Yolanda Williams Email & Phone Number

Houston, Tx, Us

Rosemont, Il, Us

Responsible for leading strategic initiatives that enable IT organizational effectiveness and innovation, by leveraging strategic thought leadership for business case proposal, roadmap recommendations and development plans to support strategic objectives and goals. Lead a team of Strategy Managers/Analysts while managing their performance and supporting their career growth.• Implement the Product Model within IT, launch and coach product teams and agile methodologies, providing product mindset training to leaders. Introduce, hire and integrate new Product Delivery Leaders and Product Owners roles into the organization.• Solve issues with role clarity and organization design, support strategies that improve organizational effectiveness. • Leverage advanced methods and tools to analyze business problems; synthesize qualitative and quantitative insights and develop clear, concise, and fact-based recommendations.• Identify innovation initiatives and programs that ensure alignment of an integrated technology strategy with cross-technology strategic business goals and enterprise vision.• Conduct research and analysis on IT trends, best practices, and emerging technologies to provide insights and recommendations to senior stakeholders and executives, including findings, proposals, and progress reports for tracking capabilities to enable successful execution against initiatives.• Develop change management and adoption strategies of new programs or initiatives by creating training, standard operating processes, communication plans, and reskilling methods.

Houston, Tx, Us

Served as transformation strategic advisor to the COO and Vice President of Finance Operations to deliver business-critical solutions. Advised executives with automation and AI thought leadership. Established and facilitated strategy, direction, and application of continuous improvement through transformation of the organization, processes, and systems.● Alleviated cost-cutting impacts to the operations business unit as the company shifted from publicly traded to private equity via process improvement, automation, and new technology platforms to support 50% head-count downsizing in the Operations Division. ● Delivered finance digital transformation and implemented Order-to-Cash (O2C) and Procure-to-Pay (P2P) technology by implementing automation and data analytics technologies (HighRadius, Coupa and Sievo) to drive cost efficiency and process improvement.● Implemented ServiceNow and Microsoft Dynamics 365 improvements to increase automation and productivity.● Championed business operations transformation strategy, overseeing implementations of platforms for ServiceNow, HighRadius, Anywhere 365, and Coupa while facilitating appropriate resources to complete projects to achieve enhanced process effectiveness and efficiency.● Managed and maintained continuous improvement portfolio, effectively working with the Vice President of Finance and Vice President of Supply Chain to streamline processes with cost-effectiveness initiatives. ● Trained and coached others to build organizational self-sufficiency with improvement methods and tools by facilitating problem-solving activities via process improvement methodologies (e.g., Agile, Kaizen Events, PDCA, and DMAIC).

New Orleans, La, Us

Advised the CAO, Senior Vice President of Corporate Business Services, and Vice Presidents on continuous improvement strategy, industry case studies, benchmarking, and goal-setting to implement business-critical solutions. Enabled development and execution of continuous improvement strategy while driving a cohesive approach across several lines of business: information security, IT, shared services, and technology capital projects. Provided expertise on initiatives and CI programs, key department projects, and remediation, including implementation of enterprise CI framework.● Established and enacted a closed-loop process for value realization and benefit capture through a pipeline, resulting in $195,000 in cost savings and $860,000 in bottom-line value.● Implemented a CI business partnership model, supporting business partnerships as well as providing leadership, mentoring, and coaching in the implementation of CI methodologies: Lean Six Sigma, Agile, and PDCA, as well as automation.● Increased and bolstered automation governance maturity by effectively benchmarking best practices to accelerate implementation of CI initiatives within business processes.● Initiated Lean Sigma and Agile, using Kaizen events and Scrum teams with employee engagement and business unit-led ownership of Lean efforts.● Refocused business goals on waste reduction, quality, cost-effectiveness, process efficiency, safety, regulatory, and compliance to best meet customer, shareholder, community, and employee needs.

