Nikhil Arora

The Exchange format is a unique, high-level forum that brings together senior industry leaders, innovators, and decision-makers for meaningful and strategic interactions.

- Strategic Vision: Architected and operationalized the enterprise Data Science, MLOps, and AI strategy/platform, collaborating with the C-suite to maximize value realization. - P&L Lift: Achieved a $7M/year profit lift through new ML-based dynamic pricing, deployed successfully across three distinct lines of business. - Operational Savings: Drove data science transformation across trucking operations, yielding $4.5M/year in cost efficiencies. - Deployment Velocity: Orchestrated the enterprise AI platform (Azure ML/Snowflake), resulting in a 15% reduction in model deployment time-to-value. - Innovation: Established and managed the R&D innovation pipeline, successfully moving 4 production implementations from 35 initial concepts in two years. - Team & Budget: Directed 45 data scientists and software engineers, managing an $8M annual budget. - Strategic Partnerships: Established a strategic capstone program with UW Madison, targeting a 5-10% potential increase in freight sales. - Performance: Championed OKR-based management across the entire Technology division.

Advising UW Green Bay and collaborating universities in design and administration of the Masters of Data Science program.

- Record Revenue Growth: Automated order acceptance with AI/ML, driving a $28M profit gain (6% lift) by optimizing decision-making and enhancing productivity. - Financial Oversight: Led Data Science initiatives that delivered a $9M EBIT improvement. - Platform Modernization: Formulated and executed the data strategy for a Snowflake/Azure migration, boosting enterprise data governance and accessibility by 20%. - Team Leadership: Directed a 55-member multi-disciplinary team; created the Flexible Analytics team to deliver quick insights and data self-service. - Strategic Partnerships: Established a near-shore center of excellence, driving 30% cost reduction in software development and AI/ML production.

- High-Value Consulting: Secured $15M in customer savings from complex supply chain design and transportation optimization projects. - Acquisition Integration: Led supply chain design to integrate a business acquisition, reducing annual operating cost by $4M. - Innovation: Original research on simplifying supply chains, published in the Inbound Logistics journal. - Sales growth: Created novel analytics product to boost transportation synergies among shippers: 10% cost savings. - Team Leadership: Directed an 11-member team, exercising full budgetary authority.

- Financial Impact & Cost Reduction: Delivered $12M in customer cost savings while generating $3M in new Enterprise revenue through specialized engineering consulting services. - Strategic Service Development: Developed and implemented a comprehensive service strategy, integrating advanced analytics to drive client productivity and ensure service line P&L accountability. - Team Transformation & Growth: Led department turnaround, achieving a 50% increase in team headcount and productivity by improving requirements gathering and bolstering staff engagement.

- Portfolio Expansion: Strategically expanded the R&D productivity portfolio, escalating measured value from $17M to $110M in five years; Recognized with a Leadership Award. - Optimization Modeling: Identified and drove R&D projects including: De-bottlenecking manufacturing (>$10M), Routing optimization ($3M), and Inventory management ($2M). - Strategic Partnerships: Established research partnership with Carnegie Mellon University.

- Global Optimization: Slashed $10M by optimizing the global cylinder business supply chain using proprietary operations research models and novel truck routing system. - Innovation & Savings: Achieved $2M annual savings by developing and implementing production and liquid distribution planning tools.

Implemented non-linear model predictive control to a polypropylene plant that saved $500k annually

Introduced new optimization methods to the group and deployed them in the internal statistical package

Focused on application of Operations Research in the Chemical Industry Designed Algorithm to Estimate Parameters in Large-Scale Dynamic Process Models; Optimized the Silicon Production Process