Speaker biographies

Nicole Allingham, Caltex Australia Head of Capability and Performance

Nicole Allingham is a commercially savvy, senior HR leader with a Bachelor of Business and 13 years’ people and culture experience in industries as diverse as amusement and leisure, retail, media, and petroleum. In her current role as Head of Capability and Performance at Caltex she is responsible for a broad OD portfolio across leadership development, culture and engagement, talent and performance and diversity and inclusion.

Creative environments and working with innovative teams who challenge the status quo is where she does her best work…break rules, stick to principles is her motto!

She believes the best ideas emerge when you collaborate with people you don’t know, so she’s happy to connect with you after today…just don’t send her a LinkedIn request without a personal note!

Stephan Amling, SAP Senior Vice President

Stephan Amling is Senior Vice President at SAP SuccessFactors responsible for SAP HCM business in Asia Pacific Japan as well as Greater China and he reports to Mike Ettling, President of SAP SuccessFactors. In this role, he oversees the regional teams to help customers shape their HR transformation agendas and to understand the value that our solutions contribute to achieving the business objectives. His charter includes delivering seamless transformation and solution implementation projects together with our ecosystem partners and provide continuous cloud services at a high degree of customer satisfaction.

Before his executive roles with SAP SuccessFactors, Stephan was Chief Operating Officer (COO) for SAP Human Resources function at a global level and he also led SAP’s HR Business Transformation Program including a strategic shift to a full cloud-based HR IS solution architecture.

From 2008 to 2011, Stephan led SAP Business Transformation Services (BTS) across all of EMEA (Europe, Middle East, Africa). BTS is SAP’s management consultancy that helps customers to maximize the business value of their SAP investments. In this role, Stephan established a holistic and business-value centric consulting approach worldwide, covering all dimensions and life-cycle stages of complex IT-enabled business change endeavors.

Stephan holds a degree in computer science and business administration from the University of Applied Sciences in Stuttgart. He currently lives in Singapore with his family.

Kate Barker, SAPVice President, Global Executive HR Advisor

Kate has extensive experience in partnering with Boards & C-Suite Executives on HR Strategy, Executive Assessment & Leadership Development and Strategic Talent Management. Kate has proven success in selling, leading and structuring world-class global human capital & talent consulting programs. She has lived and worked in Australia, London, Singapore and USA.

Currently Vice President, Global Executive HR Advisor Kate partners with clients on their global digital leadership strategy. Previously Executive Director at The Hackett Group - Asia Practice leading the practice in Leadership, Talent & HR Strategy Transformation Practice. Kate partners with the Board & C-Suite Clients in leading large-scale transformation consulting engagements. Previously as Executive Director, Global Services at Ernst & Young, Kate lead a global internal consulting team (100) for Ernst & Young’s Top Global Priority Projects $520m under management to 175,000 employees across 150 countries to achieve Vision2020 strategy $50b business.

Kate has held roles of Director, Leadership & Partner Development at PWC and held the national role as HR Director for Deloitte. In 2004 she was nominated Deloitte Businesswomen of the Year recognising her achievements as one of Deloitte’s most talented women.

Kate holds a Bachelor Business degree, MBA and a Masters Pyschology in Organisational Psychology, The University of Sydney. She is certified in an extensive range of national & global psychometric instruments and has over 30,000 hours of executive coaching experience and is a professional Mentor for The Lucy Program.

Steve Borg, SAPSenior Customer Engagement Executive

Steve Borg is a Customer Engagement Executive (CEE) with SAP SuccessFactors. Steve helps existing SAP SuccessFactors’ customers align their technology with their business to maximize the value in their investments as it relates to the SAP SuccessFactors software and services.

Steve is an experienced HR practitioner with over 15 years’ experience in generalist and specialty roles. Steve has also worked across a number of industries including finance, manufacturing and retail. Steve joins SAP SuccessFactors having spent the last three years working as the HCM – Business Architect at Woolworths Limited implementing over this time, Employee Central including Cloud Payroll, Recruitment, Performance and Goals, Succession, Learning, Compensation, Variable Pay and Workforce Analytics. Prior to this Steve held roles at Woolworths such as the HR Manager – Remuneration and Benefits, HR Manager – Learning and Development and a NSW State HR Role within Big W. Steve also worked as the HR and Safety Manager at BridgeClimb Sydney and oversaw HR, Safety and Payroll.

