IBM- Female Employee of the Year

Company: IBM, Armonk, NY, USA
Company Description: IBM is one of the most innovative companies in the world. It offers products, services and solutions to help customers solve problems. From Artificial Intelligence to Cloud Services to High-Speed Mainframe computing, IBM is about making the world a smarter, safer place. This guiding belief is what makes IBM unique in the way it serves its clients, employees and communities around the world.
Nomination Category: Individual Awards Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Female Employee of the Year - Business

Nomination Title: Susan Atmaja

A short video is also included: https://ibm.box.com/s/8qh4s4201pluhccq7jzvd776brfqiow1

Business, Technology, Passion – these words spring to mind when one thinks of Susan Atmaja. With almost two decades of service and exposure in the IT industry, Susan is an established leader with a proven track record, within IBM as well as externally. Equipped with a technical background in Computer Engineering, Susan spent the first 17 years of her career in Supply Chain, Chief Information Officer and Chief Data Officer offices. Being in the technical domain, Susan has always been passionate about the protection of Intellectual Capital. She led “Inventor’s Awakening Program”, a movement which educates people on the importance of Intellectual Property protection and the process of creating and filing a patent. Leading by example, Susan personally achieved IBM’s First Invention Plateau Award. The success of the program is evidenced by the generation of multiple patents and patent achievers in ASEAN, which contribute to IBM’s strong performance in patenting (*Slide_2).

In the business domain, Susan established several technical Centers of Competencies in Singapore. One example is the Smarter Commerce Center of Competencies, established in 2015 (*Slide_3), which develops assets and capabilities in Buy, Sell, Supply and Market domains, modernized with new technologies and injected with data and AI capabilities.

In her current role, Susan is putting her rich technical and business experience to great use in running and transforming IBM’s internal operations. Susan is currently serving as the Operations, Kaizen and Data Leader for IBM’s Quote-to-Cash (Q2C) Operations, covering Asia Pacific, Greater China Group and Japan. Q2C Operations support IBM's sellers from pre-sale to post-sale processes and is one of the most critical operational pillars of IBM.

-In her role as Operations Leader, Susan ensures the smooth running of all aspects of operation for the business unit and is responsible for delivering at least 20% year-to-year operational excellence improvement.

-As Kaizen and Data Leader, Susan’s role is to constantly challenge the status quo in operations through continued process improvement activities and by injecting technology through robotic process automation, data analysis, as well as Artificial Intelligence. In 2019 – 2021, Susan was required to deliver >1 Million hours of productivity improvements.

Outside of IT, Susan relentlessly advocates for and supports women in her network, especially in the area of high-risk pregnancies. Herself a shining example of successful women in tech, she is a strong advocate for women to join the technical domain and take up technical careers. She aims to help and inspire other women through the sharing of her own experience and career journey (*Slide_4).

Operations:

-Despite the pandemic’s challenges, Susan continued to run operations smoothly, making another excellent achievement with operational cycle time reduction of 22% year-to-year in 2020.

-Susan also contributed in Talent & Engagement, organizing an extremely successful Think Day series on Cloud – dedicated sessions for employees’ learning and development. Personally, she achieved ‘Best in Class’ in the managers’ engagement score result.

Kaizen and Data:

-Susan drove automation efforts across the organization, delivering an incredible 816K hours of productivity gain via automation, tools and process optimization. She was responsible for Kaizen Olympics 2020, gamifying challenges to harness employees’ creativity to drive innovation and continuous improvement, generating >850 new ideas.

-Partnering with IBM Cloud team, Susan’s team leveraged homegrown assets Q2C Advisor and Q2C Rapid Analyzer, moving them onto Cloudpak as client demo assets and showcasing Cognitive capability, a testament to IBM’s leadership in data and AI.

With these accomplishments, under her leadership, the team achieved historic records of achievements, including clinching 41 industry awards in 2020.

Susan has also been recognized by IBM. Personally, Susan was awarded the Best of IBM Award in 2019 (*Slide_5), which recognizes <1% top achievers in IBM. She won the prestigious Loughridge Scholarship (*Slide_6), one of IBM’s most prized annual awards, with the nomination criteria based on three traits: Delivering insight by applying analytics, data or AI to gain deeper insights into business opportunities; Partnering for success by providing outstanding support to the line team or clients; and Innovation by demonstrating transformation to accomplish IBM objectives.

Please see additional supporting materials uploaded below. *Relevant slides are indicated in the write-up above.