Brad Jacobs

I ask all my employees, and I have formal ways to do that, through questionnaires, through emails, and we also do town halls, a big campaign to ask all of our employees, if you had a wishlist and there was no financial impediment, just an initial exercise, don't worry about what it costs, and you could design any technology you would want to have,

What would make your job easier?

You could do your job faster if you had it.

What would you be able to please the customer more if you had it?

What are customers asking you for?

What are ways that instead of something taking 10 minutes, it could be done in 10 seconds?

And fantasize.

Fantasize your perfect technology, your ideal world of technology.

And then you get all these ideas come in.

Then the tech people who have to be very tightly integrated with the commercial people, otherwise they're creating stuff that there's no application for.

They're very much involved in this process.

They then take it together with the FP&A, with the financial people, and look at each one of these ideas and say, okay, what would be the financial impact?

Supposing we did this, suppose we automated this function, for example, how much more money would that save?

And we could pass along some of that to the customer and keep some of that for ourselves and we grow margin here.

And then what would it cost?

And how much time would it take?

What would the timetable look like on that?

What would be the investment in that?

And then it all comes down to ROIC, which is the basic thing of businesses.

ROIC, you're deploying capital and getting money back.