JOHN TORRES
PROFESSIONAL PROFILE
Versatile, dynamic, performance oriented Global Business Executive and revitalization leader who devises strategies that create value and sustain growth through business transformation. Demonstrated record of accomplishment in delivering a unique mix of strategy, innovation and value stream excellence to expand organizational capability, maximize market potential and increase profitability in highly competitive, international environments. Vast experience in leading cross-functional, cross-business, and cross-geography teams to consistently exceed expectations and drive game changing cultural shifts across the enterprise - increasing performance, productivity, and quality. Collaborative, pragmatic multi-dimensional team leader that builds relationships, teams and alliances through communication, empowerment, and recognition at all levels to solve complex business problems.
CORE COMPETENCIES
Corporate Renewal
Business Development
Change Management
IT & Ops Management
Turnaround Mgmt
Transformation Mgmt
Board Planning, Decision Support & Reporting
Corporate Governance, Compliance & Risk
Restructuring
Structured pyramid hypothesis Problem Solv. - Hypothesis
Performance Mgmt
Activity Based Costing
Forecasting and Modeling
Strategy Planning
Balanced Scorecard
Customer Loyalty Mgmt
Business Model Design
M&A Due Diligence
Integration Management
Commercialization
New Product Dev.
Start Up/Restarts
Strategic Alliance Mgmt
Bid Process Mgmt
Target Operation Model
Appreciative Inquiry
Business Process Mgmt
Program Management
Portfolio Management
Project Management
Global Resource Mgmt
Six Sigma/
Lean/Value Stream
Kaizen/Workout
Continuous Improvement
Change Acceleration Management
Service Management
Budgeting – Operational / Capital Expense Planning
Vendor Management
Offshore/Outsource
Transitions/Deployments
IT Strategy & Enterprise Architecture
Application Development Optimization
Infrastructure Mgmt
Program Management Office
PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE
Horizon Investors/Renewal Equity – New York, NY
Senior Vice President, Corporate Renewal Services Jul 2010-Present
Lead 17 Management Accountants in transformation and turnaround initiatives across multiple investment portfolios for boutique Private Equity Firm. Have led business transformation program across firms $1.2B portfolios of companies and real estate assets. Have led structured strategy sessions, including business model redesigns to realigning value proposition and optimizing operating model, and led restructures to increase performance, productivity, and quality yielding the fund 85% compounded annual growth over the last 3 years, translating to a $400M value increase to fund. Lead monthly review of assets to monitor growth and stability. The Business Transformation Group restructures acquisitions to achieve growth, scalability, flexibility, and efficiency. Develop Core Competencies to respond to regulatory reforms, globalization strategies, and changing customer demands. We leverage pyramid, hypothesis driven problem solving with Target Operation Model design to achieve market share growth, increase profitability, reduce cost, and increase customer satisfaction. Lead Technology Investment Steering Committees to ensure solutions are delivered on-time, on-budget, and meet the expectations of the strategic initiatives.
Managing Director, Acquisitions & Integration Mar 2008-Jul 2010
Led over 1000 due diligence engagements for acquisitions with 15 financial and operational analyst yielding 35 acquisitions for an average investment of $15M at a 25% of market value. Responsible for aggregating, integrating, and optimizing acquisitions into new or existing companies across multiple market segments including renewable energy, real estate properties, and community education/health.
McGraw-Hill – New York, NY Mar 2006 – Mar 2008
Managing Director, Enterprise Strategy & Planning
Established Enterprise Program Management function to provide the capability to define and deliver corporate strategy, determine, and manage corporate investments for a $6.2B supplier of financial and business information and publisher of textbooks, industry trade journals. Responsible for $250M IT budget, $100M Capital budget, and 120 shared resources including 25 project managers, 15 business analyst, 8 enterprise architects, and 80+ offshore resources.
Accomplishments:
Facilitated segments and business functions in developing mid-range and long-term business strategy roadmaps that enforced the evaluation and selection of investments to contribute to enterprise strategic goals via steering committee mechanism yielding improved enterprise wide capability delivery management, reduced user impact while increasing acceptance, 50% resource cost avoidance and reduced annual corporate and cross-business capital projects from $350M to $150M while meeting strategic objectives and enhanced business capability.