New Orleans, La, Us

COE Leader for Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and other intelligent automation tools Automation Leader for Nuclear, Shared Services, Supply Chain and ITGrew a team of two managers and three leads and employees to 24 direct reports with line of business automation leads and citizen developer community of 60-plus employees. Drove chat services proof of concept, adding value to omnichannel customer service delivery. Introduced Agile team tools for Jira, Trello, and Azure DevOps. ● Supported the Intelligent Automation Team in building 110-plus bots aligning to $325,000 in cost avoidance, 55,000 hours saved, and $250,000 in bottom-line operations expense cost savings. ● Executed Meter-to-Cash (M2C) CI and automation projects, using Automation Anywhere, leading to $150,000 in savings, as well as a decrease of 18 contractor full-time employees. ● Evaluated CI and automation potential for 250 processes across the company, leading to an enterprise pipeline of $2.5 million in value. ● Oversaw and led crowdsourcing activities for digitization, consolidating reporting and Lean processes with prioritization aligned to enterprise metrics and KPIs. ● Procured and developed in-house machine learning (ML) platform solutions in partnership with the data services team to analyze IOT data and invoice processing systemic issues for nuclear operations and finance operations, eliminating $1.2 million in outsourced contracts. ● Developed and designed process automation solutions, effectively generating business use cases for chat services, OCR, NLP, machine learning, and automation.

Bentonville, Arkansas, Us

Lead technical delivery of Finance Digitization efforts utilizing the digital factory approach which increases execution efficiency. Business partnerships include US, CA, LATAM, UK Countries. Technical strategic implementations ensure agility to automate manual processes using robotic process automation tools. ENTERPRISE AGILE COACH - Agile Transformation Pilot- Oversaw coaching reviews of 15 agile teams with 100 associates participating in pilot initiative- Provided insight into the agile coaching and training strategy- Collaborated Strategic 3rd party consultant to ensure the strategic direction aligned to execution opportunities and agile maturity goals- Lead agile meetings and planning events to provide mentoring, coaching, teaching and insight to leadership team - Provide leadership guidance and feedback to enhance the successful adoption of new ways of working and agile mindset shifts - Review training plans and provide training assessment reviews of 3rd party training vendors to support the agile transformationPROGRAM MANAGER/ AGILE COACH Enterprise Automation Services RPA and Bot Development - Lead the maturity of Agile adoption for a team of 20 by providing coaching, training, meetings and feedback sessions to increase utilization of tools and techniques to support feature and epic goals- Manage and execute PI Planning event and guide the team towards a finalized commitment plan that is aligned to both teams and leadership- Provide leadership feedback on team level agile adoption status, engagement , supporting the executive leadership vision for agile maturity targets - Create training plans, media; and events to promote utilization of gaming, team building, and grassroots buy-in for continuous improvement- Customize knowledge sharing peer groups to meet the needs to support best practice cross-pollination and reduce anti-agile patterns- Monitor agile metrics for visibility and health check delivery execution

Bentonville, Arkansas, Us

AGILE RELEASE TRAIN ENGINEER |AGILE COACH• Served the Customer Transaction Domain as an Agile RTE for feature delivery, with shared oversight of 26 scrum teams to coach and advocate agile best practices,• Led Scrum of Scrum meetings and managed PI planning. • Served on a core team implementing the Self-Organized Team strategy. BENEFIT DELIVERY:Manage releases and projects that entailed new solution design; legacy system integrations and cost savings to stores in US, Canada (CA), and UK. Resources include collocated and remote associates from 4 countries: UK, CA, US &IN.• UK Financial system framework build-out for Legacy to SAP integration to support competitive instant discounting at the register. • UK E2E system Retail to SAP improvements for coupon processing generated a $1.8M cost savings. • Canada Tax changes based on country and province regulations saved Walmart $1million in potential fines. • Canada School Tax exemption implementation to ensure that exemptions are in place for back-to-school shopping events. • UK Age restricted purchases based on national government regulations saved Walmart a potential $3Million in fines. BUDGET: Managed budgets up to $4 Million for programs, projects and ad-hoc operational efficiencies within INTL POS portfolios.

