for ITF, points to. So too is its embrace of smart racquets and wrist-worn devices, the first wave of which proved limiting in that they could provide data on how fast a player was swinging a racquet, for example, but couldn’t collect data on the outcome.

“You didn’t know whether that was a good shot or a bad shot or any other context around what was going on when you played it,” Capel-Davies says.

Serving performance data courtside

In the early 2000s, the ITF started working with Sony’s Hawk-Eye Innovations, whose computer vision system uses timing data from multiple high-speed video cameras to triangulate the position of the ball in relation to the court. The technology made its debut at the Australian Open in 2003 and Wimbledon in 2007, and it provides the foundation for electronic line calling for the sport.

“One of the byproducts of that, because you’re tracking the ball to see whether it’s going to land in or out, you actually get a lot of data through the process: how fast people are hitting the ball, where they hit it from, and where it lands,” Capel-Davies says.

The ITF was quick to make use of that wealth of data on the presentation side of the sport but struggled to unlock its value for competitors. So, in 2021, the ITF partnered with Microsoft to power its match insights platform for the Billie Jean King Cup (BJK Cup) with the idea of transforming performance. The BJK Cup is the largest annual team competition in women’s sports, with 16 national teams qualifying to compete for the prestigious title each year. Like the Davis Cup for men, it is one of the few tennis competitions that allow the team captain to coach players during matches as they change sides between games.

The platform uses ball-tracking cameras and 3D radar systems to generate live on-court match data, which is fed into Azure and combined with live score data to provide insights into serving patterns, returns, and player movement around the court. Those insights are provided to team captains during the BJK Cup finals via a dashboard on Microsoft Surface devices.

“We’re really starting to focus on how that data can be used to support the players, the coaches, the teams, everyone involved behind the scenes on the performance side,” Pemble says.

By allowing court-side coaching, the BJK Cup presents a unique opportunity for the ITF to showcase the platform’s match-insight capabilities.

“They’re getting live data coming through as the match progresses, and that gives teams an opportunity to look at how they are performing against the game plan,” says Capel-Davies. “Does it need updating or adapting to the situation?”

Fine-tuning performance with in-match data

The ITF worked closely with Microsoft and representatives from BJK Cup teams to develop the analytics and their presentation to ensure the dashboard would provide meaningful insights. The captain is only allowed a few moments to coach their players when they change sides between games.

“One of the key things that we were looking at was what were the most important metrics and how can they be communicated effectively,” Capel-Davies says. “The great thing about the app is it’s very visual and it also has a reasonable amount of customization.”

For instance, it can be used to display serve placement and returns to help captains and players identify patterns. It can display how players return on breakpoints. After last year’s finals, the ITF worked with Microsoft to add new features based on feedback, including a visualization called “serve plus one,” which visualizes the third shot of a rally.

Beyond court-side insights, Capel-Davies says the platform also provides teams with value before and after matches. Prior to matches, the platform can provide insight into opponents to help develop a game plan by understanding their strengths, weaknesses, and tendencies. After the match, the platform can be used to perform a post-mortem, providing insight into what worked, what didn’t, and what players can improve in the next match.

For now, the system is limited to the finals because it requires deployment of four to 12 cameras that are calibrated to a specific court. It’s also not used on clay courts because those typically don’t have electronic line calling.

“Tennis courts are the same size, but in practice the lines don’t always go in exactly the same place, so there’s a process by whereby the system is calibrated to the actual position of the lines and you also have to know something about the topography as well,” Capel-Davies says. “You don’t assume that the court is perfectly flat; you have to map that.”

For now, in-match insights are available only at the BJK Cup, but Pemble and Capel-Davies believe change is coming.

“There’s been a sort of slow, slow burn in tennis in terms of innovation and coaching, and I think this is demonstrating how good, quality coaching and good information to base that coaching on can really enhance the game,” Capel-Davies says.

“The appetite is there, and I think that extends from the largest tournaments, the grand slams and the world championships, the Davis Cup and the Billie Jean King Cup. But now I think that’s moving down to some of the lower levels of the game,” Pemble adds. “The accessibility of the technology and the data now is so much greater than it was even two, three years ago. It’s filtering down to the club level and a lot of the systems require much less in terms of technology support and teams to put in place and run them. We’re seeing a big amount of development across AI-based camera tracking systems. It’s automating a lot of that data processing and analytics generation.”