Facilitate the restructuring of Corporate Information Management into a client focused, shared service delivery model with the leverage of global resources management function via outsource/offshore and business process management capability to enhance execution capability and reduce overall IT operational expense spend by 30%.
Establish a portfolio/program/project management processes, enhanced the governance of planning, aligning, sourcing and monitoring of key transformational initiatives and assets that reduced the project failures by 20% and cost overruns by 40%.
Led the Business Intelligence and Content Management Programs development and operations and transition them into Business Intelligence Competency Center and Content Management Center of Excellence shared service to the business units.
Unisys – Blue Bell, PA Mar 2003 – Mar 2006
Deploy and manage Operational Excellence initiative and led Business Strategy practice globally for a leading $6B Business Technology Outsourcing provider in the financial, government, transportation industries.
Quality Deployment Leader, Global Lean Six Sigma Dec 2005 – Mar 2006
Led Cross Business Program in Sales and Delivery excellence, while facilitating the deployment of 1st and 2nd waves throughout business units. Some of these initiatives included improving cash flow and working capital, reducing gross margin erosion, improving corporate strategy alignment and performance, Increasing competency capacity, utilization,
and productivity management, redesigning service/product management process, and optimizing the efficiency and effectiveness of deal structure, proposal and negotiation processes. Developed organizational change structures, processes, metrics and communication channels to ensure the success of projects via criteria based identification and selection of champions, sponsors, MBB, BB, GB and projects using Delta Model (Competitive Intelligence), Hoshin (Strategic Planning) and Balanced Scorecard (Corporate Performance Management) frameworks.
Accomplishments:
Led 100 global, corporate, cross business master blackbelts and blackbelts to improve gross and operational profit margins through enhanced deal structure negotiations, customer governance, and standardization of services and delivery processes and tools, as well as increase asset reuse and utilization. Improvements in gross margins by 5% through revenue loss avoidance of $100MM by reducing failed engagements from 50% to 30% within 7 months in North America, EMEA, Asia-Pac, and Latin America. Improvements in operating margins by 10% with a cost reduction of $60M by re-baselining resource capacity to market demand and leveraging of offshore low cost delivery models.
Champion for Customer Loyalty Program to baseline relationship effectiveness for top 500 clients. Quantitative proof that sales representatives who spent more than 260 hours per month providing consultative selling and value added services led to highest order rates & referrals. Trained 25% of sales force on consultative selling best practices and moved to an account centric model that yielded an increase of 25% of orders at a value of $50MM per quarter.
A baseline of 17% of clients generated over 85% over revenue and top 20% of clients averaged a cross-selling index of 3.2 compared to a 1.5 average for rest of clients. Conjoint analysis yielded that 5 core services comprised over 75% of revenue and ITO service was core competency, which led all cross sells of 4 other top services. Re-branded Unisys and realigned revenue goals around top 5 core services globally which led to a $150MM increase in revenue growth from cross-selling to next 250 accounts within 3 quarters.
Developed Lean based Transformation methodology to achieve target operating models, and to improve services, restructure costs, and foster growth for the Unisys 3D Visual Enterprise Framework, built on Zachmann’s Business Architecture models. Methodology was used to baseline and optimized 1st wave of cross business, cross geography value streams.
Practice Principal, Transformation, Strategy & Planning Practice, Mar 2003 – Dec 2005
Led enterprise level strategy and planning consulting practice. Sold ITO, BPO, KPO offshore/outsourcing, Six Sigma, Lean, organizational change, and enterprise strategy and program management for process improvement, design, and management services to achieve operation excellence, quick market intelligence, regulatory compliance, and governance. Led the use of leading frameworks, including CMMI, COBIT, ITIL to ensure target operating models were aligned to industry standards.
Accomplishments:
Countrywide (Financial): Engage corporate IT, Finance, and Internal Audit executives to develop Enterprise Risk Management & strategy Program to comply with regulatory requirements for Basel II, Sarbanes Oxley COSO and COBIT enterprise risk management standards.
Washington Mutual (Financial): Engaged Investment Management group to develop front to back-end processes to meet regulatory requirements. Enabled rapid development with Unisys ITO offshore development services.