Bentonville, Arkansas, Us

ENTERPRISE PROGRAM & PROJECT MGMT MATURITY:• Coached Agile teams and Scrum Masters for continuous improvement and feature delivery. • Increased Project Management adoption via the Program Governance initiatives • Coached education and shared best practices within the Project delivery community • Increased project governance adoption among leadership verticals ( VP-Dir-Sr Mgr) IT GOVERNANCE: • Optimized Program and Project framework maturity and adoption by over 50% within the International, Global E-commerce and Strategic Services through training mentoring and consulting PMO EVANGELISM: Market and demonstrate the capabilities and innovations made Possible through the PMO department. Educate IT leaders on projects and applications that merge with a Strategic Roadmap.STAKEHOLDERS: • Collaborated with Release Management, QA and other PGMs for release rollout planning and code deployment. Communicate Program, project and operational status to executive leadership for high visibility projects. • Partnered with VPs, Directors and Resource Managers and communicated PMO/PGO strategy, direction and changes to IT leadership, business leadership, and IT business consultants.ENTERPRISE TRANSFORMATION INITIATIVES• Successfully managed Projects on the Global Replenishment Transformation program a CIO’s “Top 6” high visibility initiative with over 30 project team members and a $12 million budget. • Managed Centrify deployments for UNIX and Active Directory on 22,000 UNIX servers including with over 100 stakeholders for strategy, design, testing and execution and a core team of 10 and a $1.3 million budget. • Managed program governance functions: quality assurance, release management, build coordination, budget management, risk/issue management and vendor management within a program with 17 technical projects in scope.

Bentonville, Arkansas, Us

GLOBAL REPLENISHMENT PROGRAM:Replace the legacy system, inforem (inventory forecasting and replenishment), with GRS using JDA software to make order and sales forecasts more accurate and event impact more measurable• Established governance and processes and plans for Budget, Release Management, Build Coordination, QA and Development for Program delivery.• Managed data mapping activities for SKU to Item relationships on over 10 million SKUs• Led Data Management projects for Supplier to item relationships, over 8 million items• Implemented Demand, Forecasting, Collaboration tools for Global Suppliers and Replenishment ORDER MANAGEMENT PROGRAM:Replace the legacy system with oms to make purchase order and purchase agreements accurate and integrated with the other supply chain systems.• Successfully improved Program service delivery so that 2 subsequent releases for Wal-Mart’s Order Management System (OMS) came in on time and 2 weeks ahead of schedule with no major and critical defects with project team of 17 and $875k budget.

Bentonville, Arkansas, Us

SECURITY/COMPLIANCE SOLUTION DELIVERY:Resolved issues with password complexity, generic team and application id usage and database connectivity issues for Informix and UDB for PCI and SOX compliance. USER AUTHENTICATION • Deployed Centrify for Active Directory on enterprise wide servers for the Stores, Home Office, SOX and PCI and Finance, with over 100 stakeholders for strategy, planning, design, testing and execution• Increased User Authentication across 600 web farms, 22,000 UNIX/LINUX servers and 11,000 Informix and 100 DB2 UDB databases• Increased UNIX/LINUX Server Log traceability for SOX and PCI compliance

Atlanta, Georgia, Us

SOLUTION DELIVERY:Managed business process redesigns; system upgrades, conversions and installations for credit and lending operation and automated credit and lending month-end reporting• Directed staff of 6 direct reports, 4 vendors and IT resources of 60 Finance, Accounting and Credit Databases responsible for all IT functions with the SMAC business unit.• Provided technical understanding of the business unit’s systems, capabilities, and respective technologies.BUSINESS STRATEGY ENHANCEMENTS • Created business process redesigns for automated credit and lending month-end reporting. • Created maintenance strategies for production systems/programs/applications. • Developed of project definitions, cost/benefit and risk analysis, work plans, progress reports, and presentations.

Las Vegas, Nv, Us

BUSINESS CONTINUITY INITIATIVES: • Executed data center role swapping activities in a 24/7 environment for 64 casino properties as Project Manager on the Data Center Business Continuity Program.PROJECT GOVERNANCE: • Improved and guided the governance activities for 25 Information Technology projects: project plans, issue and risk registers, status reports, communication plans, travel plans and testing schedules as a part of the PMO team.• Managed PMO standards for gate/stage criteria and deliverables.• Project Management activities for Casinos for IT System Disaster Recovery, Slot Operations, New Construction • Audited Slot Operation project contracts and purchases for a $1.5 million cost savings. • Created project management documentation to more than 25 Information Technology projects: plans, issue and risk documentation, status reports, communication plan, travel plans and testing schedules.

Memphis, Tn, Us

SOLUTION ENGAGEMENT AND PROJECT EVALUATION:Managed solutions engagement review process for Project Funneling and Global Support initiatives of over 2500 opportunities annually for customers with at least $1 million dollars incremental value to the business.Facilitated via process documentation, management and alignment, meeting facilitation, ad hoc analysis/reporting and Sharepoint website portal & workflow maintenance.

Mba, Operations And Information Systems

Bs, Math/Biology Double Major