Digital Transformation, Machine Learning, Machine Vision

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Journey Beyond, a part of Hornblower Group, is Australia’s leading experiential tourism group. Headquartered in Adelaide, it operates 13 brands and experiences spanning the country. The company’s overall strategy is to “have a customer experience that’s second-to-none — from the moment they first engage with the company to plan their experience, to when they return home at the end of their travels — regardless of what Journey Beyond adventure you are booking.”

However, the company’s disparate technology systems were proving to be a hinderance in its commitment to consistently deliver unmatched services and experiences to customers. As its business diversified, including its own acquisition by Hornblower Group in early 2022, Journey Beyond inherited a range of disparate technology systems, including six different phone systems and an outdated contact center that was only servicing Journey Beyond’s rail journeys. The remaining brands in the company’s portfolio were using basic phone functionality for customer enquiries and reservations.

Madhumita Mazumdar, GM of information and communications technology at Journey Beyond

istock

“The different communication solutions were unable to provide an integrated 360-degree customer view, which made it difficult to ensure a consistent, unrivalled customer experience across all 13 tourism ventures, and any other brands Journey Beyond may add to its portfolio in the future. The absence of advanced contact center features and analytics further prevented us from driving exceptional customer experience. Besides, we couldn’t enable work-from-anywhere, on any device capability, for employees,” says Madhumita Mazumdar, GM of information and communications technology at Journey Beyond.  

These challenges forced the company to transition to a modern cloud-based communication platform.

Multiple communication solutions cause multiple challenges

Because Beyond Journey operates in the experiential tourism market, providing a personalized, seamless customer experience is essential — something its previous communications systems lacked, Mazumdar says.

“For instance, our train journeys get sold out a year prior to their launch. Therefore, when we launch a new season, there is a huge volume of calls from our customers and agents. The existing system lacked callback mechanism, leading to callers waiting in queue for as long as 40 minutes, which adversely impacted their experience,” she says, adding that there was also no way to prioritize certain calls over others.

The existing system also lacked analytical capability to provide any customer insights and it wasn’t integrated with Beyond Journey’s CRM. As a result, representatives interacting with a customer didn’t know whether the customer had traveled with the company before. “The communication between us and the customer was transactional instead of being personalized,” Mazumdar says.

Since the existing systems were very old, they couldn’t be managed remotely. In case of an outage, the company had to send a local person to rectify the on-site phone system, which could take a couple of hours. During this time, customers were unable to call Journey Beyond.

“The IVR was also not standardized across the company. As the IVRs were recorded in voices of employees from different business units, a caller had no idea they were part of the same business,” says Mazumdar.

Incoming calls to Beyond Journey’s toll-free numbers were also adding to the operational cost. “We paid per-minute on the calls received to our toll-free numbers. The high call volumes meant huge costs for us. Even if the call was hanging in the queue, it was costing us every minute,” she says.

Implementing a consolidated communications platform

To overcome the bottlenecks and drive customer engagement to the next level, Journey Beyond launched a contact center transformation, the first step of which was to establish a common unified communications (UC) platform across the business and integrate it with a new contact center (CC) solution. After evaluating several UC and CC solutions, Journey Beyond chose RingCentral’s integrated UCaaS and CCaaS platforms — RingCentral MVP and Contact Center.

“We started evaluating multiple vendors in the first quarter of 2021. The software evaluation process took three to five months after which the implementation started in August 2021. We went live in October 2021,” Mazumdar says. The entire SaaS solution was hosted on AWS.

The company took this opportunity to shift to soft phones and headsets by getting rid of all physical phones. “We purchased good quality noise-cancelling headsets, which was the only hardware we invested in significantly,” says Mazumdar. “Although we had premium support from RingCentral, we decided to learn everything about the solution and take full control over it. So, while the integration and prebuild was completely done by RingCentral, over time we trained multiple people in the team on the solution. In hindsight, this was the best thing we did,” says Mazumdar, who brought in two dedicated IT resources with phone system background for the new solution.

“Different business units within the company work differently. For instance, the peak hours for one business could be different from those of another business, which impacts how you set up the call flows. It’s not one basic standard rule that could be set up for all businesses across the company. With in-house understanding of the solution, we had full control over the solution and were able to make changes, refinements, and complex prioritization rules to it ourselves without depending on the solution provider,” she says.

Cloud-based solution delivers customer visibility and value

Connecting multiple businesses with a common communications platform to deliver consistent customer service across the group has yielded compelling business benefits to Journey Beyond.

A key advantage of the tight integration between UC and CC is the customer service operation’s accessibility for the entire Journey Beyond team.

