Hello and welcome. My name is Shannon Kemp and I'm the Chief Digital Manager of Data Diversity. We are proud to produce the webinar series of Data Governance Case Studies for the Data Governance Professionals Organization. We'd like to thank you for joining today's DGPO webinar and the opportunity not to be missed at the Data Governance journey. Just a couple of points to get us started. Due to the large number of people that attend these sessions, you will be muted during the webinar. For questions, we will be collecting them by the Q&A section in the bottom right-hand corner of your screen. Or if you'd like to tweet, we encourage you to share our highlights or questions via Twitter using hashtag DGPO. So now let me turn the webinar over to Niko from Data Governance Professionals Organization to introduce today's webinar and speaker. Hello and welcome. Thank you, Shannon. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, everyone. As a reminder, the recording for the webinar will be posted in the DVPO members only section of the DVPO website in a few days. I would also like to provide a brief overview of the Data Governance Professionals Organization, affectionately referred to as the DVPO. The DVPO is a community of Data Governance Professionals whose mission is to share knowledge, content, and best practices for its members to build a community of practice. Towards that goal, a group of individuals are working on expanding our best practice information for the six areas you see in the graphic on the lower left side of the slide. To learn more about the DVPO, please visit our website at dvpo.org. To honor those companies that have advanced in their Data Governance Program, the DVPO awarded our first Data Governance Best Practice Award this year. The award is given to the practitioners within a customer organization in recognition of the business value and technical excellence they have achieved in the design and implementation of an outstanding Data Governance Program. We had 18 submissions, and these companies are being featured in our DVPO webinar series throughout this year. I am thrilled to have the privilege of introducing today's speaker, Kevin Lehmann from ADV. Kevin is the Director of Foundation Master Data for ADV Biopharmaceuticals and has over 20 years of experience in the life sciences industry where he has exercised his IT and CPA backgrounds to lead large-scale transformation initiatives. A self-described beam counting that had Kevin strives to identify and drive a clear business value approach through the disciplines of data governance. So without further delay, it's my pleasure to hand today's session over to Kevin. Welcome. Thank you, Annika. What I'd like to do is share with everyone the journey that ADV has been on. This is really our story of development of a dedicated master data governance organization for our core transactional data. Who we are, where we've come from, where we're going, and some of the things we've accomplished along the way. Like many of our peers, in many areas we feel like we're still in our infancy, but we're eager to stretch our legs and move from crawling to toddling to running. We've seen some of the discussions from the winners of the award and it really is something that I aspire to be able to share sometime in the future. We appreciate that opportunity. I am excited to discuss our journey. I'd like to thank the DGPO for giving us this opportunity. We've learned a lot from our colleagues in data governance and appreciate this opportunity to share back. Throughout the discussion, I'll use the terms master data governance and data governance fairly interchangeably, as I think a lot of the principles apply regardless. You can't have good transactional or analytical data without good master data. I also want to point out this was very much a team effort. I'm the only one speaking today, but along with me are many others from the ABV master data team, IT, and our external partners, and I'll mention some of their contributions throughout the discussion. We're all working hard to bring the very best possible data to our users, customers, and vendors. You'll notice this deck is more of a narrative style rather than a strict bullet point, which may help if you look at it a little bit later or don't recall everything that I had to say, or if you want to share it with your colleagues who weren't able to join today. On to the next one. So as we look at what has been accomplished, first I need to share a little bit about ABV and a little bit about myself. So ABV is a spinoff of Abbott Labs. We're a global biopharmaceutical company with over 30,000 employees in a few key therapeutic areas, immunology, oncology, neuroscience, and virology. As was mentioned in the introduction about myself, I have finance as well as IT experience, thus the beam counting bit head, with over 20 years in the life sciences space. And I come from a professional background, and I really want to use that mindset to build a professional organization. There should be generally accepted good governance practices just like there generally accepted accounting practices. And ideally there would be associated training and certifications recognized throughout the industry. Thus my support and appreciation for the activities and services of the DGPO. One last thing, I am recovering from a cold, so if the line goes silent for a few seconds, that's just me pressing the mute and clearing my throat. I apologize ahead of time if we need to do that. When we look at our data governance journey, it's really about addressing our global business needs. So a little bit of background, in 2013 after becoming an independent company from Abbott, we had decisions to make. We needed to either set up our own new systems or clone the Abbott systems and processes, or some combination of the two. And the decision was made that we were going to set up our own new single instance SAP environment. So if you look at the lower left, that was the Abbott ERP landscape in 2012. That's where we were at. By the time we finished our foundation program in 2015, we were on a single instance SAP system. And not only had we implemented a new system, but we had also put in place global harmonized processes for order to cash, procure to pay, record to report our operations and payroll. And so that model that we used is what we wanted then to be able to replicate across the organization wherever possible. So we have a global process organization end to end. We have gone through the hard work of harmonizing those processes, getting them documented, identifying what were the best practices and really instantiating them. We also looked at how we could leverage shared services to the best extent. So we have a BPO partner that we use, not just in the transactional processes, but also in some of the master data processes. And we'll talk about that. So coming off of the formal foundation program which ended in 2015, we had a very unique opportunity to build a good architecture, a supportable, sustainable organization. And this was truly an opportunity not to be missed. And so coming out, we decided that we wanted a master data organization that would reflect some of the principles that we had seen as we built the foundation organization and landscape. And so what we're going to see a little bit more here now is that organization to reflect. There we go. So our overarching vision was to model this master data organization on the post-implementation, global process organization, harmonized tools and processes, global scope, dedicated focus on improvements and so forth. And when we were working on the development of this organization, we talked to a number of our consulting partners that had helped us with foundation. And we said, okay, what are some of the best practices in master data governance? What's the best way to structure this organization? What should be some of the goals, key objectives, et cetera? And so what you're seeing here is really a compounding and culmination of those suggestions for best practices and what we could develop within our existing organization structure. Okay? So the data governance program had three primary goals. One was to make sure that we're leveraging this new asset that we've built, the master data component of that. Make sure that we have a team that is focused on the master data, making sure that we've got a dedicated business team. So we're set aside in the business. We're part of the CFO organization. We're not part of IT. And we want to maximize then again our tools that we have. I'll talk a little bit about that in a few moments. But we have a tool set that we inherited and we wanted to be able to leverage that set as much as possible. So when we look at our objectives, the first again, make sure we have a business led master data organization that's going to oversee our vision, drive best practices, improve our ROI. We had our first significant milestone which was creating the organization from the different functional areas. So we had our own budget head count. We have project funding set aside for our various improvement projects. Not a lot of funding, but some funding. So at least we've got that. And then we've been working on aligning our business stakeholders with our processes, goals, our long-term plan to make sure that we're in sync with their objectives and we can support them and that they understand and recognize what it is that we're doing from our objectives and best practices. And what we were able to develop along the way is a five-year roadmap that what we want to do and when we want to get it done. Now it's a roadmap. It's not a funded plan at this point, but at least helps set the direction, helps us communicate with our stakeholders where we're going, what we want to do, et cetera. And we've made some progress on that and I'll talk about that as well. From the tools perspective, we have, I think I mentioned we have SAP is our global ERP. We have a tool from back office associates called Data Stewardship Platform or DSP that we've leveraged for a lot of our front-end data quality and we're continuing to leverage that tool and continuously improve our processes and efficiencies. We have a dedicated IT team that helps us both as well as understanding the SAP ramifications of the master data. Some activities we do directly in SAP and they assist us with that. So we've got a good working relationship with our vendors, with our IT colleagues and to use that and to leverage that to continue to build our master data capabilities within the organization. So when we look at the scope of our organization, we do have the global SAP instance. That's our primary responsibility. But we're also looking at how we can improve upstream and downstream systems. I'll talk about a couple initiatives we have underway right now when we get a little bit further in the presentation. But primarily right now we're focused on our transactional data. We have material, vendor, customer, and finance master objectives as well as teams to support those. We're looking at both the, I guess what we call the active management of the data. So where we have new records being created or existing records being updated. But we're also looking at the quality of the existing data. And when we get into a couple slides I'll further flesh out a little bit. But that's one of the things that we learned from some discussions that we've had with other data governance professionals. Some of the seminars that I've been to is really what are the components of data governance that we need to be focusing on. Initially it was primarily just the assumption that hey, if we make sure we have good records coming into the system, garbage in, garbage out, or quality stays in I guess. But there's also this concept of the aging of the data in the application and how do we know where we're at with that. When we talk about