At the 2024 edition of the Biomanufacturing World Summit series we sat down with Hari Pujar of Tessera Therapeutics and Flagship Pioneering to offer a concise but still in-depth look at the present and future of biopharmaceutical manufacturing, especially as it relates to Advanced Therapy Medicinal Products (ATMPs). Incredible progress has been made and is being made, but of course there are bottlenecks to be addressed as the industry grows, and as these new treatments become commercially available, the issue of cost comes into sharp focus. Where does the industry find itself today, and what are its plans for tomorrow? Give this interview a listen for a terrific window into the state of an industry on the cusp of an incredibly bright future.
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Hari Pujar
Chief Operating Officer & Operating Partner
Tessera Therapeutics & Flagship Pioneering

Hari is a biopharmaceutical executive with experience in vaccine, biologics, mRNA, small molecule, gene therapy modalities, with a passion for value creation. He has enterprise-wide experience including platform and product development, cGMP manufacturing, and commercial, with geographies spanning North and South America, Europe, and Asia.

North American Manufacturing Excellent Summit 2021 was held virtually due to COVID19, but that did not prevent hundreds of senior manufacturing executives and the service and solution providers relevant to their interests from coming together to network, benchmark, learn, and share with one another during what has been a difficult year in uncharted business territory.

In this interview, Willem Sundblad of Oden Technologies shares some of his expertise on, “Intelligent Industrial Automation: How Manufacturers can Leverage Pre-Built Machine Learning to Leverage Existing Data and Drive Fast Time to Value.”
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Willem Sundblad is the co-founder and CEO of Oden Technologies, a company empowering manufacturers to make more, waste less and innovate faster through machine learning and applied analytics. He is a Forbes.com contributing writer and a recognized leading voice in Industrial IoT. He is pioneering the use of real-time and predictive analytic tools that uncover untapped value. Sundblad aims to transform the manufacturing industry by digitizing, analyzing and perfecting peak factory performance. In his spare time he takes every chance he gets to enjoy the mountains, either skiing, hiking or climbing.
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Oden Technologies is a manufacturing analytics platform that leverages your existing assets and systems to help manufacturers optimize production. As a ready to use platform, Oden works out of the box and provides value from day one by making it easy to access your data and solve problems. Oden’s pre-built machine learning models help customers drive fast performance and quality improvements by identifying and prescribing process settings to utilize on a continuous basis. Predictive intelligent alerting ensures operations can proactively avoid making bad product before it is too late.

oden.io

At the 2025 edition of the North American HR Executive Summit series we sat down with Barbara Hess of CCS Medical to talk about the power and responsibility HR professionals have to help the C-Suite executives of their organization set a tone and reflect the values they want to see in their company culture. While leading by example is always important and valuable, there are all kinds of tangible dividends that pay out when a workforce sees what its leadership care about and put their energies towards. From productivity to safety to retention to cultural transformations that build positive outcomes in all sorts of ways, big and small, a lot a of great things can come from HR working with senior leadership to build culture. For all this and more, give this episode a listen!

Barbara Hess
Chief Human Resources Officer
CCS Medical

Barb Hess is an accomplished senior human resources executive with an impressive history of helping private equity-backed organizations build critical infrastructure, scale, and achieve successful exits. Her success in private equity environments is rooted in her ability to quickly diagnose situations, generate practical solutions, make thoughtful decisions, and drive consensus across executive teams/boards of directors.

Barb is currently Chief Human Resources Officer for CCS Medical and since 2021, has been an integral part in standing up the CCS Health business, growing company revenue, expanding headcount 20-30% YOY while doubling the patient base, and boosting talent retention by 30% in a highly competitive labor market. Prior to this, she served as Chief Human Resources Officer for private equity-backed Medical Specialties Distributors (MSD) where her leadership and talent/succession management expertise contributed to the company’s rapid growth ($350M to $800M in 2 years) and ultimate sale to McKesson.

Earlier in Barb’s career, she was Director of Organizational Development for Cardinal Health (Fortune 20), where she implemented enterprise-wide solutions that shaped global culture and sustained progress via gaining C-Suite support and skillful change management. Barb started her career with Nationwide Insurance as an HR Business Partner supporting 4.5K employees across the Financial Services and IT groups.

