• Reach for the sky

    Gritty, creative, seasoned technology team leader with over 20 years of experience driving profitability through digital technology. Built high-performance engineering teams that delivered data products, AI - ML Data Science services, end-to-end B2C and B2B eCommerce, ERP Apps that enable all stakeholders make data-driven decisions, profitability, and meet organization's OKRs.

    Ishwar Bharbhari

  • Technology executive with 20+ years of experience developing and executing Data Engineering and Technology strategies aligned with corporate objectives. Delivering “always on” Digital Technology / Information Systems and products that enable business functions - Sales, Marketing, Product Management, FP&A, Finance, and People Ops teams to generate business value.
    Thrive on challenges that need leaders who understand team dynamics, technology and business strategy. Proven record as a leader who collaborates with C level executives from marketing, operations, finance and HR to simplify and digitize business processes to deliver measurable benefits. Collaborated effectively with customers, managers, and front-line staff. Reached across organizational and geographic boundaries to cultivate relationships and build a team of cross functional business leaders that respond rapidly to business needs. Strong focus on People + Process + Technology. Applied “servant leader” principles by removing obstacles, listening and mentoring. Hands on leader conducting regular scrums, lessons learned and structured problem solving sessions. Calm, adaptive, and decisive leadership style.

  • MY MOTTO

    Assign work suited to each team member's strengths, protect their time and celebrate their success.

  • Skills

    Things I've picked up over the years

    Management

    • Strategic Vision & Technology Planning for 3 to 5 year horizon
    • Business/IT Alignment, Business Relationship Management
    • Enterprise Apps - BI, Data Science, eCommerce, ERP (Oracle, Netsuite, SAP), CRM, Application Development, System Integration
    • Budgeting & Forecasting, Vendor/Contract Management
    • Team Building & Leadership, Process Design & Improvement
    • Digital Transformation, Change Management, Program Management
    • Global Implementation, Global operations, Technology Infrastructure, cloud migration
    • Data Center, Cloud, Network, Telecommunications, Mobile, Big Data
    • Governance Processes, Security, Risk Management, Mergers & Acquisitions

  • Current Position

    Director of Data and Analytics - Automation Anywhere

    • Led a 2-pizza team of data engineers to rebuild the data analytics stack using Google BigQuery+Informatica+Tableau.
      Led a team of 30+ cross functional super-users and 12 Sr. Managers, data engineers, BI developers to generate KPIs& insights based on customer, product and GTM data. Impact: ~15%+ uplift in upsell,new sell and 20% employee productivity. Enabled 700+ employees on the data
      analytics stack.
    • Worked closely with CIO, CFO and Controller on automating businessprocesses - Quote to Order to Cash, HR processes, & Financial Reporting.
      Participated in brainstorming Automation use cases for customers.
    • Defined and implemented Agile processes, Coding standards, & DataQuality requirements. Defined the Data Governance ISO compliance policies and successfully passed the first audit.
    • Defined Data infrastructure needs, evaluated options, negotiated &built the stack.
    • Defined Corporate KPIs such as ARR, ACV, GRR. Identified process gaps thatled to inaccuracies, & generated reliable KPIs.
    • Assessed team members’ strengths, defined their roles,orchestrated knowledge sharing & brainstorming sessions. Created prioritization frameworks, OKRs, playbooks, QBRs to align with business units.
    • Partnered with Product Managers on instrumentation and featureengineering. Led the team to build the ML infrastructure to serve analytics and improve UX.
    • Tech Stack: Google BigQuery, Vertex AI, Git, Jenkins, Python, PySpark, Informatica,Cloud Dataflow, Tableau. Workday, SFDC, Marketo, Pendo

    Previous Positions

    Director of Business Intelligence and Integrations - Yext

    Led a team of 6 Project Managers + 60 data engineers to rebuild the data analytics stack using AWS Redshift+Matillion+Tableau.

    Collaborated with CFO, CIO and peer Directors of PMO, Enterprise Applications on 3-year $2.5 Mn plan to transform and scale up IT operations after IPO.

    Led the BI, Systems Integrations and implementation of Salesforce.com, Zuora, and Workday Financials. Led team of 5 people leaders, 12+ technical engineers, 40+ cross-functional team with members from Finance, FP&A, Product Engineering, Customer Success, Sales & marketing.

    Gathered requirements for FP&A (Oracle Hyperion), streamlined business processes to ensure data quality, and implemented the tool. Impact: Enhanced financial planning and analysis by providing a centralized, integrated platform. Ensured accurate and real-time financial data, thereby improving decision-making capabilities. Streamlined the budgeting, forecasting, and reporting processes. Increased efficiency and compliance while reducing manual errors and operational costs.