the progress of the organization, this is a good part of our journey that I'll talk about here. We started as official organization January 1st, 2015. And primarily that was more of an accounting adjustment rather than anything else, budget adjustment. We moved the headcount from one organization to another. We moved the funding to the central team here. But most of the efforts were really still focused on finishing up the deployments that were ongoing or completing and really cleaning things up from those deployments. And then we moved into an upgrade of the DSP tool. That was our first major project as an organization. It was a very substantial effort. But we're seeing benefits from that. And I'll talk about those in another slide. As we went through that upgrade, we learned a lot of things about the tool set, some of the capabilities and limitations. We learned some of the things about how we're working together as a team that I think has helped mature the organization. So we went live, what, September, August, September, something like that in 2016. And then we took a little pause, a little breather, to evaluate where we were at as a new MDM team. And we had some consulting assistance with that. There's a model that they compared us to along 11 different categories of maturity and really helped us understand where we were doing well, where we had risks, and where we had opportunities. So that was a couple of months' engagement, but really helped us better understand where we were at in our maturity, where we needed to go, and fed in a lot of the components to our five-year roadmap. So as we spent that time with our consultants, we were talking to our stakeholders and really, I think, focusing both inwardly and externally to understand what we need to do next. And I'm going to talk about the five-year roadmap, and I don't mean to keep you on a baited hook, but we'll talk about that in a little bit further. What I want to do right now, then, is talk about some of our organization roles, have an understanding of what we look like as an organization, what we're doing, how we're structured. So when pulled together as an entity within finance, we had, again, worked with our consulting partners to pull together best practice recommendations, and we are a set of dedicated folks that focus primarily between the strategic activities and the transactional. Of course, we have to focus on the transactional activities first and foremost. We need to make sure that we have new customers set up, new products set up, et cetera. But as we mature as an organization, we want to move away from the more basic transactional activities to more of a strategic focus. And I think you'll see that reflected here in our roles and responsibilities. So when we look at the organization, I'm the director, the master data lead, so I'm responsible for integrating across our different stewards. I mentioned earlier we have a steward per data tower, so a finance master data steward, customer steward, material steward, and finance steward. And they each have their organizations that support them. But I'm responsible for making sure that we're well integrated across the different stewards that we have a good understanding of the data throughout the organization, that we understand the impacts if we're changing data, aligning with our key business stakeholders, and really setting the direction, it's a director role, right? So setting the direction for the organization, making sure that we're striking the appropriate balance between strategic initiatives and the more tactical transactional initiatives. And then also working with the stewards and our business stakeholders to make sure that we're continuously improving our processes, that we have both data integrity, that we have good data quality, and that we're cognizant of the business priorities and the projects that our stakeholders are working on so that we can be prepared and support them as well. I'm accountable to our global process leads, so ordered cash, procure to pay, record to report. Those are my direct stakeholders, customers, if you will, but also the other business stakeholders. So Treasury, finance, operations, those are all business stakeholders in the master data processes. Our stewards then, so my direct reports, are responsible for executing the strategies for their respective towers. They make sure that they're closely aligned with their respective global process leads, so customers working with ordered cash, et cetera. They're responsible for maintaining the data quality, making sure that we're developing usable KPIs making sure that when projects are proposing changes that we understand the impacts of those changes and we can prepare for and support those appropriately, making sure our users are knowledgeable of the tool and trained in it, and being consistent across the different data types within their areas and across the other different domains. And then supporting our stewards, there's a master data coordinator. This is the individual then that is a little bit more tactical focused, but they are the right-hand person of the stewards. And they're frequently the ones that really have the in-depth data knowledge. When you look at the steward role, it's going to have more of a strategic component than a tactical component. And the coordinators, typically, are going to be the ones that really understand the depths of the data. When we also look at the organization that supports master data, I've talked about my team of direct reports and consultants, but we also have our shared services organization. And I would be remiss if I didn't also describe their role. So it's evolving, but as much as possible, we want our shared services organization to be able to provide the more transactional focused activities, the rules-based activities that we can move off the plate of my more experienced stewards and coordinators so that they can focus more on strategic activities and have more of the rote transactional activities handled by the shared services organization. And they're frequently time-distributed, so they're more able to support our global organization on a timely basis. And I should also reinforce that our organization supports all the countries, so we have a global support requirement. And so the BPO, by being in the different time zones, can help us with that. Let's talk about communications a little bit. I've mentioned the stakeholders that we have. It's very important to stay closely aligned with our process stakeholders and our other business stakeholders. We provide a monthly update to our stakeholders through what we call end-to-end meetings. And this group really functions as a de facto data governance board. We don't have a single set-aside data governance board at this point. That may be something that we look at in the future. I know a lot of organizations do have one, and it's recommended as a best practice. I don't have one at this point. Maybe something we grow into. But we do have these monthly updates with our senior management, and that's where we have an opportunity to present updates on our metrics, as well as the projects, the key initiatives that we're working on. We have a formal project process, a methodology and tool for our larger projects where we go through and we identify what are the costs of the projects, what are the impacted organizations, what's the timeframe for getting the project done, what are the business benefits, what's the cost, et cetera. And we review these in a bi-weekly, what we call change review board, CIR review board, sorry, but basically turns into a change review board. So they add all of the different functions and organizations that comprise the foundation landscape are aware of these large initiatives. Where we have master data-specific initiatives, we'll provide updates on those. Through this organization, as well as our monthly meetings. When we talk about the KPIs and the metrics, we have both performance as well as quality metrics that we're reporting on. The performance metrics talk about how quickly we're adding up new records or how quickly we're processing updates. We talk about the costs for the records. We'll talk about how many records have been archived in the time period if that's a relevant metric. So we have those performance metrics. We also are working on quality metrics. So that is an area that we're revolving on. I mentioned earlier that we had really focused primarily on our active governance and now we're focusing a little bit more on our passive or quality governance. So we've introduced some quality metrics that we're providing on a regular basis and we're going to continue to grow that. So those are some of the metrics and KPIs that we report on. One of the things that I've been interested in is more performance metrics with other organizations. And that's a challenging thing to do because everybody is different. It depends on your industry, et cetera. But if there are other published metrics that someone can point my way, I'd really appreciate it. It would be useful to understand that and just to see where we fit up against other organizations. There is a consulting organization. I'm not sure if I can say it on the call. So maybe, Shannon, you can tell me later. But we have worked with them and they do their own metrics gathering and comparison. And so we're working with them on comparing ourselves to the organizations that are within their specific domain. But it's not an industry representative sample, unfortunately. But it's better than nothing. So that's on the metrics and initiatives. And it's been very productive to have these updates. I think that's one of the key criteria to being successful with this type of model in this organization is to make sure that we have really good open discussions with our key stakeholders. We also have key user meetings. This is a little bit lower level where the data stewards are talking about the key initiatives, et cetera, with our power users, our key users. And they go down to a little bit lower level talking about tips and what issues we're facing, what are some upcoming changes, et cetera. Again, in the communications realm, very helpful, very important to keep those discussions going back and forth. And then finally, we have a SharePoint site that has been developed and we're working to continue to develop and improve where we're able to share tips and FAQs, metrics, training, et cetera to anyone in the organization that is interested that has a use for it. Metrics, there are some things that I can't share, but there are some general things that I can share and wanted to provide that. When we implemented our tool, specifically benchmarked before calculations and some of our performance metrics. And what we saw before the tool and shortly after the tool implementation was a 12% reduction in our average cost per record, 14% reduction in time to enter, 22% reduction in the number of clicks. The metrics themselves, as important as the story that they tell and the fact that we took the time to measure before and after. So I talked earlier about our Charter AsterData as an asset and part of what we want to do is make sure that we are taking appropriate and relevant measures that looking at things from a cost-benefit analysis standpoint. So when we look at the average cost per record reducing, that's a solid win that we can take to our senior management and help them understand this reduction times this number of annual records being created and updated across the organization. That's real savings. That is significant when you extrapolate that across the organization. And so as part of our approach, if you will, as part of our finance approach, these are the types of things that are very important to be able to track and demonstrate. We also have been looking this year on metrics, our quality metrics, I mean, where we've identified