Gritty, creative, seasoned technology team leader with over 20 years of experience driving profitability through efficiency. Built high-performance engineering teams that delivered data, ML, eCommerce, ERP Apps that enable all stakeholders make data-driven decisions, grow sales and profitability.
Ishwar Bharbhari
Previous Position
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 generating annual value of $100K to $500K.
· 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 450 to 500 employees.
· 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
· Currently building the business analytics and data science team.
· Implemented Tableau business intelligence for 250 users. Over 50% daily active users and growing.
Yamaha Corporate Kickoff
MC at the Annual Corp kick-off, entertained over 450 employees.
Products portfolio
ecommerce
B2B ecommerce
B2B finished goods, parts ordering and invoice payments. B2C parts ordering using Magento
Results
Since relaunch in 2016
- Doubled number of users
- Doubled number of orders
- Increased number of invoice payments
- Increased AOV using ML recommendations
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.
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
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.
Image Entertainment
IT Project Lead July 2007-April 2011
Entertainment Company with over $150 million in sales.
- Replaced legacy system with Oracle Financials (order to cash process).
- Introduced Agile /Scrum Project management
Hines Horticulture
IT Solution Architect January 2002 to January 2003
Large scale US Horticulture Company with sales of approx. $ 200 million.
- Replaced legacy system with Oracle Manufacturing and Financials module
- Built and supported business intelligence solution
Computer Sciences Corporation (acquired by DXC Technology)
Sr. Oracle ERP Consultant January 2000 to January 2002
Fortune 500 consulting firm with 65,000 world-wide employees.
Education
California State University Long Beach
M.B.A. (2011-2013)
Business Administration
Hitotsubashi University
B.Sc
Physics
Center for Development of Advanced Computing
Post Graduate Diploma
Software Technology
Mumbai University
B.Sc
Physics
Hobbies
Listening to
“If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.” ― Oscar Wilde
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
