How Modern IT Leaders Drive Digital Transformation, Automation, and Cloud‑Based ERP at Scale

From Automation to Process Improvement

Steelcase’s CTO Steve Miller explains that the company must provide a seamless, visually appealing online shopping experience for millions of customers while handling massive product volumes, and that modern IT leaders must lead cross‑functional digital‑transformation projects that combine systems, processes, and data.

Mark Slater, VP and PIO of Walgreens Boots Alliance, describes the company’s rollout of SAP S/4HANA Cloud across more than 9,200 stores and 20 distribution centers, highlighting the challenges of migrating a legacy, monolithic data‑center architecture and the benefits of unified front‑, middle‑ and back‑office processes for finance, workforce, and supply‑chain decisions.

Slater also notes ongoing manual journal‑entry, reconciliation, and cost‑allocation work despite the ERP deployment, and how the team uses BlackLine and Automation Anywhere’s RPA tools to automate journal‑entry approvals, cash allocation, invoice processing, and PDF extraction from Outlook, saving thousands of manual hours.

Optimizing Cash and Personnel

CIO Bill VanCuren at NCR leads a cash‑collection automation initiative that combines advanced analytics, survival analysis, regression, and ARIMA time‑series models to predict payment behavior, reduce days‑sales‑outstanding, and streamline cash‑allocation dashboards for senior management.

John Roman, CIO of The Bonadio Group, discusses a parallel effort to improve auditor productivity by introducing a Monday.com workflow platform with customizable dashboards, aiming to replace manual tasks with automated processes and enhance employee and client satisfaction.

Modern Customers, Modern Approaches

Steelcase’s CTO emphasizes the shift in customer expectations toward a self‑service, frictionless online experience, especially during the pandemic, and describes how the company mapped the customer journey from product selection to delivery, identifying pain points.

The team partnered with IBM to build an intelligent order‑fulfillment system with embedded analytics, and integrated SAP S/4HANA Cloud to better plan manufacturing and delivery of complex product variants.

Collaboration with sales, marketing, and product development created a dedicated channel for employees purchasing home office furniture, requiring new logistics, packaging, and on‑site assembly solutions to meet the “magic” of delivering small orders to individual homes.

Overall, the CIOs and CTOs interviewed stress that modern IT leadership is about taking a strategic, cross‑functional stance, leveraging cloud, data, and automation to drive business outcomes and improve both employee and customer experiences.