what are some of the quality metrics that we can track through the system, through queries and so forth. What's the baseline? So where are we at right now? And where do we want to get to? So, for example, I put one up there. So we measured here that we're at 90% as a baseline, for example. So the next step is to work with our stakeholders and say, okay, we're at 90% now, where should we be? Should it be 100%? Is it okay to have less than 100%? And why? And so we're taking a rational approach to these metrics, making sure that we understand, first of all, where we're at right now and where we want to go. And then as much as possible, being able to automate these metrics so that we're not burning a lot of human-being cycles to generate something like this when a simple query would be able to return it for us. So that's just an example of some of the things that we've been working on from a performance and quality standpoint. And then our next slide will talk a little bit more about some of these activities that we've got going on this year as well as planned for next year and some upcoming beyond that. Looking forward to the future, things that we've done this year and really things that we want to do going forward. And this is part of our five-year roadmap to elevate our master data governance across the organization. So the first thing that I want to talk about is this racy matrix that we did. So this was our first attempt at identifying four-hour key data elements, the business owners. I think there was a lot of instinctive on who the data owners are. But up until this point, we as an organization had never gone through any exercise to verify that our assumptions were correct. So each of our teams went through and identified what are their key data elements and then went through with their stakeholders and put them into a racy format. So the key data elements are those critical ones that if we don't get them right, the transaction is going to fail or bad things will happen. So we had, I mean, this is a multi-month exercise to go through with our stakeholders. But in some instances, there was very clear whatever Treasury has this one. Okay, Treasury is here, they agree, great, we're done. In some instances, we have others that nobody wanted. And in some instances, we had some that multiple organizations felt that they owned. And, you know, when we all have immediate agreement, okay, that's a nice intellectual exercise. But where we really found the benefit was when we didn't have agreement where there was no clear owner and we needed to identify one or where there were multiple owners that disagreed on who owned it and we got to play referee. Now, in my view of the world, master data, our organization shouldn't own any of these elements. There should be a clearly identified business transactional stakeholder, someone that is going to suffer if something goes wrong with the data. And in very rare instances would it be the master data team? And I'll give you one example. We had a tax field. And you would normally assume that tax would say, oh yeah, that's my field, you know, we're clear on that. But in the discussion that happened, as I'm told by my finance master data steward, tax said, oh yeah, this was IT. And IT basically came back and said, oh no, no, this is a tax field. Well, tax says, well, when we were populating it, you always told us to put this value in here so we thought that was just our only option. IT further explained, well, no, this is a default. You can put whatever value you want in. In that case, we can improve our tax position, reduce exposure, et cetera, if we can change some of these values. Great. So we now have an identified funded 2018 project to go through and rationalize that field across our master data domain so that we can improve our tax position and reduce exposure, et cetera. So that was a very clear win coming out of this exercise. Other examples, maybe not so momentous, but we had a recent discussion on a master data field. The question was raised, well, who owns this field? Oh, well, let's go check the RACI. Oh, this organization owns it. Oh, okay. So off we go to that organization. Hey, we have a problem. Can you help us? So that was an exercise that I think had benefit to the organization. We started small, relatively small, 173 elements, and looking forward later this year and the next year, we want to expand the number of elements that we are evaluating and documenting. The next step then was to take these elements and say, okay, how do we know that our data is good? Why do we have any doubts if we had good data coming in? Well, how can we possibly not have good data in there now? Now, there's a number of different reasons why that may be the case. Business rules change. When they change, do we always go back and retroactively apply the business rules to our existing database? Maybe not sometimes. It's coming in. We did our best to make sure we had good data coming in, but it's possible due to the rush and the fuss. Maybe some less-than-perfect values are in there now. And then data can go bad. It can go stale. You've got licenses that have an effective period for two years. So is there a trigger to go in after the second year and refresh the license? So these are all questions that we look at when we evaluate the quality of our data. And through discussions with other DGPO colleagues, consultants, et cetera, we came to understand that there are different dimensions of data quality. So you can have uniqueness. Are there duplicate records? You can have timeliness. How recent is the data? Are all the licenses unexpired? You look at completeness. Are all of the mandatory fields? Again, what is mandatory now might not have been a mandatory field six months ago. So we define accuracy by, does it abide by the business rules? So we've identified quite a few, thousands of business rules that we have put into our DSP engine. So when you're adding a new customer, is it a U.S. or O.U.S. customer? If it's a U.S. customer, it needs a five-digit zip code. If it's a Canadian customer, it needs to have an alpha in the middle of the zip code. These are business rules that we've put in the tool. And so we know that by the time a record gets added, it's passed all these business rules. Well, that's great. That's good for new records. When we update a record, it applies the business rules to the update. But what about the records that haven't been recently updated? So can we apply the business rules to those records? That's a component of accuracy. Do we have reference data, otherwise known as drop-down boxes? So do we have a field with only 10 current valid values? Well, let's go look through that field in the records and see if any records have values, which aren't in our current list of valid values. And some of these are very simple put into a query. Some are more expensive. Some are more challenging. And then you get into some of the more challenging aspects of data quality. What I call, it could be accurate. It could be timely. It could be all of those things, but still wrong. So what we call fit for purpose. If we have a customer record, it can be absolutely a bona fide record. It could be an address that's in the U.S. Postal Service Database. It could be timely. It could have all of the necessary attributes, blah, blah, blah. It looks perfect. It's just wrong. It happens to be the guy next door. And so you're not going to know that until you have a failure. So then you have to look at the failures and say, okay, what's the root cause of the failures? Well, there could be a thousand different root causes for a delivery failure. One of them may be that you had bad master data. So that becomes a much more challenging, complex way to investigate the data and determine the quality. Just a couple more points I want to cover real quick. And the reason I spent so much time on quality is because that really is an area that we're investing quite a bit of time in and focusing on. But we also want to look at efficiency. How can we improve our process? How can we streamline it? How can we leverage our BPO for repeatable activities? We recently completed a project to move some of our purchase, our vendor master activities that were done by my employee team here to the BPO. And so where we can, that's something that we want to be able to continue and free up more time for the folks to focus more on strategic activities. And then where we can use robotics. This is something that we're just getting started in. But how can we automate some of these more repeatable activities that we might not even need to move to a human being? We can use computer-based robots for this. And so we're just getting started in that area. And then finally, looking at expanding the governance. So we're looking at enterprise finance master data. We've identified there are challenges with some of our finance master data across different applications. So not just SAP, but other applications. So we're looking at how can we use the principles and tools that we have available for our foundation master data, our SAP master data, to improve our enterprise finance master data. So with that, and you wanted a few minutes for questions. I apologize I ran over a little bit, but in the excitement and spirit of all this, I wanted to share as much as I could. But let me turn it back to you for questions. Karen, thank you so much for this informative presentation and sharing insights of your data governance journey at Leigh. As a reminder to all of our audience members, please feel free to submit your questions in the Q&A section in the bottom right corner. I see we've received a number of questions from our audience. So in the next few minutes, I'm going to get addressed as many of these as possible. The first question is, Kevin, you mentioned that master data stewards establish and publish KPIs related to their data domains. Could you give us an example of one of your KPIs and how your efforts were able to improve business outcomes? Sure, sure. So one of the KPIs that we have is the time to add new records, as well as the time to update records. And we've seen since our tool upgrade a significant improvement. I had some metrics I shared a little bit earlier that were from the early part of this year. We've seen improvement throughout this year and when we're able to compile our metrics, I expect to see even greater improvements in terms of the time it takes, the activity required to update these records. Thank you for that. Next question, is the data stewardship platform tool from Black Office Associates specific to SAP, or is it compatible with other databases too? So it is compatible with other databases. It is something that we use for SAP. I believe they have some, we want to say some preconfigurations for SAP, but I understand that it can really be used for other databases as well, other tools, other systems. Do you have any system on top of SAP, or is all data entry done in SAP? As well as, did you have any issues regarding trying to synergize data elements and rules across multiple countries without a governing committee making decisions? Excellent. So we do have data governance across all of the countries. So the tool and process that we use, so the DSP tool from Back Office, that sits in front of SAP, and that is used by everyone, regardless of whether you're in the US or outside the US, whichever country, that tool is the front end for probably 80%, 90% of the master data activities. Now there are a few things that we don't do in DSP that we'll do directly in SAP. Some of those are done by the BPO folks, some of those are done by my team members. But when you're talking about the end users, primarily they're the ones that are working directly with DSP to request a new material, a new vendor, a new customer, et cetera. So we do have consistent tools and processes across the globe when it