Business Transformation & Operational Excellence Insights

BTOES Oil & Gas Live- SPEAKER SPOTLIGHT : Why Forward Enterprise should be your standard for achieving Operational Excellence

Written by BTOES Insights Official | Aug 11, 2020 8:28:06 AM

 

Courtesy of Forward Network's Brad Sullivan, below is a transcript of his speaking session on 'Why Forward Enterprise should be your standard for achieving Operational Excellence' to Build a Thriving Enterprise that took place at BTOES in Oil & Gas Live Virtual Conference.

Session Information:

Why Forward Enterprise should be your standard for achieving Operational Excellence

Applying the fundamentals and using a systematic approach to your improvement is critical now more than ever. Not only does our technology rapidly change, but so does the people using it. The fundamentals to the methods and tools have been modified, skipped, and/or politicized over the past decade leading to a deep approach rather than taking the first step of understanding how the enterprise operates. The structure and process must be in place for Strategic Planning, Policy Deployment, Annual Operations Execution, and Operational Excellence in order to keep your improvements sustainable. The approach must be packaged so that all people can be part of and accept the change. Key elements from this talk will be:

  • Determining your Optimum Speed & Predictability through the fundamentals of analyzing current performance, capability, and entitlement.
  • Use what’s needed, not what the standard has forced upon you. Finding the balance of Technical/Political/Cultural influences.
  • To know the difference between doing something Different versus Differently
  • Eliminating the Culture of Repetitive Problem Solving
  • Knowing if you are in a Recovery, Turnaround, or Transformation and the importance of using the right approach.

Session Transcript:

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Beatles, Oil and Gas LifeVantage: Does that vary as the CEO of Global Excellence and Innovation? Really glad to have you all with us today, with another incredible session here from Brad Sullivan. Breads is the Regional Sales Director for four Networks. He began his career with IBM selling both mid-range and mainframe computers to the Energy Manufacturing verticals. Brad's career evolved to include artificial intelligence for Texas Instruments, where he interacted with the US Navy and various aerospace companies. Brand was asked to join Oracle, where he achieve recognition as a number one salesperson in the world supporting large electric utilities.

Ultimately, his career grew into networking with time is spent a Riverbed mobile networks and the risks that prior to joining for networks. So here's a really experienced leader in practitioner, and very glad to have you with us today, bread, and very much looking forward to your, to your presentation on a topic. That's probably new for most of our audience, or which is intent based Networks.

Joseph, Thank you very much for the intro this morning, and thank you everyone online Listening. And so what we'll do is, we'll get ourselves started here in a minute and I'll introduce you to forward networks and, and a little bit about what we're all about, because this is a, this is a pretty exciting opportunity to, to engage with the technology that, that, is just emerging. And so, I think, you'll find it very, very exciting. So, again, thank you everyone for your time today and, and this are present in the Air Dish Forward Networks is compelling, What I want to do is to give you a brief background on the company and share with you a little bit about the business problem. We embarked out, **** out to embark on to solve.

Then I'll walk you through, at least how we've done this architecturally so that you'll have an idea about how we do deliver this solution.

So with that in mind, let me introduce you to our team. Our team is, is, is, is the co founders for founders. You'll see these across the top, David, Brandon, the kill and payment. And they've all had PHDs in a combination of computer science and doubly.

And what they did is they focused on networking and they all graduated the same time in 20 13.

While they were there, they did research in the Lab with Nick McEwen has been known as a ..., a prolific researcher, an entrepreneur and generally had mass impact on the networking industry.

While our leaders and the team leads help create, the also he'll create software defined networking, There were really the founders of this technology, which I think is incredible. We'll talk more about payments work here in a little while, because payment really hasn't been the secret sauce. That's allow forwarded to evolve into who we are today, but in the killing brand, and also, arguably, lead the whole this whole development project was this Cisco Tetra. And I think that was pretty interesting too.

So, what's the challenge isn't that? We're getting a little bit about what the challenge with this networking problem.

The networking problem challenges, then, in our view, the current state of network operations is large, complex.

It's really a tangled world of a bunch of different technologies Companies as they evolve. They can acquire merge, require, they can merge multiple times, which causes really diverse IT environments. And the challenge is to streamline them into really what we think of as a common architecture so that we can, so we can merge all these disparate, all environments into one, in one view.

It's an area that's oftentimes really reviewed and overlook. It's an area that hasn't seen a lot of attention around innovation, and no one's ever really taken a comprehensive, holistic approach to how to solve this complex problem. The issue is, again, it's, it's gotten a lot of vendors. It's got a lot of devices, both physical and virtual. It's got, it's got thousands of layer 2 through 4 devices, and not counting all those thousands of edge devices.

And what's really driving, there's all these millions of rules that are intended to drive what the network behavior of what these devices should do.

So, this is the world of CLI. CLI has been around a whole, long, long, long time, and really seeing a whole lot of innovation and former networks. We believe it's time for a change your teams and operating these spaces today, and for those that are specialists, they are burdened by the many syntax associated with all the various vendors that you have in your network.

There are just basic fundamentals that we believe that you need to understand in order to be effective with all this. And that it starts off with the hope you would agree. Y'all need to know what you have, what's installed in the network out as it connected, and where is all that traffic go.

And, I challenge everyone on this call today that if you do believe, you understand comprehensively, all of this data and all the details associated with this, do your team to operate in these environments to understand it. If they do, they understand, is it really working as intended?

And when they do make changes, do they know what to change and what is their comfort level in making those changes?

IBut, bread sullivan's, dad is in the hospital with Cove at 19, and he he was really on there, you know, extraordinary situation, and he was still trying to deliver the session for you today, but it's one of those things day in the world that we're living in today. There are a lot of unexpected things going on, and he is dealing with this personal situation. So, he, he will be talking to the hospital here, clearly got a call from them, needs to address that, and then he should be back with you shortly. We appreciate your patience on that.

THIS SESSION WAS CUT SHORT DUE TO AN EMERGENCY SITUATION

 

About the Author

Brad Sullivan,
Regional Sales Director,
Forward Networks.

Brad Sullivan is a Regional Sales Director located in Dallas supporting the South Central region. He began his career with IBM selling both mid-range and mainframe computers to the energy and manufacturing verticals.  In college, Brad earned a BBA in finance and his next endeavor focused on global M&A activities for  technology companies. 

Brad's career later evolved to artificial intelligence for Texas Instruments where he interacted with the US Navy and and various aerospace companies.   Next Brad was asked to join Oracle with a focus on application and database technologies for large investor owned utility companies where he achieved recognition as the #1 sales person the world.  Ultimately, Brad career grew into networking and more recently has spent time at both Riverbed and Arista Networks.