Great Atlantic & Pacific Co (Retail): Engage COO, CFO and CIO in delivering enterprise regulatory compliance program office with integrated risk, control and process management responsibilities. Sarbanes Oxley compliance documentation via internal control assessment of financial reporting, business and IT control analysis, and process documentation against COSO and COBIT control guidelines. Developed and implemented sustainable risk management process with exception and change management to documented baseline and phase review workflow to manage the compliance and auditing lifecycle.
Eli Lilly (Pharmaceutical): Led turnaround of outsourcing program. Engage by developing a shared service strategy and function for technology and business back office services. Performance and process management methodology developed from service management, project management, Balanced Scorecard and Six Sigma integration.
Department of Defense /DFAS: Facilitate the proposal development for ITO and eventually BPO engagement with DFAS administration. Total contract value $85MM over 3 years.
JRDG – New York, NY
Apr 2001 – Mar 2003
CIO, Business Consulting Services
Led development of a strategy consulting practice for a marketing strategy boutique, growing revenues $50M over 2-year period. Services include concept and product development, segment analysis, branding strategy, e-Business, e-Commerce, and Continuity planning. Responsible for managing all faces of engagements and delivery resources.
Accomplishments:
JPMorganChase (Financial): Coached RMMFS Senior leadership in the deployment of Lean Six Sigma Program throughout the RMMFS division. Partnered with Deloitte Consulting to facilitated the development of a Global Resource Management Program (ITO/BPO) leveraging Lean target Operating Model design methods to re-align and mobilize non-core competencies to an offshore model for a cost reduction capture of $150MM. Re-designed business transformation project lifecycle for all Six Sigma, E-business, Digitization, and strategic initiatives to capture baseline value stream maps for future quality initiatives. Benchmark cross-selling index identified average products cross-sold of 1.5 products against Citigroup 3.5 products per customer. Integrated all Customer Relationship Management under single Contact Center model were opportunities for cross-selling products increase 300% during support calls.
Vivendi/Universal (Media): Redesign and development of corporate website, developed online marketing applications to build online communities. Leveraged Design for Six Sigma methodology and quantitative tools to mass customize customer segments by locality, professional status, and affinity.
NY Times (Media): Develop syndication and production workflow of NY Times Digital website operations, fully integrating Associated Press and Times National news services.
PrincetonEcom (Retail): Design and develop e-Business portal and integrated electronic billing and presentment services. Leveraged Lean Design methods and tools to capture business requirements to develop customer channels and services.
UBM/PRNEWSWIRE – Jersey City, NJ Aug 2000 – Apr 2001
Program Manager, United Business Media IT Center of Excellence
Establish IT Governance Center of Excellence for a $2B information clearinghouse with directory databases, publications, and industry events. Responsible for standardizing IT processes and project management practices throughout North America subsidiaries such as CMP and PRNewswire. Establish a program management office by integrating project, change, knowledge, and quality management to manage PRNewswire transformation initiatives.
Accomplishments:
Collaborated on the due diligence and integration of Cyperus (France) and Xinhua Financial News (Hong Kong) acquisitions by PRNewswire.
Software Development Lifecycle redesign based on Rational Unified Process and Extreme Programming best practices. Reduce time to market and scope creep of key initiatives with multi-generation planning of
business requirement to reduce scope creep to critical business initiatives that previously led to stalled, revamped, derailed projects.
Implement portfolio management process to support Technology Review Board in better accessing project progressions to re-aligned large stalled projects, reducing excessive consulting burn rates by over 75%. Captured overall cost avoidance exceeded $15Million and exceeded the expected operations cost-reduction of 25% to 35% of overall SGA.
MEDIASOUL – New York, NY
Oct 1999 – Aug 2000
Chief Executive Officer and Board Member
Startup providing digital rights management and syndication services of music, radio, and concert content serving the media and entertainment industry. Initiated, negotiated and established strategic alliances and intellectual property rights contracts with major concert promoters and radio networks.
General Electric/NBC – New York, NY
May 1994 – Oct 1999
Successfully completed senior assignments that facilitated operational excellence, new product development & introduction, quick market intelligence, post-merger integration, and new ventures launches strategic initiatives that contributed to accelerated transformation and growth from $4B to $14B dollar media conglomerate.