    Developed the organization's corporate technology roadmap in alignment with the business strategy, driving innovation, efficiency, and competitive advantage while safeguarding corporate digital assets.
    Impact - 25% improvement in retention through a 3x increase in the number of Quarterly Business Reviews conducted by the Customer Success Retention team
    4x improvement in generating data insights for Sales Operations
    5x improvement in FP&A trend analytics
    Led the team to build a dimensional datawarehouse for over 50 data sources spanning Enterprise Applications to Product databases.

  • Yamaha Music

    Yamaha Corporation of America

    Director of IT Oct 2006 – Present

    Company engaged in sale of Musical Instruments, Commercial and Home Audio Products. Annual revenue over $700Million. Locations include artist services in Burbank, Nashville and New York, sales offices in Indiana and music school in Boston. 450 - 500 employees in USA.

    Drove the digital transformation of business as AGM of IT division of 23+ employees and 4 - 20 contract resources.

    People

    · Leadership role on cross functional PMO consisting of approx. 50 high performance managers and 14 Sr. management sponsors including the President.

    · Collaborated with Sr leadership to create the Global and North-Central-South America IT strategy and vision.

    · Hands on project planning, execution; financial planning, controls and policy/procedure administration. Manage an annual IT budget of 10 to 14 million USD.

    · Coached and worked with the team to venture into new territory such as AWS cloud in 2014.

    · Drove culture shift towards digital marketing by securing senior management buy-in and budget for Customer-Centric-Yamaha initiative.

    . Master of Ceremonies at the annual kick-off meeting for 450+ employees.

    Strategy

    · Delivered around 4 major strategic business initiatives every year for 10 years generating annual value of $500K to $3Mn.

    · Delivered tremendous Dev-Ops capabilities, savings by moving to cloud.

    · Executed over 15 company-wide, cross-functional, cross-divisional projects by skillfully maneuvering through change management challenges.

    · Oversaw the full project lifecycle including executive communication, RFP, vendor selection, negotiations, project planning and production support. Assigned responsibilities, tracked timelines, led daily scrums and structured problem solving sessions.

    Technology

    · Ensured consistent, reliable infrastructure, systems, applications and services for over 800 employees in North America and 5000 employees globally.

    · Played lead role in migrating company to SaaS applications like Salesforce.com, Fuze Voice, Office 365.

    · Increased quote pricing accuracy by 23%, reduced time to close quote to order cycle by 30% Implemented CPQ. Built guided selling and configuration rules for over 500 SKUs. Integrated with ERP for product catalog and territory management.

    · Implemented processes to use Salesforce.com as database for B2C and B2B customer information. This data is used to power marketing and sales campaigns.

    · Improved CSAT score by over 20% and NPS score by over 50% by implementing Service cloud. Built escalation rules, performance metrics such as time-to-resolution, self-service FAQ usage, call durations, abandoned calls. Supported customers of over 1500 SKUs.

    · Led Yamaha24x7 ecommerce - http://www.yamaha24x7.com/#/at-a-glance Over 3000 SKUs, 50,000parts and custom invoice payment features. Average value of each visit approx. $800. AOV $1,643. Deployed personalization using machine learning - AI to increase AOV.

    · Conceived, planned and executed "Girl meets Guitar" to create new musicians as part of the 4 member "Innovation Team" - https://www.yamaha.com/us/girlmeetsguitar/

    · Orchestrated 16-month, $1M Oracle R12 Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) upgrade project, delivered on time and without compromising business operations. Improved Order to cash, procure to pay, asset tracking, expense reporting, tax, accounting and financial reporting processes.

    · Implemented SharePoint enterprise collaboration and digitized over 25 business workflows.

    Data

    · Built the business analytics and data science team, delivered a trusted, reliable, high-performance analytics tech stack.

    · Implemented Tableau business intelligence for over 500 users. Over 50% daily active users and growing.

  • Products portfolio

    ecommerce

    B2B ecommerce

    B2B finished goods, parts ordering and invoice payments. B2C parts ordering using Magento

    Results

    - $750 Mn / year in orders and payments

    - Increased AOV by 23% to 1,643

    - Increased annual Marketing ROI by implementing digital tech stack

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    Results

    Innovative program to make new music makers among women by providing them with a fun, relaxing, easy to learn format. Limited pilot generated over 50 paying customers, 7 venues and 4 teachers.

    Worked on the tools and backed infrastructure.

    Freight consolidation, quoting and forwarding.

    Created the database architecture, led the project and developed the quoting algorightm (weighted shortest path).

    Results

    100s of quotes generated, efficient tracking and more business

  • Experiences

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    NACA Logistics

    Director of Oracle Applications (Technical) Mar 2004 - Aug 2006

    Medium size ocean freight Consolidation Company with sales of approx. $500 million.

