Billie Jo Waara joined Cicis as Chief Marketing Officer in 2017. She is responsible for overall brand evolution, marketing, creative and culinary development for the Original, Unlimited Pizza Buffet restaurant chain. Since joining the team, Billie Jo has launched several strategic initiatives including re-evaluation and refinement of brand positioning, pricing standards and technology-enabled Guest occasions such as online ordering. She has led innovative marketing initiatives for several industries including hospitality, quick service restaurants, travel, tourism and retail for the past 20 years.

Prior to joining Cicis, Billie Jo was Chief Marketing Officer for Taco John’s International. Billie Jo’s previous experience includes advertising agency leadership, she was the Director of the South Dakota Office of Tourism and served as a locally elected official as the Minnehaha County Treasurer. Waara graduated from Augustana College with a double major in Business Administration and International Government, and received her MBA from the University of South Dakota.

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A core leader of McKinsey’s Operations Practice, Ashutosh advises clients on operations issues, with a specific focus on end-to-end supply-chain design, logistics, procurement, manufacturing transformation, supply-chain function, omnichannel operation, procurement transformation, and strategy. His experience spans a broad range of industries, including consumer packaged goods, retail, automotive, industrial, pharmaceutical, and high tech.

Ashutosh is a leader of the firm’s manufacturing and supply-chain work within the Operations Practice and coleads McKinsey’s logistics work globally.

Examples of his recent client experience include the following:

• leading a supply-chain strategy and network-optimization study at a high-tech company, with subsequent value capture and implementation to improve overall supply-chain costs by 17 percent annually
• developing a holistic operations transformation for a consumer-packaged-goods company to reduce manufacturing costs by 17 percent and logistics costs by 14 percent while improving customer-service levels to 98 percent, from 87 percent
• spearheading an end-to-end supply-chain-planning transformation to improve service levels by 30 percent and reduce inventory days on hand by 25 percent
• supporting an indirect procurement-spend transformation at the online and network retailer of a consumer company, with work that included global procurement capability building and transformation, to deliver approximately 13 percent yearly savings
• leading a supply-chain planning and order-to-cash transformation, resulting in warehousing savings of 13 percent, transportation savings of more than 10 percent, and inventory reduction by 20 percent
• deploying lean warehousing to improve efficiency by 40 percent while reducing cost by 30 percent on a spend of $21 million for an industrial heavy-duty-parts manufacturer and distributor

Ashutosh has worked as the head of a beverage company’s global logistics group, with responsibility for logistics procurement and management, automation, digital logistics, and productivity across all business units. He also spent ten years at a global transport and logistics company based in Switzerland, leading projects in network optimization, transportation modeling, warehouse design, warehouse start-ups, and warehouse- and transportation-management-system implementation. He ultimately headed the company’s solutions engineering and operations group in North America across the high-tech, retail, automotive, and industrial sectors.

He has spoken at several conferences, including the North American Supply Chain Executive Summit, Supply Chain World, and SummerCon.

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Bidisha Rudra is the Senior Managing Director for Essilor Transitions and has been with Essilor for 13 years. She has enjoyed variety of roles including Market Research and Analytics, Managed Care Sales, Business Development, and Corporate Strategy, with the latter two stints out of the Asia Pacific headquarter in Singapore. She also serves as the President of Essilor Womens’ Network since the beginning of 2018. She firmly believes that achieving gender diversity and inclusion in the workplace is not something that can be done by just a handful of employees it is a collective effort. Bidisha earned a Ph.D in Applied Economics from University of Georgia, Athens. She was born and brought up in New Delhi, the capital city of India, and through her journey in life in different cities, she made a permanent stop (hopefully!) in Big D, Texas. When she is not busy working on achieving sales targets, Bidisha spends her time running around after her eleven year old twin young boys, Niseem and Nirvan, which is no less challenging!

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A Independent Certified Coach, Teacher, Trainer and Speaker with the John Maxwell Group

https://www.johnmaxwellgroup.com/yolandadixon

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