Sean Collins, SAP Sean has worked for over 15 years with both the public and private sector as an executive and management consultant before joining SAP SuccessFactors in 2008. He went on to manage SAP SuccessFactors’ Workforce Analytics and Planning customer-facing teams, which including directing projects in the human capital domain for many leading enterprises across the region. In more recent times Sean led the SAP SuccessFactors Customer Value function and worked with key customers across the Asia-Pacific region to ensure that they achieve the most from their SAP SuccessFactors investment. Sean’s work with customers looks to understand their business priorities and the contribution that human capital plays in contributing to successful strategy execution. Sean’s role at SAP SuccessFactors today is to help companies who want to invest in Cloud HR to understand how it can contribute to human resources success and help drive business outcomes. This stretches from illustrating best practices that differentiate leading organisations from the rest of the field, assessing maturity of current practices and readiness to grow, and explaining how our technology works.

Monique Downes, SAPSolution Adoption Advisor, Customer Adoption and Engagement Program

Monique joined SuccessFactors SAP in January 2014 working specifically with the Recruiting product. She is part of the Customer Adoption and Engagement Program and works closely with the Customer Engagement Executives within the APJ region to ensure the strategic direction of clients that use the SuccessFactors SAP Recruiting module.

She came directly to SuccessFactors SAP following 5 years of working with one of Australia’s largest Job Boards/Online Publishers. Over this time she specialised in client services, sales operations, international sales, implementation of new products and relationship management of alliance and partnerships. Monique’s key focus in this role was the management of the Customer Service team servicing Key Accounts, Corporate, Recruiters and SME clients in the optimisation of a suite products to ensure a high renewal rate.

Her diverse career also includes 14 years of experience from owning and operating her own business, to working in leading roles for State Government Ministerial Office, telecommunications and advertising.

The Recruiting business and customer base has been growing significantly and Monique’s goal is to drive adoption and utilisation of the Recruiting modules in the APJ region.

Joni Ferrier, SAPBusiness Transformation Advisor, HR Line of Business, Australia Pacific Japan

As part of the SAP SuccessFactors Business Transformation team in Australia Pacific & Japan, Joni Ferrier is the leader for the Southeast Asia marketplace.

Joni has a multi-faceted background in software development, consulting, HR technology and HR transformation. Joni started her career in IT consulting but recognized early on the huge impact HR can create to the business outcome and to the quality of life of each employee. She made a conscious decision to focus on HR projects and management since 1998. She has lead multi-cultural teams in the local, regional and global capacity. She brings in a unique perspective of the considerations required in implementing people, process and technology changes across geographies and multiple HR service delivery models.

In her career spanning almost two decades working with and within HR organisations, she has seen the challenges HR faced in articulating the value of investing in HR. Her focus is to assist organisations realize the impact that an HR service delivery aligned with the business strategy has to the bottom line.

Joni graduated from Fox Business School / Temple University with highest honor for Master’s Degree in Human Resource Management.

Marc Havercroft, SAPVice President, Business Transformation Advisory

Marc Havercroft brings more than 20 years’ experience within the future workforce strategy and transformation helping clients adapt their HR strategy to meet the opportunity of the new digital world and the future workforce needed. His expertise includes advisory & strategy and workforce design for organisations going through major change as well as new entrants into the APJ region from both green field to M&A structures. From Talent acquisition to talent management, Marc provides clients with not only high level visibility on current & global trends, but is able to turn this into meaningful workforce strategies that deliver. He has worked across industries from Financial services, Telco, Energy, media, digital social, to public sector, with many of his solutions being honored with industry awards. Marc is a Fellow of the AHRI, and is based out of Sydney, Australia where he lives with his wife and 2 children.