comes to the SAP master data. We have many questions about tools in general. So besides DSP and SAP, what other tools does your MDM team use? I assume the question is around maybe data quality, perhaps vintage, or other areas of governance. What other tools does your MDM team use? Sure. So our primary tools are the DSP and SAP. We use SharePoint as well, primarily as a communications mechanism. And then it's really just Excel, is our other analytical tool. We are working with our IT organization to develop BW queries that we can use to further analyze our data and our performance metrics and so forth. But that's our primary tool set. Within V as a wider organization, we have quite a few different tools in use. But from the foundation perspective, our general area is really DSP and SAP. Now one of the things that we're working on, as I mentioned, was robotics. So depending on how we proceed with that, there may be some new tools introduced or new capabilities to DSP may be developed. As we look at building further capabilities within our governance organization, we want to explore better ways to identify, document, store metadata. And I know that there are multiple different metadata tools out there, so we will have to decide what's the best tool for our metadata. Right now, we have a very basic start, I think primarily in Excel, but if we really want to do metadata right, then we're going to need some tool to support that. There's a comment that came in, it says, got to prove a future economic benefit with some easy visual metrics. Have you developed any visualizations to show your data quality to your shareholders? Yes, back up right there. So this little donut is where we're starting. We have the basics, the beginnings of this for our different quality metrics. Now what this doesn't immediately translate to is cost. So we can look at quality metrics and say, okay, we have our accuracy at whatever, 90%. We want to get it at 95%. We don't currently have a way to translate that into dollars. So what would be the dollar savings of getting it to 95%, what's the dollar cost of getting it to 95%, that may be something that is a little easier to calculate. But when we do large projects, calculating the cost and the savings is something that we need to do for each of these projects. So at some point, if we're doing a substantial effort, we're going to go through and say, okay, what are the time savings across the organization if we do this? How does that translate into dollar savings, et cetera? So from a performance metrics, that's easier to do. From quality metrics, it's a little bit more challenging to do that correlation into cost savings. But the good thing is people intuitively seem to understand that if we improve the quality, it's going to improve most people's lives that are dealing with the data. Well said. Next question is, what process did you use to identify key data elements? It would be interesting to know how many different definitions for each key data element you came across and how you were able to rationalize that across the company. Yeah, okay, that's a good one. I wish I had my stewards here in the room with me. I think they could each take and give a slightly different explanation. But I did allow the stewards leeway in how they went about calculating or determining what the key data elements were. But in principle, these were the ones that really was going to screw up the transaction if we didn't get it right. So for example, the customer address, vendor address, vendor bank information if we're doing electronic payments. When we're in our material elements, of course, there's very key material master data elements that have to be right. And so if I recall correctly, the material master team did a voting, so each of the team members voted on what they thought the most critical data elements were and then averaged them and whatever elements had the most votes won. I think it was brilliant. Others maybe didn't go into quite that much detail, but the approach was basically the same. What were the elements that were really going to mess us up if we didn't get them right?  Who are you accountable to? Is that an executive sponsor from the business or is that the chief data officer of your company? Oh, excellent question. So I report in to the vice president of Foundation Processes and she in turn reports to our CFO. So there's one person between me and the CFO. We are part of the finance organization. We are responsible for the maintenance. Maintenance is not the right word. We're responsible for improving and managing the asset that is our foundation implementation. So when we look at the global processes and the BPO activities and the single instance SAP application, this is the organization, the business organization that's responsible for making sure that we are being good stewards with the asset, that we're continuously improving our processes, that when we have legal or regulatory changes, that we're implementing them quickly and thoroughly. That is all the responsibility on the business side of my boss. And then we have an IT counterpart who's the vice president of enterprise applications that has the SAP responsibility directly. This is all the time we have this afternoon. Thank you, Kevin. I want to thank you for your presentation this afternoon as well as your time. I'd like to remind everyone that the recording for this webinar will be posted in the DGPO members' only section of the DGPO website in the next coming days. Back to you, Shannon. Thank you so much. And Kevin, thank you for this great presentation and thanks to our attendees for being so engaged in everything we do. We just love all the questions coming in. And that's it. Everything's been covered. I hope everyone has a great day. Thanks, everyone. Thanks, all. Thank you.


You know I see this as a sign from the JoJo gods above I promised you guys seven days straight of JoJo reactions. I missed two days of it I did four in a row three of those four my neck was killing me I had a stop for two days and now we're continuing today So I see this as a sign from above you can't handle this much JoJo.  Let's just get to it Oh, thank God I took a break because Vaughn THRYING is back And I needed all my sleep for that. I'm surprised I still have to What did he expect to come and see in this room? Burger King? I wouldn't be surprised.  Double shock Everyone I killed this season it's alive How do you know you can't he's facing the other way I just got off the train from hell He's not exactly a bad guy, but he's a German soldier, which means he's a bad guy He said sit down to be submissive while I breathe him Well, thanks for telling him You didn't have to tell him that you see what happened to easy DC for telling JoJo everything he was gonna do with him Look what happened to him It's like the McQueen himself cars I can't believe what I'm looking at right now. Look at this.  It's like Pegasus mixed with that guy from Street Fighter Arms don't bend like that. What are you talking about? You don't want to talk. Oh His life point he lost a thousand Oh, yeah, that's true. Hi. Yep. Yep. Here. He did the brah. You already did it Germans Y'all gonna think I have something against your arm. It's yeah, I do He's gonna throw a golf ball at him. It's Tiger Woods Did he just he crushed a golf ball in his hand and then threw the threads at JoJo It just had to be a little lower. That's it.   It looks like Aaron Haha He controls light he controls me.  I forgot he can stop time to a right cut him already.  He just sits up That's about a child. I thought he was the ultimate life for now.  What are you speed wagon? He's learning for speed wagon.  I want to I want to get a close seat when when Hitler's thrown off the mountain Look at him. He's following I forgot he's thinking my bad Nicky stinking. I forgot Was this in my horoscope This ain't no time for astrology. It's a nuke It's not yours.  Cuz I Gotta stare more take your time Is his black clover now where each character?  Is this way is this his quirk? Is he gonna be the wizard king next now? He's the German science is the world's greatest I Can you both at a time like this? How can you pose like a time like this? Don't worry.  Let's get a camera actually There she is Erin herself. They won't do anything either.  Yeah, they're horses. All right.   How's it slide it this much? I see his mouth move when he did that look try doing that.  No worries to our eyes. You have time you have time It's like Jojo and Tio fighting. It's 175 meters to the bottom. Thank God they specified that Five seconds five seconds until impact ready one two three four five Eight All right, you know that was better.  They didn't impact to the crown. They were hang they they hit a ice So that was still five seconds.  What is that in yen? Oh, it's Jojo and Tio Why would he still falling? Why do you say that?  He's how big is this mountain?  You know what the funniest part about that is Before I watched Jojo I watched Jojo out of context at that clip him laughing here was in that video and I thought context What would add meaning behind it?   That's five days This is beautiful what weird shit's about to happen That was the most stock cat sound I've ever heard in my life. I'm gonna find out on Google right now. Let's see No, no, that's a that's a little pussy. What's this? No, I bet we're gonna hear that I bet we're gonna hear that one He's he's literally abusing the cat right in front of us Wait, whoa, whoa, what am I talking about? I'm no furry Jojo You Joji what Jojo, what are you doing? Look at my balance Yeah, I wouldn't go in there can we just go back to New York at this point can we get out of Europe? He's still wearing feathers on his head. That's cultural appropriation canceled Nani He's following with Sunzu way way whoa, whoa, whoa, someone else mentioned Sunzu. What's it? They've ecdc mentioned a cdc himself That's a cdc That's him. He's possessed. That's why the guy left at the bottom of the mountain ecdc's inside of them I'm not half cocked. I have a full cock.  He said Now they're fighting each other Caesar's not gonna listen That's what the next episode is called young Caesar.  There he is God.  He's being sensitive young Caesar.  Is that Hitler's descendant Mario Zeppelin. Oh my god. It's my great-great-great-great-great grandfather Mario left without a word.  You see a father in Japan.  Oh Mario just got sucked into the wall painting He just went from I want to murder my father to DOSTA father DOSTA. All right Now look at him. That's a dead father character right there This OST is way too good. I think this is one of my favorite OSTs not even in a show just anime.  I didn't expect that soon. Oh God, he's like I don't want season salad. I want Jojo himself Now he's avenging his father that he was gonna murder don't think you're win.   What's he gonna do? He's gonna do something ridiculous one move over here. Shamu Sucks finally we're in the damn house But I forgot Jojo is going Jojo speed he's in Jojo time right now He said he's gonna be right behind him. I'll see him Instructor John Gina's dead This guy's fighting in a mortal monster and Jojo's over here walking motherfuckers having a full bubble be matched inside Here goes with top step again Yeah, I got download that Jojo fighting game I think it's free on Xbox right now.  I might stream it. Would you watch the Jojo stream from me? God he tripped up steps now. He's really dead. I'm surprised he didn't take in the whole episode to fall down the steps He's gonna throw a rainbow at him She's our one who has sent all the time.  It's a flashback episode way. He could actually die here.  Jojo and adio dies now.    You know it.  It's a cycle Why didn't you follow him you hear that scream?   Oh my god the symbolism Don't think I didn't see that. Please stop. He's fine. Please be an anime character.  I can't believe it It looks like Aaron's eyes.