    • Contributed to $400K annual savings and improved efficiency by developing freight quotes website to replace expensive thick-client quoting software.
    • Managed 24x7 support for Oracle Financials ERP system used globally for collections, payables and accounting.
    • Delivered $1M savings over two years by implementing optical character recognition and workflow software.
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    Computer Sciences Corporation (acquired by DXC Technology)

    Sr. Oracle ERP Consultant January 2000 to January 2003

    Fortune 500 consulting firm with 65,000 world-wide employees.

    Digital Strategy Consulting -

    Implemented Oracle Manufacturing and Financials at multiple global manufacturing companies

    Built and supported Business Intelligence product

  • The Blog

    Thoughts, musings, and ruminations.

    Rolling out software products and major patches smoothly is super challenging but you can reduce...
    Read more...
    February 6, 2019
    All the transformation videos on youtube and TV finally got to me and I decided to try a year of...
    Read more...
    So your company’s leadership has decided that it is time to make better data-driven business...
    Read more...
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    My Blog

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    Greater Los Angeles, CA

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    Milpitas, CA

  • Education

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    California State University Long Beach

    M.B.A. (2011-2013)

    Business Administration

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    Hitotsubashi University

    B.Sc

    Physics

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    Center for Development of Advanced Computing

    Post Graduate Diploma

    Software Technology

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    Mumbai University

    B.Sc

    Physics

  • CONTACT ME! 

  • Listening to

    “If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.” ― Oscar Wilde

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    Reid Hoffman

    Masters of Scale is an original podcast hosted by Reid Hoffman, Co-founder of LinkedIn and Investor at Greylock. In each episode, Reid shows how companies grow from zero to a gazillion, testing his theories with legendary leaders. Masters of Scale is the first American media program to commit to a 50-50 gender balance for guests. It won the 2018 People’s Voice Webby for Best Business Podcast.

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    Guy Raz

    https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510313/how-i-built-this

    Guy Raz dives into the stories behind some of the world's best known companies. How I Built This weaves a narrative journey about innovators, entrepreneurs and idealists—and the movements they built.

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    Guy Raz

    http://freakonomics.com/archive/

    Discover the hidden side of everything with Stephen J. Dubner, co-author of the Freakonomics books. Each week, Freakonomics Radio tells you things you always thought you knew (but didn’t) and things you never thought you wanted to know (but do) — from the economics of sleep to how to become great at just about anything. Dubner speaks with Nobel laureates and provocateurs, intellectuals and entrepreneurs, and various other underachievers.

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    Guy Raz

    https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510298/ted-radio-hour

    An idea is the one gift that you can hang onto even after you've given it away. Welcome to TED Radio Hour hosted by Guy Raz – a journey through fascinating ideas: astonishing inventions, fresh approaches to old problems, new ways to think and create.

    Courtland Allen

    Learn from the founders behind hundreds of profitable online businesses, and connect with others who are starting and growing their own companies.

  • Supported causes

    The simplest acts of kindness are by far more powerful then a thousand heads bowing in prayer.

    - Mahatma Gandhi

    Water.org

    Water.org

    Empowered more than 13 million people with access to safe water and sanitation.

    We believe water is the way. To break the cycle of poverty. To protect and save lives. To make a bright future possible for all.

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    directrelief.org

    Healthy People. Better World.

    That means all people, regardless of politics, religion, or ability to pay. Improving their lives is Direct Relief's mission.

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    Giftofvision.org/

    Striving hard to eradicate curable blindness in India.

    Sankara Eye Hospitals are focused on providing the highest quality care and service to the needy at our eight state-of-the-art hospitals all over India.

  • My passion project for California

    Gathering volunteers and community leaders to create tiny forests to stop wildfires

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    The Miyawaki dense forest method.

    Usually, a planted forest takes about 100 years to develop into a “real” forest. An awful long time, especially when you take into account the rapid deforestation and the urgent call for more trees, nature and a healthier, sustainable planet. A new forestation technique could kick start this process.

    Inspired by Shubhendu Sharma

    Eco-entrepreneur Shubhendu Sharma is the founder of Afforestt, an organization that creates “wild, native, natural and maintanance free forests at the lowest possible cost.” Basically, they bring back forests by creating them. To do so, they have a special technique to spur the process of forestation: Tiny Forests. Sharma based his approach on planting these forests inspired by an assembly line technique that he learned during his tenure at Toyota. These “forests to be” start out tiny, but because of the careful selection of plants, trees and soil to be included and a multi-layered plantation technique, the Tiny Forests of Afforestt grow big quickly.

    Tiny forest in Holland

    Celebrating the spirit of Afforestt with this beautiful movie called Tiny Forest by IVN, Netherlands. It took an year to shoot the movie and it shows the journey of forest making in a totally new geography for us. After making the first forest in Zaandaam, in 2015 (shown in the movie) Afforrestt team has made 4 more in different cities in The Netherlands.