“At a national integrated level, we now have subject matter experts in each of our experiences available to deliver unrivalled customer experience, with economies of scale. So, if one team is under duress in terms of call volumes, the call can be overflowed and picked up quickly by a consultant with secondary expertise in that brand,” says Mazumdar.

Journey Beyond is supporting its customer experience drive by integrating the CC solution with its CRM to develop omni-channel CX capabilities and build towards a 360-degree view of the customer.

“We are building up our ‘Know You Customer’ strategy, which starts with our customer service agents knowing who you are when you call any of our Journey Beyond brands,” says Mazumdar. “Callers who have travelled with us before, have their phone number in our CRM. When they call, their records pop up. The executive can look at the customer’s history with the company and the communication between them becomes a lot more personalized. The integrated view of the customer also helps to cross sell. For instance, if a person is booking a train journey from Adelaide but our executive knows that he is coming from Sydney, he can sell him another trip in Sydney.”

The other major advantage is the scalability and remote capabilities of the cloud-based platform. The solution allows Journey Beyond to run operations 24×7 with centralized administration and distributed users, working from anywhere, on any device. This has also given Journey Beyond the opportunity to recruit for talent in other locations outside the market around its Adelaide office.

Journey Beyond has also rolled out the solution’s workforce management functionality to better align agent availability with customer demand. The advanced feedback capabilities allow Journey Beyond to measure customer net promoter scores (NPS) right down to the consultant level. That NPS functionality will then be integrated into Salesforce, enhancing the 360-degree view of the customer experience.

The solution’s quality management functionality is providing Journey Beyond with a level of automation to ensure the contact basics are being completed, allowing leaders to focus on scoring the more complex or intangible components of customer engagements — delivering a recording of both the call and what is happening on screen at the same time. “Quality analytics completes the picture in terms of everything we need to see from a skills gap perspective,” says Mazumdar. Journey Beyond has deployed the UC solution to all businesses nationally. The CC solution has been rolled out at the company’ rail division and Rottnest Express while onboarding for the other businesses is in progress.

Unified Communications

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For any IT leader new to an organization, gaining employee trust is paramount — especially when, like PepsiCo’s Athina Kanioura, you’ve been brought in to transform the way work gets done.

Kanioura, who was hired away from Accenture two years ago to serve as the food and beverage multinational’s first chief strategy and transformation officer, says earning employee trust was one of her greatest challenges in those early months. Tapped to guide the company’s digital journey, as she had for firms such as P&G and Adidas, Kanioura has roughly 1,000 data engineers, software engineers, and data scientists working on a “human-centered model” to transform PepsiCo into a next-generation company.

“People become embedded into the ways of working successfully,” she says. “Me coming in from the outside and proposing so much change —  the associates and midlevel management are the ones that must be empowered and that is the most difficult aspect of any kind of transformation.”

Now halfway into its five-year digital transformation, PepsiCo has checked off many important boxes — including employee buy-in, Kanioura says, “because one way or another every associate in every plant, data center, data warehouse, and store are using a derivative of this transformation.”

The $247 billion conglomerate, one of the largest food and beverage companies in the world, is developing a modernized data and cloud infrastructure replete with automated processes and workflows. To date the company has moved 5,000 applications to Microsoft Azure as it applies predictive analytics, AI, robotics, and process automation in many of its business operations.

PepsiCo’s migration to the cloud has paid off in in many ways, Kanioura says — in speed, flexibility, and agility, reducing on-demand forecasting from weeks to days or hours, and in feeding its supply chain more accurately and frequently.

“We want to ensure that the monetary value realization is captured across the board, and so far, we are very happy with the financial KPIs, which translate to business implementations which gave us a positive ROI,” Kanioura says. “But there is more room to go. We expect within the next three years, the majority of our applications will be moved to the cloud.”

The company is also refining its data analytics operations, and it is deploying advanced manufacturing using IoT devices, as well as AI-enhanced robotics. PepsiCo also plans to evolve its network modeling to become more “prescriptive,” anticipating events and making planning adjustments rather than reacting to market conditions, she says.

Upskilling for the digital future

The digital overhaul of nearly all PepsiCo’s business processes and operations has no doubt contributed to the company’s expected 12% growth for the current fiscal year over FY2021’s reported $79.5 billion in revenue. But with automation comes questions about the long-term viability of a range of current roles.

Kanioura insists the transformation’s goal is not distributing pink slips. In fact, she says, PepsiCo, which employs about 300,000 workers across the globe, is transforming all its human capital for the digital era.

“We are upskilling every employee of PepsiCo, whether you know someone who sits in company headquarters or you’re sitting in a plant or out selling our products,” Kanioura says.