Welcome, and good noon, Shabuigan. Did I nail it, Scott? Yeah, you did. All right. Will Darren have a battle? All right, all right, that's my applause to Scott and his weekly Friday announcements. All right, well, thank you guys for coming today. My name is Derek Mink. I'm the Transit and Parking Director for the City of Shabuigan. I am also on the Governmental Affairs Committee who puts on the First Friday Forum. So welcome, and thank you to the Elks Lodge for hosting us today and to Prevea Health for sponsoring our First Friday Forums. These are a great way for us to, I guess, continue to learn about Shabuigan County in these challenging and difficult times. So without further ado, this man needs no introduction, I've been told, but today we're going to hear from City Administrator Todd Wolfe and have some time after for some questions and answers. So please, warm chamber welcome to Todd Wolfe. Before we get started, we do have a reminder that once you guys are done, once you guys are done eating lunch, please wear your mask once you're complete. Thank you. Is it okay if I take my mask off while I'm talking? All right. We just want to make sure you guys can hear me. Pardon? You're concerned? Okay. All right. Well, thank you, everybody. Many of you guys know who I am, know a lot of you guys in business, and a lot of you just through interactions throughout the city. So again, I'm Todd Wolfe, the City of Shabuigan City Administrator. Thanks for inviting me. And I believe that you guys have basically put out the next four hours for me to talk, so I really appreciate that. Oh, I'm sorry. It's 45 minutes, not four hours, okay. My bad. So how many of you guys love to have lectures and presentations? Okay. All right. I totally agree with you. I was asked if I should bring a PowerPoint and I thought you guys are going to eat, you're going to sleep, and you're going to forget who I am. So I like to be interactive. So if you guys have questions, concerns, complaints, let Deidra know. So basically the overview is going to be my background schooling, my past careers, my past city involvement, and my present position and the vision of the city. And some city stats just to kind of bore you guys before I leave so you guys start to fall asleep and not ask questions at the end. So background. I'm a transplant. Don't hold it against me, and I'm proud of it. And I think it's great because of the fact that I bring an outside source and understanding of how things go outside the city of Sheboygan, outside our county, outside our community, because I've been to the other side per se. So I moved here as a disgruntled teenager back in the 80s, took to the 90s to get warm. I say that all the time because anybody that lived where I came from, even today is a cold day for me. So I'll never get out of that. So overall I've cross-pollinated as I call it. I love Sheboygan and I love Wisconsin. And we have so much to offer, and it's such a great community. It's a great environment to raise a family. So when I talk about, you know, live, work, and play, I'm serious about that. So when I moved here as a disgruntled teenager, one of the first things I said to my dad is, did we just go back in time? And I honestly, as a teenager, I was serious. You guys didn't even have cable yet. I was like, whoa. So anyway, moving forward, Tended North High, I think that kind of makes me a Sheboygan right now. I've basically gone through many positions within Sheboygan. I've worked in multiple companies. And part of my many jobs is my goal to add value to myself and to others. So over the years, I've been involved with many organizations. And I'm presently a board member for the Habitat for Humanity. And I've been involved with them for quite a long time. When people ask me about myself, I basically tell them I'm a Cinderella story. For those of you guys that know about Cinderella, she kind of worked hard. And then, okay, I'm not a princess. I'm not a kid. Last verse and foremost, let me explain that. It's more of the fact that I've worked hard and I'm blessed to be in the position that I am today. So I worked for local companies and climbed the ladder into management positions. And as we all know, when you climb the ladder, sometimes you slip on your way up. Sometimes you move up pretty quick. So I've worked for family companies. I've worked for corporate companies. And I've been very blessed with that. I've worked with companies during good times and bad. Many of you guys totally can understand that because we've been there together. So I've been through layoffs. I've been through growth. I've been through process improvements. I've been through customer changes, corporate changes. I've been through employee challenges. I've been through product development changes and on and on and on, just like all of you guys out there. So where does that bring us? So personal growth is very important to me. But helping others is also the, is bigger part of me as a person. So you will see that I'm honest, especially for those of you that know me. I'm honest and I'm straightforward. But I also like to work hard and play hard. No bungee jumping, no. So my schooling, I'm a non-traditional. I'll explain that. I started as a Wisconsin journeyman here in the city of Sheboygan. A lot of people don't even realize, well, what's that mean? So especially in today's day and age, how many journeymans do we have going through colleges and technical schools, right? So I attended Lakeshore Technical School at the time, college now. I attended UW-Sheboygan. I also finished up at UW-Stout, my alma mater. I have a bachelor's and a master's in industrial management and I'm certified in Lean Six Sigma for those of you guys that remember that. Still alive, it's still going. So I'm a black belt certified and it's a passion of mine. And it's not a martial arts. I've had multiple people at the city thought I was a karate expert. It's like, no. Part of the reason they thought I was a karate expert was the fact that I tend to walk really fast for those of you that know me. And all of a sudden, boop, there I am. So they thought something interesting was going on. So I've worked in manufacturing, the manufacturing world, locally and out of state. So my last career path was working for a local company called Kurt Joa Company that I'm sure you guys are familiar with, Nice Family Company. My career path started in mechanical engineering and I was promoted into project leadership. Now, for some of you guys that know the Kurt Joa Company, they are a manufacturing company of large machines, custom machines. So when we talk about project management, we're talking about 15, 20 million dollar machines all over the world. So it's quite unique and they're specialized. So when you say project management, project management is almost like doing what? Running a business, if you think about it. So you have income, you have costs, you have customers, they're always right, right? And you have to try to balance that and make it all work out and make sure that they're happy at the end of the project and stay on time and on schedule and on budget. So I worked with them and then I was promoted from engineering to project management. And in my last three plus years with Kurt Joa Company, I was promoted into business development. Now, as a side note, you guys will get a kick out of this because at the same time that this was happening, our city administrator in Cheboygan had presented his letter of retirement. So because of the pandemic and my background with the medical side of the industry, and we can all imagine what that means, right, for some of us, I became the lead business development manager for the Kurt Joa Company. So the irony is where I'm going is the Wednesday before I gave my letter of resignation, I received two awards and they had an award ceremony because I did over 90 million plus dollars in sales. In development, which was the highest that they had had in a five month period. And a lot of it's because of luck. It's because of how you foster and develop your customers. And it's also a lot of the situation that we're all in right now. And that's the COVID-19, right? So unfortunately, when you apply for a job that's a city job, what's the hardest thing about that? Not being in the paper. You can imagine that. So when you give your letter of resignation, but they already saw it in the paper, they kind of figured it out. So it's kind of funny. So anyway, where am I going? Past involvement, I've been with the city since 2011. And why? I'm a taxpayer just like you guys bought my first house at 21.   But I'm either part of the problem or part of the solution. So what do I do? I get involved. I got involved. I got involved on committees, commissions, and started understanding how the city works. The city is a company, if you think about it. So I was the past holder for the last five years. I was council president for four years. I was council vice president the year before that. Why does that matter? Because of the fact that it allowed me to work with our city administrator prior to me and understand what our challenges were, what our growth opportunities were, and try to help him see it from a business perspective. My predecessor didn't come from business. He came from Grafton, no offense. But he also came from a community that was much smaller. And he never had the challenges that we have as a city that's growing and that needs to grow. So having said that, I look at the changes in the growth of the last five years and I want you guys to understand that we've done over a half a billion dollars of growth. And we all in this room should be proud of that. We've had a lot of opportunities, a lot of development. We've been very lucky because the economy was doing great and then what happened? January happened, right? We had COVID. So fast forwarding today with all of the development, we had low unemployment, we had the development that I talked about, we had everything. We had rainbows and unicorns as I call it. It was just great things were happening, growth was happening, double digits, everything. COVID happened, so then we have to really kind of rewind. So for me, the new city administrator, I have obviously lost revenues, budget issues, COVID challenges, just like all of you. I have city unrest, we have nationwide unrest. We have development on hold and we have businesses in need of help. So that's what I see, you guys have to help me if my vision isn't so good. So what, what can we do? This is all about what, this is not just about what the city can do. But it's for us citizens, Sheboyganites, Wisconsinites working together. So let's circle back to the city. So July 7th I took office, I was hired, it's not a voted in position. So my boss is everyone in this room, my boss is everyone in the council, and my boss, besides my wife, that's probably the first one I should say. So we all have bosses. So my thoughts on the present vision, so, because everyone wants to know, what's your vision? If there's an optometrist out there, they know this isn't good. So my thoughts of the present vision is the vision is like a road and we will adjust it as the road and environment changes. There's two parts. There's internal and external. And being that my background is business and development and process improvement, we really need to look at it in two ways. We have the internal, the city, and we have the external, the community. Together, we have to work on both. So when I talk about the internal, excuse me, during this time of COVID, I'm looking to spend time on the internal focusing on the growth and development within the city. I've been digging into the city's departments and processes to assess our teams and develop and support positive growth and change. So a lot of us in this room have been family organizations, large corporations that are maybe multi-generational. We probably all understand that during times of growth, things tend to slide a little bit because everybody's kind of happy and moving forward and