Barb earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Management/Labor Relations from Cleveland State University and a Master’s degree in Industrial/Organizational Psychology from Capella University. Outside of work, she is active in the community with organizations such as Make-aWish (Executive Chair of Governance and Compensation Committee / Board Member for OH, KY, & IN) and The James Cancer Care Center fundraiser. Barb also enjoys having fun with friends and family, running, outdoor activities, and world travel.

At the 2024 edition of the North American Finance Executive Summit series we sat down with Tom Hood, AICPA & CIMA’s EVP — Business Engagement and Growth, to explore one of the most topical and timely topics out there at the moment: How is Generative AI going to impact me? Senior Finance leaders are in a particularly exciting place with this new and emerging technology, as their function already has a lot of familiarity and comfort-level with different forms of automation, and data already flows into their department. Is there an opportunity for Finance to be at the forefront of their organization’s adoption of Generative AI? What would that look like in real terms, and what should Finance professionals be thinking about and learning about as they prepare themselves for the future? How are associations like AICPA & CIMA helping people get up to speed, stay informed and engaged, and understand both the challenges and the opportunities of this exciting new tool? For all this and more, give this episode a listen!

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Tom Hood, CPA, CGMA
EVP – Business Engagement and Growth
AICPA & CIMA

Tom Hood, CPA, CITP, CGMA is currently the EVP Business Growth & Engagement for AICPA-CIMA and the Business Learning Institute.

Tom recently stepped onto the global stage of the largest association of certified professional accountants in the world, representing over 690,000 CPAs, CGMAs, and students. He was named the second most influential person in accounting by Accounting Today Magazine for the tenth year.

His focus is elevating and accelerating the role of CPAs and CGMAs in corporate and management accounting.

In 2012 LinkedIn recruited Tom as one of their Top 100 Influencers and he now has a following of over 730,000. He is a member of Forbes Finance Council and was inducted into the Accounting Hall of Fame. He is the former CEO of the Maryland Association of CPAs and former CFO of a highway construction company. He has a Master’s in Finance from Johns Hopkins University and a Bachelor’s degree in Accounting from Loyola University of Maryland.

He lives in Baltimore with his wife Sharon.

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AICPA & CIMA

The Association of International Certified Professional Accountants® (the Association), represents AICPA® & CIMA®. We advance the global accounting and finance profession through its work on behalf of 696,000 AICPA and CIMA members, students and engaged professionals in 192 countries and territories. Together, we are the worldwide leader on public and management accounting issues through advocacy, support for the CPA license and specialized credentials, professional education and thought leadership. We build trust by empowering our members and engaged professionals with the knowledge and opportunities to be leaders in broadening prosperity for a more inclusive, sustainable, and resilient future.

cgma.org

At the 2023 edition of the North American Sustainability & Responsibility Summit series we sat down with Stephen Molen, the Chief Revenue Officer of Cority, to talk about how more and more Environmental Health and Safety professionals have seen their company's Sustainability performance become part of their role. Why is that a natural fit for so many organizations? How does it change the existing EHS function? What should business leaders understand about this trend to help their EHS people better gather, document, and report on ESG performance? How is technology helping these people broaden and deepen their capabilities and skillsets? We discuss all this and more. Give this episode a listen!
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Stephen Molen has held several progressively senior Sales leadership positions with Navex Global, Clinicient, and Viewpoint. Stephen was a key part of the team at Navex Global that grew the company to $200 M in revenues. Stephen’s original company, EthicsPoint, was acquired by Navex Global along with three other companies. Stephen was a key part of the team that integrated the sales teams and companies. During Stephen’s 2+ years at Viewpoint, they grew revenues from $100 M to $200 M, growing EBITDA margin from 30% to 50%. Stephen’s sales team grew net new sales bookings from $6 M to $30 M, at which point Viewpoint was acquired by strategic investor, Trimble. Stephen has worked with Private Equity firms Vista, Riverside, Catalyst, and Bain Capital and with his companies’ Boards of Directors.
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Cority is the global enterprise EHS software provider that develops industry leading technology. We make it easy to harness the power of our software to create higher levels of operational and sustainable performance and help organizations ensure their data is accurate and auditable. Our global enterprise platform unites the full spectrum of powerful solutions to empower healthier, safer, smarter, and more sustainable outcomes that fulfill today’s business imperative—creating a better enterprise for tomorrow.

Cority has the industry’s highest levels of client satisfaction and has received many awards for its strong employee culture and outstanding business performance.
www.cority.com