One core program developed to achieve this goal, PepsiCo Digital Academy, provides employees with a common foundational understanding of the value of data and analytics and how they can use that information in their own roles, Kanioura says.

Digital Academy was launched last year, and to date roughly 27,000 employees have participated in digital training, with almost 140,000 views on digital training content, according to the company.

One HR employee took some courses in data analytics and found a new job within the company helping to advance digital transformation.

“I was always passionate about advanced analytics and took courses where I augmented my digital skills and acquired new ones,” says Ashley McCown, senior data analyst in PepsiCo’s People Analytics division. “These new skills enabled me to take on a new role where I am able to leverage advanced analytics to solve HR problems.”

IDC analyst Craig Powers says increased automation inevitably leads to some job losses. But enterprises are sincerely trying to upskill their employees to retain institutional knowledge necessary to realize the growth a digital transformation is designed to generate, he says.

“Is it possible to upskill all employees in a large organization to be digital experts? Not likely,” Powers says. “However, for the sake of success and efficiency in digital transformations, companies should be looking to educate and upskill as many internal people as they can, because their knowledge of the organization’s business processes is hard to replace.”

Enterprises like PepsiCo are also battling for new digital recruits even as they develop digital talent from within.

To that end, PepsiCo has launched two Digital Hubs — one in Dallas and one in Barcelona — to create more than 500 new data and digital jobs over the next three years. The hubs are designed to accelerate how PepsiCo “develops, centralizes, and deploys critical digital capabilities” across its global operations, according to the company.

Blending analytics and AI

Since taking over, Kanioura has applied the expertise she developed as chief analytics and AI officer at Accenture to advance PepsiCo’s data infrastructure, a strategy that includes building out a data lake and AI capabilities with partners such as Microsoft and Databricks.

Analytics and AI are integral to Kanioura’s vision for PepsiCo’s future, one that centers on enhancing three key pillars: consumer experience, commercial excellence, and operational excellence. “Every data set, every data KPI, or every data field is as important as the app,” she says. “Yes, the data is key. But the big unlock is MLops. The importance of using AI for data ops is critical. What we are trying to do is operationalize all our analytics and algorithmic libraries.”

PepsiCo will use a combination of customized Microsoft Azure and Databricks AI frameworks and machine learning models to redefine its operations even as it develops its own homegrown framework, “which is very specific to the needs of PepsiCo,” says Kanioura. “AI in this company is something that we absolutely debated down and it’s evident in many of our transformations across the globe.”

Gartner analyst Sid Nag says PepsiCo has adopted many of the technologies that are driving the next phase of enterprise digital transformation.

“The next frontier in IT services will be driven by the nexus of cloud, edge, 5G, AI, IoT, and data and analytics,” Nag says, adding that digital business initiatives built on these technologies can help enterprises interact more closely with their customers, thereby improving customer experience and engagement. “Digital touchpoints supported by cloud environments are the mechanism to connect the digital and physical worlds and are essential for the digital economy to execute on and accelerate digital business initiatives.”

Kanioura says PepsiCo’s success over the past two-plus years has laid the groundwork for an evolved, insight-driven enterprise. But for her, the most impactful achievement has been fostering employee trust across all layers of the organization.

“I expected more resistance,” she says. “I didn’t get too much resistance and that’s the toughest thing — to grow with what we were proposing. If you’re going to bet parts of your business and part of your critical business to a transformation like this, you need to be convinced that it will not cannibalize or disturb your growth trajectory.”

Analytics, Cloud Computing, Digital Transformation

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With its business rapidly growing and customer expectations rising, Thermo Fisher Scientific is turning to machine learning and robotic process automation (RPA) to transform the customer experience.

Formed from the merger of Thermo Electron and Fisher Scientific in 2006, Thermo Fisher Scientific is one of the world’s largest suppliers of scientific instruments, reagents, and services, with more than 130,000 employees worldwide. Since 2006, it has grown with additional mergers and acquisitions, including Life Technologies Corp. in 2013, Alfa Aesar in 2015, Affymetrix and FEI Co. in 2016, and BD Advanced Bioprocessing in 2018.

The rapid growth left the company highly dependent on fragmented, manual processes and disparate data sources and systems. With more than 10 million transactions and interactions per year across order entry, sales, and customer service, the company found those processes could not scale to meet the demand and deliver the experience its customers needed.