Director, Global Telecommunications May 1997 - Oct 1999
Managed the Telecommunications program, including engineering and support operations of the video, data, and voice telecommunications network world wide with a staff 40 and 5 reports and $120MM Expense and $15MM Capital budgets annually.
Accomplishments:
Champion the capture of $50MM cost savings via worldwide voice, video and data networks convergence, contract renegotiation; technology services policy revision; call center optimization.
Operations Director/MBB, Broadcast & Network Operations
May 1995 – May 1997
Co-managed the NBC television network broadcast operations for news, entertainment, sports division with a staff of 80-160, 8 direct reports.
Accomplishments:
Six Sigma project saved News division $15MM a year by outsourcing news feeds distribution operations to strategic partner, while creating a new revenue stream of $250MM from the syndication of digital on demand news feeds.
Capture of customer value drivers from clients on-site improvement projects to develop innovative target advertisement solution that led to a first to market advantage capturing premiums, expanded market to spot sales market, building deep customer loyalty which led to low cost new client acquisition from referrals increasing revenue by $1.5B.
Establishment of quality assurance practices to reduce revenue loss or rework cost from on-air outages and anomalies of commercials.
Blackbelt, Broadcast & Network Operations
Oct 1994 - May 1995
Facilitate the global rollout and implement Six Sigma throughout the Broadcast & Network Operations division that accounted for 60% of overall cost. Establish a performance management system with executive dashboards and
business process scorecards to track improvements and cost savings. Collaborate on strategic planning of digitization of NBC broadcasting plant.
Technical Manager, WNBC
Jul 1994 – Oct 1994
Support the General Manager to identify cost savings opportunities with workout events throughout the sales & marketing, broadcast and news operations, and engineering departments. Managed all Information systems and supported Weekend Today, Live@5, 6 & 11 news technical operations coordination.
GE Capital – Stamford, CT Mar 1994 – Jul 1994
Management Associate/Blackbelt
Led Six Sigma Design project for the re-engineering of loan origination process for the commercial loans division. Participated in the GE Global vendor qualification process design across all GE business units worldwide.
Andersen Consulting – New York, NY
May 1993 – Mar 1994
Project Lead/Business Analyst, BPR
Business strategy consulting with client need and gap analysis, developed process and technology implementation proposal, solutions implementation and documentation. Responsible for business process reengineering and implementing Siebel CRM/SFA solution for Bechtel Corporation, including mapping and
streamlining sales force process and operations, establishing database structure for document library and customer profiles for mobile sales force support.
Mobil Oil – Pennington, NJ
May 1989 - May 1993
Quality Engineer, Call Center Operations
Supported Director of Call Center Operations in developing vendor, quality, and productivity management reports aligned to corporate service objectives and implement workflow management throughout the Call Center. Designed and developed interactive Expert system (Knowledge Management) for decision support in service provisioning and recovery. Revamped Trouble Ticketing system to support integrated automated management reports (Pareto, histograms) for vendor management & operations improvement strategy.
EDUCATION
RENSSELAER POLYTECHNIC INSTITUTE – Troy, NY
Bachelor of Science, Major: Computer & Systems Engineering
Minors: Management (Organization Research), Computer Science
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY – New York, NY
School of Engineering and Applied Science & School of Architecture, Combined Program
Major: Construction Management, Architecture & Civil Engineering
ANDERSEN UNIVERSITY – Chicago, IL
Business Restructuring & Process Reengineering
Hypothesis Driven Consulting
GE CRONTONVILLE – Crotonville, NY
GE Workout Facilitator
GE Six Sigma Blackbelt/PMI Certification
GE Manager Training
GE Finances for Managers
GE Integration Manager
GE Six Sigma Master Blackbelt Certification
Unisys University – Blue Bell, PA
Unisys Strategic KPI (Balanced Scorecard) Certification
AFFILIATIONS
Turnaround Management Association, Member
Institute of Management Accountants, Member
International Society of Six Sigma Professionals, Member
Strategic Management Society, Member
Council on Foundation/Hispanics in Philanthropy, Member