Rick Fordyce Email & Phone Number

New York, Ny, Us

New York, United States

• A boutique consulting firm focusing on data strategy and transformation, operational excellence, and organizational design.• Helped a $150M company focused on regulatory matters in environmental health and safety, workplace safety, and food and chemicals, develop a data strategy playbook. Enhanced its operational efficiency, data management, and decision-making processes.• Established an operational excellence framework, defining standard operating procedures, best practices, KPI creation, productivity baselines and standards for roles and responsibilities across the organization. Saved 10,000 hours of effort and improved the quality of client deliveries.• Reduced the cost of producing regulatory updates by 25% and increased capacity by 40% through global resource partnerships in areas including customer support, development/engineering, quality assurance, chemical data analysts, data experts, scrum masters, and news writers/editors. • Revealed the opportunity for 3E to serve its customers more efficiently through better data governance and data structuring, including metadata, leading to a data catalog to inventory disparate regulatory data components across client organizations.• Facilitated $100,000 reduction in contractor expense and reduced time to delivery by 30% of regulatory data by analyzing workflows and leveraged reusable language translation across projects.• Uncovered and solved operational delivery gaps, enhancing process efficiency and fostering a continuous improvement culture. Applied Lean philosophies and practices, including Kaizen events.• Mentored and developed an Associate Director of Operational Excellence to lead Operational Excellence to drive further process improvements and optimize team productivity.

Newark, New Jersey, United States

• Revitalized Prudential's data management and governance framework, aligning it with the company's digital transformation goals and establishing a strategic vision that emphasized data as a pivotal business asset.• Reporting to the CDO, managed four direct reports, overseeing a team of 25. Led three teams – Data Management/Governance, Data Management Systems, and MDM. Developed an enterprise-wide data management and governance capability, focusing on data science/AI deployment.• Collaborated, employing a customer-first mentality, across the organization, including with the Chief Information Officers (CIO), Chief Data Officer (CDO), centralized global technology, and business units, including PGIM, US Insurance, and Emerging Markets. Developed and implemented comprehensive data governance strategies. Shifted the focus on data from oversight to data enablement.• Established a plan to achieve a projected $30M savings over five years. Reduced data discovery and consumption time by 75% and saved 50K+ hours in data science and business intelligence effort in the first year.• Transformed teams from being data "operators" to data experts driving strategy and execution. Reduced costs by eliminating redundant labor, reducing professional services costs, and eliminating duplicate technology.• Dramatically improved organizational design and role definition frameworks, establishing clear responsibilities, metrics, and measures to track progress and enhance data-driven decision-making. Migrated some work to contractor agencies to scale at a lower cost.• Reduced the effort required to respond to regulatory inquiries by 90%.• Address racial and orientation inequality by partnering with ERGs. Modeled change through personal passion, joining community and non-profit initiatives, and publishing content detailing my own personal and professional experiences.• Selected among 40 executives to participate in the Prudential EDGE program for next-generation high-potentials.

Greater New York City Area

• Managed four senior leaders/teams with oversight of 30+ staff.• Oversaw S&P Ratings data science initiatives, steering strategic vision on innovation and change management. Rekindled an effort to drive transformation, defining a data-first environment through feasibility studies, model training, prototyping, innovation, and artificial intelligence and machine learning (ML) adoption.• Brought technology, business intelligence, and data science teams together to address problems. Identified and deployed data science strategies across the S&P Global Ratings division. Partnered with technology and data teams to design data infrastructure for scaled platforms to support advanced data analytics. Managed and coached a high-impact data science team to develop quantitative models using natural language processing (NLP), natural language generation (NLG), machine learning, and data mining techniques.• Within the first year, surfaced 21 projects expected to generate $80M in revenue over five years by steering 12 data science exploration lab sessions, each with dozens of participants, including data experts, data scientists, developers/engineers, quality control resources, leaders, customers, credit analysts, attorneys, and data architects. Notable project was a model that helped to generate insight from issuer, customer, and regulator communication on industry and competitor positions and outlook to reduce insight and decision-making turnaround by 50%+ by credit analysts, saving 27K hours of analysis.• Procured $15M to invest in augmenting credit analytics and hiring machine learning engineers based on learnings from earlier initiatives.• Addressed racial inequality by partnering with employee resource groups (ERGs). Spurred change through personal passion, joining community/non-profit initiatives, establishing talent acquisition platforms from under-privileged communities, and publishing a monthly blog detailing personal/professional experiences.

New York, New York, United States

• Led data strategy and global operations within Market Intelligence. Managed eight senior leaders and six diverse teams, with a total oversight of 1,000+ staff. Successfully delivered strategic initiatives exceeding client expectations, partnering with major tech companies, including Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and IBM, for innovative, client-focused solutions.• Eliminated over $8M in annual labor and professional services costs and avoided an additional $10M in related volume-based expenses.• Achieved a 10-20% improvement in labor productivity through Lean operational procedures, RPA, and automation in enhanced large-volume data management. Cut manual labor costs by $750K annually and reduced data acquisition turnaround times by 50% year-over-year.• Collaborated to develop advanced AI for earnings call transcripts, reducing annual production costs by $10M, reducing transcript delivery time by 75%, and generating $20M in incremental revenue for access to transcripts within 24 hours. • Reduced staff attrition to 2% from an already low 5% and led professional development initiatives, including designing career progression roadmaps, offering mentorships for advanced roles within the organization, like data scientists, and leadership development for succession planning. Mentored and advanced the first female director in the India operations unit.• Recognized in the S&P Global President's Circle and appointed to the Elevate Program for senior leadership development.

New York, New York, United States

• Advanced this language translation/localization business by improving the sales process, performing strategic planning, and developing solutions. Oversaw 500+ people across four national operating locations and remote workplaces, including India.• Oversaw services delivery valued at $100M in annual revenue, increasing revenue by 15% and operating profit margin from 26% to 30% during tenure. Improved project turnaround time from eight days to three and project estimate accuracy by 55%.• Served as point of contact for customer satisfaction and retention. Steered business development, performing cost-benefit analysis and initiating capacity and operations studies. Established staffing levels that leveraged strength and diversity.• Modernized the operating platform to achieve $2M in sustained annual savings by implementing a virtual workforce, rationalizing roles and vendors, automating procedures, and deploying an organization-wide Lean Six Sigma initiative.• Reduced annualized attrition levels to 8% from 13% by implementing a remote work business model for employees. Reduced real estate footprint from seven to four locations.

Master Of Business Administration - Mba, Business Statistics

Bachelor Of Science - Bs, Business Management And Computer Science