“We’re very much focused on the commercialization of acquisitions, making sure we don’t break the deal models and that things are running as they should be,” says John Stevens, vice president of IT at Thermo Fisher. “Sometimes the back-office capabilities don’t always get assimilated into the ecosystem. So, we have a lot of disparate systems across our company — ERPs, CRMs, middleware — but our go-to-market strategy for our customers, you have to make that all invisible for them.”

The problem had grown stark: Sometimes it would take customer care representatives in the Life Sciences Laboratory Products Group more than 10 minutes to answer simple calls about things like the status of an order or product availability.

“Customer care teams were going through nine different systems and nine different screens to put things together,” Stevens says. “It was an important inflection point for us as a company to ask: What are we going to do to digitally enable our colleagues inside our company to be more effective and have richer conversations with our customers?”

So, in 2020 Thermo Fisher initiated an automation and digitization project focused on eliminating those manual processes and creating a unified system of engagement for customers.

Unifying customer care

Dubbed Project Northstar, Thermo Fisher’s customer engagement initiative involved creating a series of discrete modules — order entry automation, case management, a single pane of glass search platform, and a customer insights platform — all underpinned by a centralized data lake that could consolidate relevant data from disparate platforms into a single layer.

Project Northstar has earned Thermo Fisher Scientific a CIO 100 Award in IT Excellence.

For its order-entry automation module, Northstar leans on AI and RPA to optimize data recognition and verification, and to reduce errors and accelerate order cycle times. Although Thermo Fisher is still iterating this module, the goal is for the final release to automatically ingest fax and email orders via OCR and upload them to the system of record while routing order exceptions to a new case management portal, Stevens says.

Northstar’s case management module is an intelligent business process management platform that uses machine learning to automate tasks associated with customer emails. It auto-assigns emails to teams based on addresses or selected content and text. The module also enables customer care teams to view the entire email history and any linked emails, and to search for information related to the email within the same interface, Stevens says.

The project’s smart search platform gives Thermo Fisher employees an easy-to-use interface for pulling information from the company’s data lake on customer orders, product availability and pricing, customer-specific quotes, carrier tracking information, invoices, and more.

To complete project Northstar, Stevens’ team developed a customer insights platform from the ground up, using a JavaScript framework and Power BI to provide a 360-degree view of objective and real-time customer experience metrics. The team also built a centralized data lake on AWS, Databricks, and Power BI.

Catalyzing change

Project Northstar represents a shift in direction for IT at Thermo Fisher, Stevens says, one that sees Stevens and his team embracing approaches and solutions new to them.

“We didn’t have a lot of expertise in this,” Stevens says. “Five years ago, a lot of IT professionals would have been talking about putting everybody on a single ERP, a single order orchestration platform, and spending millions of dollars and months or years to consolidate that.”

For inspiration, Stevens and his team looked outside their industry to understand how other organizations have applied automation at scale. One key to Northstar’s success was Stevens’ decision to partner with professional services firm Genpact, which helped Thermo Fisher create process maps down to the click level.

“That helped us to really understand how to solve some of these very complex problems and simplify the way that our customer care teams interact with our customers,” Stevens says.

Stevens also cites the team’s focus on putting together a compelling story for company leadership as a key component of Northstar’s success.

“Not only was it going to be transformational, but it was going to inspire our colleagues to wake up every day and be more digitally enabled,” he says. “They didn’t come to work to look through spreadsheets and nine different screens and see frustration in their customer interactions.”

Of course, when IT starts talking about automation, the perception can be that IT is going to automate them out of a job, Stevens notes. As such, change management was hugely important to Northstar. Stevens and his team worked closely with the communications team and HR to ensure they were sending the right messages to end users.

Since fully deploying Northstar at the end of 2021, average call hold times have decreased 27%, and the ability to process orders faster has led to an acceleration in cash flow, Stevens says.

“There’s more selling time for the sales team because they no longer have to spend three hours a week or more calling care to ask where a product is,” he says. “We built an enterprise data lake that has all our disparate systems data so you can present it in a single pane of glass, and we use low code and no code for that, which allows us to have everything at our fingertips. We’re rolling that out now internally to our inside sales teams and to our commercial team so they can self-serve.”

Ultimately, Stevens advises IT leaders to not let themselves — and their organizations — get stuck in the technology of the past.

“You have to stay relevant; you have to stay current,” he says. “You have to convince your company that you’re going to take chances to do lighthouse programs that are going to fail fast or prove the efficacy of a program. A few years ago, we wouldn’t have thought about doing anything except an ERP migration or more integrations. Now, we’ve got these new tools that sit in front of us.”

CIO 100, Digital Transformation, Robotic Process Automation, Science Industry