Lisa Harding, SAPSenior Manager, Solution Marketing

In her role as Senior Manager of Solution Marketing at SAP Fieldglass, Lisa is responsible for working closely with the product and technology teams to define and deliver key solution strategy, messaging, and go-to-market activities for SAP Fieldglass’ award-winning solutions. She additionally oversees the company’s content marketing and analyst relations. Prior to joining SAP Fieldglass, Lisa worked in product marketing for a variety of companies within the technology industry.

Sarah Hawkins, SercoPeople & Culture Project Manager, Serco Asia Pacific

Sarah is an established Prince 2 qualified, project manager with over 20 years’ experience in HR, recruitment, change management, stakeholder engagement and system implementations. She has worked in the UK, Middle East and Australia for companies such as Crown Perth, Cap Gemini Ernst & Young, Marks and Spencer, and TMP Worldwide.

Sarah has a degree in Behavioural Science and a Diploma in Counselling which ensures a people focus during technology implementations, therefore setting projects up for success.

Sarah managed a pilot implementation of SAP SuccessFactors Recruitment in 2014 and also deployed the SAP SuccessFactors Learning module for Serco, Asia Pacific in 2015. Earlier this year she was the Global Recruitment Solution SME and AsPac Implementation Manager for Serco, and delivered SAP SuccessFactors Recruiting across Serco Asia Pacific, Middle East and UK.

Joe Herman, SAPVice President, Learning Product Management

In his role as the Vice President for Product Management, Joe leads a global team. His focus is exclusively on the cloud learning solutions from SAP SuccessFactors. With over 13 years of experience in eLearning technology, dating back to Plateau Systems, Joe is passionately committed to innovating eLearning technology, with a specific focus on making learning more continuous, increasing employee engagement, and supporting multi-modal learning.

Joe holds a BA in from Cornell University and an MBA from the University of Virginia. He lives in Northern Virginia with his family.

Carl Hubbard, SAPBusiness Domain Principal – Core HR/Payroll (APJ)

Carl is based in Sydney, Australia and his entire career has specialised in Human Capital Management, from a number of years in front-line HR, to HR consulting in two major consulting firms and working with HR solutions for the last 20 years. Carl had more than fourteen years of senior pre-sales experience with SAP prior to transferring to SAP SuccessFactors in 2012. His role is responsible for strategising and evangelising the Employee Central products in APJ.

Carl is an experienced conference and workshop presenter

Carl has a Bachelor of Laws from UTS, Sydney and a tertiary qualification in HR.

Dr. Steven Hunt, SAP Senior Vice President, Human Capital Management Research

Dr. Steven Hunt role at SAP SuccessFactors is focused on guiding the development and implementation of technology-enabled solutions to maximize workforce engagement and productivity.

Dr. Hunt has over 25 years’ experience designing systems for a variety of human capital management applications including performance management, staffing, employee and leadership development, culture change, workforce analytics, and succession planning. A recognized expert on strategic human resources, Dr. Hunt has played a pivotal role in the implementation of systems that have improved productivity and engagement of millions of employees working for hundreds of companies ranging from small start up organizations to the largest employers in the world.

An active author and presenter, Dr. Hunt has written two widely respected books on HR process design and implementation: “Commonsense talent management: using strategic human resources to increase company performance” (Wiley Press, 2014) and “Hiring success: the art and science of staffing assessment and employee selection” (Wiley Press, 2007).

Fiona Lawrie, SAPSenior Consultant

Fiona is a professionally certified SAP Consultant with 18 years of experience in SAP HR/Payroll. As well as being a qualified trainer in R/3 HCM/Payroll she has a working knowledge of and has implemented many HR modules including PA and PD Modules, Employee Self Service (ESS), Managers Self Service (MSS) and Learning Solution (LSO). Additionally, she is very proficient in the use of the ASAP implementation methodology. She has recently moved into Success Factors Consulting, with expertise in the areas of Learning and Performance and Goal Management.