we're focusing on a different target than internally. So what happens? Companies tend to not improve on their internal processes because, like Lean, waste tends to hide things. Money tends to hide things. Margin tends to hide things. And it's only when things start to go south, when people start to internally work on things and reduce the waste because they need that margin to survive. So as a city, we're going to be focusing on a lot of internals. We're going to be looking at a lot of things besides training, growth, development, which I know we all talk about, but how many people actually invest in that? So we're going to be looking at things like that. We're going to be looking at technology because why? I believe in working smarter, not harder. It's amazing some of the things. And we look at the city, and the city should be one of the areas that we all look up to because that's a company that we all pay into. And it should be the most efficiently run organization for us to look at, and it's not. And I hate to say that, but it's not. So we have improvements just like every other company, but we need to work together on that. So part two of that is our city's past relationship and our view that has been fogged. And that's just my personal opinion, you guys can help change it. But this is an important portion as we look to improve the ability to help businesses large and small. Right now is perfect opportunity and example of how we need to help. As a city, as a community, working with our businesses that are local and within our county and abroad. I mean, and when I say abroad, I'm saying outside our county borders. Because technically we all work together. It might be from our material vendors, might be from our process vendors, might be from our internal resources, meaning our employees that live and work and play in communities outside Sheboygan and outside Sheboygan County. We need to help them understand what we need to do and what the vision is. Obviously we really want to see more business come here and develop. So we need to help those businesses. We are open for business and you're going to hear me say that more and more and more and more and more. We're open for business and change is coming, it's kind of my mantra. And why do I say that? Because if we're not growing, we're dying. And I've said that as a past holder, and it's just like any business. If you're not growing in margin, if you're not growing in sales, you're dying. And that's why product tends to change, right? The city is a company, as you've heard me say, and the city has to do what? We provide services. If we're not improving our services, reinventing our services and when I say improving, I'm meaning more efficient, the services become too costly, and then the constituents say, well, why am I paying these taxes for these poor services? So we need to rework them, we need to use technology, we need to use process improvement, and we need to find ways to work smarter, not harder. And I know I sound like a book, I sound like an infomercial. And if you guys would like, I can work with you later on that, but I'm joking. But these are things that are just common sense and just not common practice. So only together can we work through these times. So the vision of the city is the fact that we are a large company. How do I see things changing within the city? Along with my team, I want the city to be an employer of choice. We are one of the largest employers in the city, if you think about it. We're not selling insurance, we're not making cheese, we're not making brats, we're not making tubs and toilets and things like that. But we're making services. We're providing things that the city constituents need every day, day and night, 24 hours. So we need to do a better choice, a job of that. We need to communicate better. Like any company, our city doesn't communicate very well. And I've seen it. I've only been with the city three months, and believe it or not, I can see a lot of opportunities within our group. So involvement and participation, just like every other company.  How often do they all work together? If you were actually to have an Olympics within your organization, how many people would actually get a gold, a silver or a bronze? They don't all work together. Teamwork is what's important, and we don't always see that. Whether it's in the city or outside the city. So lean, improvements in process review and technology. That's one of the things that I believe in because how many people right now are zooming? It's amazing, right? If we didn't have that technology in those tools, you'd be out of business, right? Think about that. Where were we? A couple of years ago, we still had the old city hall. The old city hall that we struggled every time I was out of the country, just to have me call in for a council meeting. That's archaic. And that's calling in with a phone. Now you look at today where we're using Zoom, we're using Teams, we're using all kinds of different communication techniques and abilities. Without these tools, companies are struggling, companies will fail. And we're not out of the woods yet. So again, technology, not just in technology like that, but technology on how to do the billing systems, how to do the transit systems, how to do our HR systems, how to do our financial systems. All of these technology tools are things that you guys are probably ahead of what the city is, so we need to work on that. But it doesn't just mean you're rolling out a new program. It means process improvements, process review. Jokingly, as a past alder, and when I first got involved with transit back in 2011, I complained about the fact that city government, and I wanted people to prove me wrong, would just take a budget, roll it over and add. But I wasn't far from the truth, and that's a sad situation. So we're changing things. Why are we changing things? Because now, I hate to say this.  Because now I'm the city administrator working with those budgets and those numbers and trying to figure out how we're gonna pay for all this stuff. So it's a good thing. So I already have a team that's working on being super users for our technology base. I already have a team that's gonna be working on lean improvements throughout the city. We're working, we're chipping things away. We're getting people involved, we're creating teamwork. So my leadership, I just wanna talk a little bit about that because some of you guys know me and some of you know me from my past management style. So I have five steps. Now I'm gonna start to sound like a politician again, right? I have five steps. The first three are cyclical. And hopefully you guys like these and agree with them and maybe you'll even implement them or think about them in your future. First one's coaching. We coach every day. Whether it's friends, family, maybe we try to coach our significant other. But we all know how that works. But coaching is what we do every day together. Friend to friend, worker to worker, co-worker to work, co-worker. It's basically giving those little tidbits of how to improve and how to do something a little bit better. That's the first one. Mentoring is where we basically, we work closer together. Maybe it's arm in arm. It's basically helping somebody understand the process a little bit better. Maybe they're struggling on understanding the whole scope, the whole process. But it's bringing them closer and working with them more as a teammate and improving them. A lot of times though, again, this is a three-step piece, you find out that that person doesn't have the skills, the knowledge, maybe the training. So what do we do? We give them the training. So it's coaching, mentoring, and training. That's cyclical. Why is it important? Because every day we should be doing coach mentor train throughout our community, throughout our city, throughout our business, throughout our friends and family and businesses. Because we're trying to do what we're trying to make them better. Because we're only as strong as our weakest link. So if we continue to work with people and make them better, you're adding value to them. It also means things are gonna be what? A lot more efficient, less problems, less complaints. People aren't working so hard. People are able to enjoy their jobs and their careers. Because they have other time to do other things. But all good things come to what? Step four, and that's discipline. We have to have that one, right? Because I call it a reboot. And believe it or not, and some of you know me, I've been written up before. I'm that guy. I pushed the edge. I was the guy that said, hey, I don't wanna do that. That doesn't make sense. But I hate to say it. If it's part of my job description, not purpose, but description. It's my responsibility. That's what I get paid for. That's what I'm supposed to do and do day in and day out. That's what I get reviewed on. That's where my goals are. And that's why you have to have what I call that reboot, and that's called discipline. And that's why it's stepped. Because nine out of 10 times, I've actually been able to take that team and get them to see the vision and mission and where we're going and why we need to go there and how we're gonna get there. And help them understand how important their position is within the company. That one out of 10 times though, I've helped that employee to understand that maybe this isn't a good fit. And that goes to step five. And that's dismissal. And I call that promoting to the exterior. And you guys can use that one. But the whole concept is by the time I get to that level on step five, the majority of the time the employee actually has moved on on their own because they've realized with a non-confrontational situation that this isn't the place for me. This isn't the job I thought it was gonna be. This isn't the career I thought it was gonna be. And they move on. It's not a bad thing. We've all had multiple jobs and we will continue to. And we have to understand it when one door closes, another door opens. And in some respect, multiple doors open and we have the ability to choose it. So again, the five steps are not to be disciplinary. They're to be growth and development because that's what we want. That's what we all should want is to make our employees better because those employees that are better make the company better, more successful, more profitable. And that's really what we need day in and day out, not just development. So that's my five steps. So I also wanted to talk about real quickly is our values within the city. And when we talk about our values, these are things that we take for granted and we're gonna be communicating them much, much more within the city because we have a mission, we have a vision, just like everybody in this room, right? Hopefully everybody knows about the mission and the vision, right? The mission is what we wanna do, the vision is where we wanna go kind of concept. But then what are the values? What are values? We all have values, especially in today's world. So the values, and I found these in the city on a wall and I thought, oh my God, we have values. Does anybody else know besides me? And seriously, it's a poster on the wall. And I was like, whoa, look at that, took a picture of it. I was like, so excited. So accountability, God, I can't wait to rub that one in. Respect, seriously, there's a lack of respect, just like every company. It's not a city issue, it's just a society issue, it's a culture issue, we need to work on that together. Fiscal responsibility, I think the city is one of the shining stars when it comes to fiscal responsibility, but we gotta communicate it to our constituents to let them understand what we do and what we struggle with to become fiscally responsible. Service, again, I don't think we provide adequate communication on service. Why? Because every day as an alder, I would get a call, why are the roads bad? Can you fix this? My neighbor's complaining, my neighbor's too loud. All the complaints, things that alders get to listen