The distribution industry is approaching a crossroads. With a workforce that is aging by the day, companies are having a hard time attracting and retaining employees across all levels of their organizations. According to Gallup Daily tracking, only 32% of employees in the U.S. are engaged. Employees are looking for work-life balance, flexibility in time, role, and location, and the opportunity...
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Unemployment rates are at the lowest levels in 18 years. That’s good news for the economy, and even better news for workers – but bad news for companies trying to recruit and retain talent. Instead of preparing for the next downturn, companies are scrambling to find the people they need to grow their businesses right now.…
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Recently, Microsoft released to General Availability, the newest version of Azure Data Factory (which you will see referred to as V2 in Azure). This is a major release that is a huge step up from the previous version of Azure Data Factory (read about the new features here). One of the most interesting new features is support for SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) packages.…
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Over the past five years, I have served as “Chief of Chiefs” in West Monroe’s Chicago Office. The goal of the Chiefs program is quite simple: It is a program created and intended to help foster a culture specific to the interests of each West Monroe office (we have nine of them), while allowing people an opportunity to own and lead.…
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Too often, businesses make important decisions from an inside/out perspective; only thinking about what is important to the business but forgetting about the needs of their customers. How can organizations design something if they do not know who they are designing it for? Whether it is an in-store experience, a new technology, or a process for communicating with customers, businesses need to...
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Technology, and how we interact with it, is evolving every day. Someday, virtual overlays, like in Minority Report and Terminator, might not be science fiction. Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR), two relatively new interactive experiences, have had their rises and falls throughout time as new technology became widely available, but not enough to sustain user engagement in the...
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This spring, we had the opportunity to attend GOTO Conference 2018, hosted at Chicago’s Navy Pier. Here are our key takeaways: Containers, Containers, Containers Microservices are one of the hottest trends in the technology industry right now, so it’s no surprise that the GOTO Conference dedicated a whole track to the topic.…
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As another class of campus hires joins West Monroe, I’m reminded of how far we’ve come on our journey in the 11 years since I accepted the challenge and joined West Monroe. In 2007 I joined right out of school, in one of the first ever large hire classes. Even then, focusing on employees was a core value, and it showed.…
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Perhaps it is the implied simplicity, or its general acceptance in the industry, but ROI (return on investment) is the ubiquitous approach to evaluating success of an investment. To establish a consistent understanding of ROI, let’s define it as follows: As for automation, the prevailing measure of “Gain from Investment” is cost reduction. …
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As a female technologist, I’m familiar with the bleak statistics: Women only occupy 20% of the technology workforce, a number that drops to 5% for women in leadership roles. These numbers are often presented at the start of conversations about how we can help bridge the gender gap in STEM-related fields and increase female representation.…
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Over the years, the utility industry has developed an ingrained safety culture. When we think about these safety programs, we often think of the hard hat, the steel-toe boots, flame resistant clothing, keeping three points of contact as we climb the stairs, and dozens of other little things that can make big differences when it comes to safety.…
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Take a peek under the hood of Salesforce’s newest offering, Salesforce Shield, which makes defining, executing, and monitoring your organization’s strategy to become GDPR compliant a breeze. By now you have heard that GDPR officially went into effect in May and is a regulation in EU law on data protection and privacy.…
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