Jo Morrow, SAP Head of Practice, SAP SuccessFactors, ANZ

Jo is a passionate, multidisciplinary implementation and change lead professional with extensive experience in HR, training and development, project management and operational roles. Her skills and experience have motivated her to lead the charge in HRIS implementations, business process improvement, and leveraging the SAP SuccessFactors solution to support customers on their journey to the Cloud, while simultaneously driving strategic business value.

As a Practice Director, Jo understands what it takes to mold an organisation’s People strategy into a solution that is engaging to the end user, streamlines HR processes, quantifies HR metrics and adds value to the business. Through working closely with customers on project governance, she has become a trusted advisor and thought leader. She engages easily with stakeholders, taking the time to understand their needs and challenges.

She oversees all implementations and customer engagements across Australia and New Zealand, working closely with SAP SuccessFactors project managers, consultants and internal teams to support customer success and ongoing adoption of our solution. Impressively, Jo has led over 40 SAP SuccessFactors implementations as both a principal consultant and project manager, supporting organisations in their transition – doing things differently to get a better outcome.

Throughout her career, Jo has worked in a wide variety of industries across Australia, Canada and Japan, engaging with both small and large enterprise organisations including manufacturing, retail, sport, health, education, travel, government, mining and services.

Russell Porter, SAP Russell Porter is a Business Transformation Advisor with SAP SuccessFactors. He partners with HR and business leaders to help them identify, deliver and realise the value of innovative cloud-based Human Resources solutions – so that organisations can optimise their workforce and achieve their strategic business objectives. Based in Sydney, Russell provides industry thought leadership, strategic solution advice and expert consultation across the Asia Pacific region.

Brenda Reid, SAPBrenda serves as Vice President of Product Management at SAP SuccessFactors. An HR professional herself, Brenda takes a practitioner’s view to building enterprise software for global organizations. She has over 20 years of experience in transforming onboarding, recruiting, and human capital processes through the optimization of technology and support.

Brenda holds an honors degree in Organizational Development and Business Systems from Regis University, Colorado and professional certifications in product and project management.

Gareth Roberts, SAP Senior Consultant

A project manager with multidisciplinary implementation experience, high client engagement, both business process design and improvement skills. An experienced human resources professional with both strategic and operational experience across multiple industries in geographically dispersed environments. Adept in building strong relationships, developing and leading high performing teams to exceed expectations. A strong change advocate with the ability to guide strategic initiatives across all levels of the business. Highly proficient in problem solving, firm decision-making abilities and a natural talent to educate and motivate others.

Hari Srinivasan, SAP Senior Consultant

Hari Srinivasan has over 20 years of experience and he has worked extensively in the last 13 years in the implementation, upgrade and support of ERP projects. Since 2011 Hari has implemented and supported eight EC implementations, two Partner Enablement EC implementations and is currently involved in two active EC implementations. Industries Hari has worked in include: Logistics, Media, Communications, Hospitality & Tourism, Education and Real Estate.

Hari brings extensive HRIS expertise to his role, having worked in Senior Consultant roles in the public and private sectors. Hari’s particular expertise is in workforce administration, onboarding, e-Recruitment, organisational development and ethics, as well as building HR capability.

Laura Stegall, SAP Customer Value Consultant

Laura L. Stegall is a Customer Value Consultant specializing in Talent Management program and system strategy. With 12+ years of HR experience and 7+ years of experience with the SAP SuccessFactors product suite, she has provided implementation and consulting services to clients in the financial services, manufacturing, retail, oil & energy, healthcare, technology, pharmaceutical, agricultural, construction and non-profit sectors. She is an active speaker and presenter at industry events and conferences, sharing best practices and trends in Talent Management technology. She also spent several years as a HR practitioner for US-based

Fortune 500 companies with strategic operations in the Asia-Pacific region: Her roles were focused on developing and managing the technology supporting Talent Management, Talent Acquisition and Compensation functions.