to. Innovation. Now that one we were lacking on, I will admit that. I'll give you an example just because you guys will love it. So in finance, we have a process, I won't even say what the process is, but we have four steps to this. We have paper, remember paper days? I thought those were gone. So we have paper, we have Excel, we have a program, IBMI, and then we have our ERP system which is called Tyler Munis. I have four areas that this process is being used in and it's like what? So if I ask for information, well, let me go check the paper. What? Well, let me go check the Excel sheet. Oh, what? Well, let me go check AS 400. Really? It should be one stop, one click, find it done next. We're not there. Teamwork, seriously, we've got great teams and we've got areas that just, they're just not running smooth, but every company has that problem. Every culture has that problem, so we need to work on that. And that comes with training, it comes with getting people involved. And I know how hard it is because I've been that guy in a plant, union, and I've worked union and non-union, just like you guys. Sometimes you have to ask yourself, why did I ask the question because I didn't want to hear what they told me. But we owe it to them because why? They are the ones that really hold the key to making us profitable or not profitable, successful or not successful. And I can tell you in my past life, working with the Kurt Joel company, when I would go to other countries and have to be there for the installation of a machine and the culture was a little bit behind Western civilization, if you can imagine. It's kind of like in you guys remember, hopefully you guys remember, I'm aging myself, the Flintstones and Jetsons. There are times when we sell the Jetsons machine to the Flintstones because we don't realize how lucky we are with the technology and skill set that we have in the United States. So again, it comes to participation and helping them be efficient. Anybody can have a state-of-the-art machine and run it and lose money. You can't fix that because that's a personnel issue. That's what you have to focus on. It's not always the machine. So having talked about our values, we're also looking at internal development and that's training and personal development within our employees and helping them become better. So the last one I wanted to kind of talk about real quickly before you guys fall asleep on me is some city stats. The reason why I wanted to throw that out there is I don't know how often you guys realize how big we are. And when we say how big we are, we say, well, but Todd, our population's just under 50,000, hopefully it ticks above that. How can we continue to just be at 50,000? Well, we also live in a world where everybody loves to drive. They're used to driving Milwaukee, they're used to driving to Madison. Everybody drives anywhere. So you can work anywhere, live anywhere and now, today, zoom anywhere, right? So we have to understand that we need to improve our community because we want people to live in Sheboygan. We want them to understand why we love to live, work and play here and why it's so good. Reason why I moved here as a kid, besides the fact I had to follow my dad, the schools were better. It was safer. It was cleaner. It was cheaper or cost effective depending on how you wanna look at it. So when you look at that, that's what we have to offer plus the beautiful lake. So city's value of 2019, 3,298,516,300. That's a big number. That's a big, big, big, big business when you think about it. A lot of assets, a lot of opportunities. Let's talk a little bit about our expenses because you guys run big businesses too. 2019 amended was $131 million plus. That's a big number. 2020 adopted was only 109. Some of that's borrowing, some of it's projects, some of it's what's going on within the city development. 2021, Todd, you lucky guy. What are you gonna do to make this better? So we're at proposed executive, which was just finalized this morning. Was $118 million. Again, we're trying to cut costs. We're trying to find ways. How can we make things better but still be conservative on our spending? So on a positive note, 2019, we had $9.4 million in new construction. In 2020, we had $84.5 million in new construction. That's all of you guys, that's everybody in the community. That's bringing other businesses in here. That's bringing development into the city. That's tax base. That's what helps us to survive because if we don't have development, if we don't have growth, then it costs the constituents, cost all of us taxpayers more money every day and that's not good. We need more development. We need more growth. So just on the last note, and I love this just because of the fact that people tend to forget because when they send us their taxes, they think that all that money is going to the city. 36% of that dollar goes to the city. 40% goes to schools. 21% goes to the county, not including the additional sales tax. 3% goes to the technical college. That's your dollar. So when you think of it, it's spread out. It's helping the community. It's not just the city. It's helping colleges. It's helping our school systems. And we need to remember that because it's not just going to one place. It's being spread out. So in closing, I just want to reiterate the fact that you're going to continue to hear me say Sheboygan is open for business. I would yell at like Derek, but I don't want to startle you guys. We are open for business. And as I've told every employee within the city of Sheboygan, change is coming and I'm here. So thank you. Let me know if you have any questions. I'm here all all day. So maybe if we take questions and then because we don't want to pass microphones around, if Todd, if you can repeat the question in the microphone so everyone can hear it better and then respond. I'll do my best. Sure. Thank you. I'll start. You talked about coming to Sheboygan, but you never said, you know, from where? I am from California. Don't hold it against me, but Ventura, California. Yeah, north of LA. So if you have LA County, then there's Ventura County. So I lived in California. I got to go to the beach every day. I got to have fun in the sun. And then I moved to Wisconsin. It's cold. It's cold. It's cold. Just digressing. I moved here. Like I said, I moved here in June as a young disgruntled teenager. My dad says, go down to the lake. It's just like the ocean, Todd. You'll enjoy it. Just go east. I didn't know my grandmother's address, but I went east. I went to the beach. Lot different. Went in the water. Seriously, that hurt. That hurt. So that's a joke. Right. Just more on facts and figures. You mentioned at the end when you were giving some stats. I think you said 3.9 in a billion or something like that? It's 3 billion, yes. That is total assets. Total value of the city. Sure, I'd love to. The city invested in 150 acres for South Point Business Park. We did that because the council and myself at that time, we had missed a few opportunities within the local industry where they were literally looking for more land, shovel ready as we call it. So basically ready to be developed. We didn't have enough in our old business park and we didn't wanna see good businesses having to go to other communities when we have so much to offer. And a lot of those businesses wanted to come to Sheboygan, but we just didn't have enough land. So we invested upwards of $15 million and built 150 acres of prime right off of High 43 Business Park for anybody to expand, grow in, Steve, and put some nice industry in there. Well, COVID obviously happened, sorry. So we had some opportunities that we were working on and developing through the SEDC and other groups. And basically a lot of that was just put on hold. They're basically saying, hey, we're still looking to grow, but the industry's changing. Things are kind of throttled down as I call it. It's not that it's not coming. It's just more of they're kind of riding out the wave right now, the COVID wave. So we do have a couple of small opportunities that we're looking at. So we're hoping to get something started, but some of that won't start until probably next year, just because it's already October and construction starts to get into, have issues with winter. We do have a development on the far south side of I believe it's a 133 single family residential. It'll be Stonebrook, I believe it's called. So that'll be a nice addition to the city. And I want to say in the near future, when the Aurora Hospital finally moves and out of the, into their new facility, that'll be a seven acre development opportunity in the heart of a really great neighborhood because I come from that area. And that'll be a great place to see some development, which is really needed in our city. We just, our city is a great, it's great, obviously, but we haven't had any land and housing development opportunities. Obviously the land to the east is a little moist and, you know. Are you suggesting that we might meet that development agreement? Yeah, it's already in the redevelopment agreement. Yes, young man. You can all see why I am and the rest of the city employees in the room are so excited about fatiguing this new position. And he's really hit the ground running and doing a great job. But while you've told us a little bit about your experiences and what your views of the city's future are, tell us a little bit about your hobbies type. My hobbies? Tell us when you're inviting us over for that factor. All right, for those of you that know me, obviously I love to do remodeling and things like that, but I also built in my backyard a 55 inch diameter wood fire pizza oven. I love to cook. So I'm a pretty good cook. So I did, I did like Chowdown and one first place this year. I was one of the three winners. And I've done men who cook. And again, it's because I love to cook and I love to give to the community. So as an example, digressing a little bit since Deirdre brought that up. When I was council president, the council president tends to take the council out once they're voted into the position. It's kind of just tradition. So since we had COVID, I decided that what I would do when everybody wants to go to Todd's house for pizza, I bought pizza boxes and we did 80 pizzas in three hours. I had numbers on the street that I'm on and people could order it and I would give them a time they'd pick from the menu and then we would run the pizzas out to their car so they could eat and go or pick up and go. So, yes, Reed. Armory, once that's down, is what focus are we gonna have on the A Street retail segment because once you get a bunch of people living downtown, what are we offering them to do? And I know we have some nice restaurants but we're gonna be losing some restaurants that have been here for quite a while. I know there's a lot of beauty shops that are other retailers basically closing their doors and stuff, it's a city house plan to encourage that development. If in fact we are getting the people that are filling up all these apartments, the ability. So, Reed, that was really good.  If I miss one, please. And keep it in the bathroom. Sure. So, Reed asked about the apartments and the capacity. So, I did not come prepared to answer the capacity. We do have numbers on that. I will tell you that the majority of them are full or at like 80 plus percent of capacity. So then, the question there is, do we need more apartments? And there's a controversy on that. The city does have basically an outside source. Mike, I don't remember the name of it but we have a study being done to see about the housing market right now and how balanced it is. We are working on that as well as a parking study for our downtown. Again, the city has really seen a lot of development growth when it comes to the housing market and I think we're really good on that. We have the Oscar that's gonna be 200 plus or around 200 additional apartments with some of them being like three bedroom apartments which is good. You have the Badger Lofts coming online and they've already started filling those. So that's 100 plus apartments. So we have some large apartment complexes that are coming online. So we really don't see that market really taking off plus with COVID I don't see a lot of development coming. To answer your question as far as the armory that is coming down, if nobody noticed, there's two questions out there. What's the city gonna do and what's gonna happen with the property? Right now because of just the way things are going we'd like to kind of just see it kind of settle down, plant some grass and see what's coming. We have had multiple developers come to the city and ask what's going on. We will probably end up doing an RFP in the future but right now it's just let's get the building down, let's let everybody kind of mourn if you know what I mean and just kind of get past the fact that the armory is no longer. It's been a large controversy like other large projects within the community. So we do have some development opportunities and it'll go out for RFP I'm sure in the future because it is a prime, prime piece of real estate. What's it gonna turn into to ask to answer Reed's question? We don't know yet. Some people would like to see condos down there. Some people have said let's put a hotel down there. Some people have said let's put some more housing. We don't really know right now. It's too early in the process. To answer Reed's question as far as the downtown, what's the city doing with the downtown to help? We've actually had a couple of different programs out there through CDGB funding where we basically been and it's online, it's on our website, it's been sent out, it's been mailed out where businesses can get some additional assistance. It's not a lot of money, it's thousands of dollars but a lot of the businesses aren't reaching out. We've had a couple of businesses reach out and the reason I know this is I'm on the committee that reviews the approval and acceptance to providing it but they have to provide us with information. I hate to say it but how long have you been in business? Have you been in business for a couple of years? Are you making money? Are you losing money? They need to show that they've been in business and again a lot of these smaller companies just don't wanna go through the hassle and it's just filling out a paper of getting the money and we've had some ask for the money. There's also another program for development again through CDGB money funding and that's for upper apartments downtown and facade renovations and we've had a few businesses locally downtown that have tapped into that to receive some money. So again, we're trying to develop, we're trying to help them out. I know during COVID and it started out very slowly and I apologize for that but again, we tend to be more reactive than proactive but when COVID first hit and summer was happening the city did back down on some of the liquor license fees and some of the fees when it came to having outdoor dining and stuff like that and we really were trying to push a lot of businesses downtown to have outdoor activities and we even tried, I believe it was on, I think it was Thursdays where we closed down part of A Street and let them have kind of an open area and unfortunately it was just a couple of businesses that actually participated. It was very well attended and there was discussion and I don't want anybody that knows where I'm going with this from past mayors but we are not looking to close A Street down but the question was could we close it down because of COVID to allow more businesses to have more activity but we were looking at more of the ability for them to have outdoor seating, things like that just to kind of expand on it. With the travels that I've had in my career traveling to a lot all over the United States and abroad it's amazing how our downtown doesn't do more of that. Let's face it, our summer is two and a half months of decent weather, sit outside weather. I'm being kind of, I'm joking a little bit but we need to really help them and expand on that and be able to use that whether it's a relish downtown with kitchen utensils and things like that or a clothing store or some of our restaurants and bars and things like that. We need to allow businesses to thrive during these tough times. Did I answer all your questions? Pretty much. We were kind of asking there's a lot of vacancies even pre-COVID that we'd love to see in different and additional retailers and opportunities so as we have these apartments filled up and we've got the streets buzzing with people that they have more options and opportunities to shop local. Thank you Dieter, do you want me to repeat that question? No that's okay. Yeah. So the whole concept of bringing in additional businesses downtown, I can only say in the three months that I've been in this position that we want that, we need that and we're gonna do what we can to support it and help it. I mean let's face it, in January everything went sideways and upside down. So I have not seen anybody come forward that says, hey I wanna start a business and can you help me? I can tell you that between Mayor Mike and myself and my team or our team, we're gonna do everything we can to help them because we do need to grow it and we do need to make the downtown bigger and better. We talked about housing, done. We talked about the need for grocery store downtown and Stefano's looking at it and we have some other opportunities that might be happening. We're doing what we can, it's slow, it's tedious, it takes time, but we're also not a Madison, we're not a Milwaukee, we're not Chicago, so it takes a little bit longer. So, questions? One more. You're my favorite. Yeah, early in your commentary you used the term, you said there was some city unrest. Yes. That was the term you used. Did you explain on what you meant by that? City unrest can be defined in multiple ways depending on which department you're in, I guess would be another way to say it. There's city unrest inside the city, there's city unrest outside the city. So I'm gonna give you an example of city unrest outside the city and when I say outside the city I mean outside city hall, okay? Unrest means, as an example, the SEEDC and the county put out a, basically what is it, Joe? It's a resolution, yeah, thank you. A resolution, asking businesses, asking people to wear a mask all the time, okay? We the city and the county can't force people, okay? But the unrest became huge because people assumed that we were taking their rights away. That's unrest, okay? Unrest means people are not happy with a decision, even if it's a decision to be respectful, to be healthful, meaning healthy to everybody. As a business, you guys can stop people from going into your establishment because you can say, you know, kind of like no shirts, no shoes, no service. You can say no shirt, no shoes, no service, no mask, but you have that ability to say that. The city and the county can't do that. Now the county can be more forceful if things go sideways and continue to, but we don't have mask police. So the ordinance was basically asking people to be more respectful and band together between businesses and the city and the county and basically tell people they need to wear a mask. If you have a health issue, we don't wanna put somebody in a bad situation, right? But that's less than the norm. So now you have all of those people that are against it pushing the fact, well, I have a health issue because they just don't wanna comply. So that's city unrest. Internal unrest is more of the fact that we have, just like any company, we have departments that don't communicate and work and play well in the sandbox. Thank you. Reed? One last one. Sure. This deals with the annexation issue and... Sure, I've heard of it. Any update on where that... Well, the ball is in now? Yeah, so Reed's question was about, in regards to the Kohler golf course in the 254 acres, there has been an overturn on the portion of the land that the Kohler company or Kohler group was looking to swap with the Terry-Andre group. If everybody realizes there's some acreage that they wanted right off the main entrance so that when you turn left to go into the golf course, some of that land was owned by Terry-Andre to get to the land. So they were trying to do a swap with the property, give them land to have better access to their property. And that has basically failed in court. So they're still on a little bit of a hold. Mike, did you want to add to that? They said that you need to go through the full process now. And so that other court will be making a decision on this rather than taking it out before and just, you know, dismissing it. Any additional questions? Otherwise, I'll throw it back to Derek. One last one. The land on the, see, that would be to the north where Kohler has the new art preserve and all that. So on the other side of the railroad tracks or whatever. Is there a plan of that? Or was that also sold to Kohler or? The land, what land are you referencing, Reed? Well, the city bought it for a innovation district or whatever, but they sold a portion to Kohler for the Kohler Art Preserve or whatever they call it, extension of Indiana and sugar property. Okay, yeah, the sugar property. I don't know if it's a sugar property. No, that was actually a portion of that was, went to the Glacier, yeah, Glacier Lakes.  I went on that. But it's a wetland area. It's a wetlands, yes? The city had looked at it for me. Right, right. So that's now a preserve. So that land is not developable, developable. To the east, Rogers bought a portion at the top of the hill across. My understanding is they bought everything. I can check into that, Steve, but I believe they bought everything. Yes. Yep. You know, Reed, actually a lot of questions. The nation within departments and businesses. Right, and families. Right? If I have questions, I call Steve, but. Make yourself at work or make your business. All right, well thank you everybody for your time. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.


Dear students, In this topic, we shall discuss the localization and characterization of ion channels. Dear students, in the 1940s and 50s, two scientists Hodgkin and Huxley performed a large number of experiments using the joint axones of squids. They found that during action potentials, the conductance of membrane for sodium and potassium ions changes. At that time, the ion channels had not been discovered. So due to their experiments, Hodgkin and Huxley predicted that there should be some ion channels present in the membrane that control the conductance of sodium and potassium ions. After Hodgkin and Huxley, many technical advances took place that contributed to the understanding of nature of these ion channels. The major development was the development of technique for measuring ionic grunts across the membrane. The technique that was developed is known as patch clamp technique. Similarly, the techniques for the study of protein chemistry and molecular biology helped to identify the channel proteins. As a result of all these developments, now the molecular protein nature of ion channels was established. In localizing the ion channels in the membrane, there has been a great role of neurotoxins. The neurotoxins have the capacity to bind to specific ion channels and block them. That is also the basis of their toxicity and that character was used to localize ion channels in the membrane. An important neurotoxin is the TTX or Tetrodotoxin. This toxin is obtained from Japanese puffer fish. It selectively blocks the fast-acting sodium voltage-gated sodium channels. Radioactively labelled, TTX is used to estimate the density of sodium channels in the membrane. Now it is, new techniques have developed for the localization and characterization of these ion channels. One of these is the use of antibodies. Antibodies can be developed for specific ion channels. They bind with specific channels and the antibody labelled channels can be viewed directly under the microscope.