Nikki Symonds, Origin Energy Ltd Head of People & Culture Systems Development & Operations

Nikki is the Head of HR Systems for Origin Energy and leads a team of talented individuals charged with extracting as much value as possible from Origin’s HR Systems. Bringing 16 years of experience implementing and designing HR systems and solutions, Nikki focuses on aligning technology solutions to the strategy and goals of the HR function and creating the best possible experience for employees, managers and HR practitioners. Nikki is also responsible for setting and achieving the HR systems roadmap to deliver a future-state solution that will support Origin P&C in delivering their People vision.

Prior to joining Origin Energy, Nikki was the product manager for ADP GlobalView’s HR product. Working with the SAP HCM solution to provide a global outsourced HR product that worked seamlessly with the GlobalView Payroll and Time Management product to deliver a completely outsourced HR solution to customers around the world.

Bak-Wei Tan, SAPCustomer VIP Manager

Bak-Wei Tan is the VIP Customer Manager for APJ – establishing and managing the program for Asia Pacific Japan. Bak-Wei has been with SAP SuccessFactors for about 3 years, formally as a Partner Enablement Consultant with Success Factors. Bak-Wei has more than 10 years of experience in HCM, primarily as a consultant with Accenture, and later on as an internal consultant with a customer within their Global IT setup. He has experience managing multiple teams and users working across multiple locations.

His consulting experience in HCM / HRIS covers areas such as Recruitment, Personnel Administration, Organizational Management, Payroll Accounting, Time Management, Travel & Expense Management, Employee Self-Service. In the course of his work, Bak Wei has exposure to a rich variety of industries, such as airlines, healthcare, police, civil defence, government, retail, and pharmaceutical.

Greg Taylor, Woolworths Greg is passionate about helping people adopt change with confidence. After spending a number of years flying Hercules transport aircraft for the Royal Australian Air Force, Greg moved into the field of change management. He has spent the last 10+ years working with senior teams across government and corporate sectors to help them turn great ideas into real outcomes. More recently, he led the change team for the delivery of SAP SuccessFactors and SAP Payroll in the cloud to over 200,000 employees in Australia’s largest retailer, Woolworths Limited.

Neil Taylor, IxomFor the past year Neil Taylor has been the Global HR & Payroll Project Manager for IXOM, market leader in water treatment and chemical distribution in Australia and New Zealand, with a growing presence in Asia and Latin America.

With a background in HR and Payroll technology spanning almost two decades, and many different industries, Neil’s experience covers all project lifecycle tasks from pre-sales to client and account management. His other areas of specialty include project planning, solution design and architecture, business process re-engineering, system testing and post-implementation support management.

Dr. Karie Willyerd, SAPWorkplace Futurist

Karie is the Workplace Futurist at SAP SuccessFactors, an SAP human capital software company. Prior to that she was the cofounder and CEO of Jambok, the industry’s first video-based informal social learning software platform, which was acquired by SAP SuccessFactors in 2011. Jambok is now incorporated into the SAP Jam product offering. Karie was formerly Chief Learning Officer for Sun Microsystems, and in that role she was responsible for employee, customer, partner, and Sun community learning. The customer business of Sun trained over 600,000 students a year in 125 countries. ATD named Sun the #1 BEST learning function in the world.

Karie is the coauthor of the award-winning bestseller, The 2020 Workplace: How Innovative Companies Attract, Develop & Keep Tomorrow’s Employees Today. She is a regular blogger for Harvard Business, coauthored a feature article on Mentoring Millennials in Harvard Business Review and has authored dozens of other articles or publications.

In prior roles, she was a Chief Talent Officer for Solectron (now Flextronics), led the people development function at Lockheed Martin Tactical Aircraft Systems and ran executive development at H.J. Heinz. Karie holds a bachelor’s degree from Texas Christian University, a master’s degree in Instructional and Performance Technology from Boise State University and a doctorate in management from Case Western Reserve University. She serves on the global leadership council for the business school at Colorado State University. Additionally she serves on the board of City Year, San Jose supporting the young leaders who are making remarkable changes in high school dropout rates. Karie’s newest book is Stretch: How to Future Proof Yourself for Tomorrow’s Workplace, which was selected as an Amazon Editor’s Pick in Business and Leadership in January, 2016.

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