A Leadership Perspective in Technological Advancement

Akash became Executive Vice President and Chief Information and Digital Officer when he joined Wesco in November 2020. He leads the Information Technology and Digital organizations and is spearheading Wesco’s digital transformation journey. Akash previously served as CIO and CDO at McDermott, and had leadership roles at Baker Hughes, GE Energy and GE Healthcare.

Akash is an active community leader, supporting global philanthropic organizations in India and the US. He holds a Bachelor of Science Degree in Engineering from the University of Pune, India, and a Master of Business Administration from the University of Wisconsin.

Akash Khurana, brings over two decades of experience in organizational transformation and innovation across various industries. Recognized in Constellation's Business Transformation 150, Khurana has demonstrated exceptional leadership in driving digital and technological advancements. At Wesco, he oversees all enterprise systems, security, infrastructure and cloud operations while spearheading the company’s digital and omnichannel strategies.

This exclusive interview highlights Khurana's visionary leadership and corporate excellence in driving business success through digital transformation. It delves into Khurana’s insights into the pivotal role of leveraging advanced technologies, fostering a culture of continuous improvement and integrating IoT and AI into strategic initiatives for Wesco’s growth and operational efficiency.


AT A GLANCE:

• Showcases the significant benefits of leveraging advanced technology, such as the Inventory Command Center, to enhance operational efficiency and financial performance.

• Addresses the complexities of balancing talent refreshment, upskilling and onboarding within a large organization while ensuring alignment with ambitious digital goals.

• Details Wesco’s commitment to IoT innovation, emphasizing the role of smart solutions in energy management, environmental assurance and space optimization
From Strategy to Execution: A CIO’s Leadership

I am the Executive Vice President, Chief Information Officer, and Digital Officer at Wesco, a Fortune 200 company that generated over $22 billion in revenue last year. With over 25 years of technology leadership experience across various industries—including consulting, retail, healthcare, the energy sector and industrial distribution—I lead an organization responsible for all enterprise systems, security, infrastructure and cloud. Additionally, we drive top-line revenue through omnichannel, digital products and platform capabilities.

Balancing Talent Management and Alignment

One of the significant challenges we face is talent management, particularly finding the right balance between refreshing, upskilling and onboarding talent in a large organization. A digital transformation of this scale requires a substantial effort from employees, and aligning the workforce with Wesco's ambitious digital agenda while keeping them motivated and energized throughout a multi-year journey is no small task.

Talent management is a primary concern for me, especially given the high demand for technology. Many companies are going through major transformations, so for those who excel at technology, there are no shortages of opportunities. It is leadership’s responsibility to ensure that we provide clear direction and give the team the purpose of why they stay with Wesco and why they continue to work hard and deliver for our customers and suppliers.

Technology-Driven Operations

A great example of how technology is driving operational efficiencies at Wesco is our Inventory Command Center. This centralized portal provides enhanced visibility into our inventory, offering data insights we previously lacked and helping us meet our customers’ and suppliers’ needs.

It empowers our sales leaders to make informed decisions, share insights and identify opportunities. The data is refreshed daily, remains highly interactive and continues to evolve and improve. As a result, the Inventory Command Center is helping to enhance our cash flow, improve working capital and reduce the number of days of inventory outstanding.

Advancing in the IoT Space

Wesco is building an IoT Innovation Ecosystem to collaborate and co-create with industry-leading partners representing the entire technology stack and value chain. This ecosystem is committed to solving customer challenges and delivering solutions with meaningful return on investment.

Our commercial digital platform is designed to be flexible, scalable, and secure and is built on an open architecture. We can deliver smart solutions that help our customers tackle current and future challenges. For example, with lighting retrofits, we might start by transitioning from legacy lighting to modern, high-efficiency systems. As we retrofit the lighting, we can deploy the fundamental IoT architecture for the building as well. This type of investment provides year-over-year savings. It can also provide the added benefit of using the IoT infrastructure to capitalize on additional IoT use cases, including:

Energy Management: Wesco’s smart energy management solution provides a complete view of energy use to draw deeper insights into consumption, model and predict efficiency gains, optimize policies and measure improvements in energy reduction, typically between 10 and 30 percent.

Smart Environmental Assurance: Maintaining the optimal environment can improve productivity and safety within our customers’ facilities. By implementing proper monitoring and alerting systems, we can protect inventories from damage or spoilage and support policies that reduce HVAC system demand and related energy costs.

Space Optimization: Wesco’s smart space optimization solution provides a complete view of a property so the customer can gain deeper insights into employee occupancy and utilization of your facilities. Whether the customer is planning to reconfigure, add or reduce real estate, occupancy analytics provide the evidence needed to optimize space planning.

Building the right team and fostering a culture of continuous improvement is essential for navigating the complexities of digital transformation and staying ahead in a rapidly evolving industry.

Smart Track-and-Trace: Keeping track of critical equipment, tools, machinery and employees can help prevent the loss, improve productivity, increase safety and enforce processes. A track-and-trace solution can support a wide range of applications across various industries.

Smart Machine Utilization: Optimizing machine utilization can have a cascade of benefits on operating costs and, depending on the size of the investment, could also affect other opportunities for business investment. Wesco's smart machine utilization solution provides deeper insights to help customers optimize their equipment and safeguard their investments.

Wesco recently acquired entroCIM, a building intelligence software company, to enhance our smart building management capabilities. With over 30 years of innovation, entroCIM manages 270 million square feet of building space and processes more than 5 million records daily.

Implementing DevOps Practices and End-to-End Automation

We’ve developed Digital Deployer, a self-service portal for our customers and supplier partners that streamlines and automates the deployment and management of DevSecOps services. This platform empowers software developers to enhance the speed, security and quality of their software delivery. It meticulously curates a comprehensive collection of DevSecOps tools and services, ensuring developers can focus on innovation.

Digital Deployer allows technologists to incorporate coding and system architecture standards and security, and compliance policies into enterprise-curated end-to-end automation. Its modern architecture ensures that every application, DevSecOps pipeline, and infrastructure component within its extensive service catalog is equipped with essential performance measurement and calibration tools. This setup helps developers achieve optimal efficiency while maintaining high security and quality standards throughout the software development lifecycle.

By managing complex dependencies, Digital Deployer can enhance the agility and responsiveness of development teams in rapidly evolving business and technical environments. We embrace highly diverse and changing business and technology architectural paradigms and empower the software engineering teams to deploy software faster with uncompromising security, quality and compliance.

Building the Right Team with Motivation

It's all about having the right team members in place and ensuring they are empowered to leverage their skills in alignment with the company’s objectives. It's remarkable to see how a well-coordinated team can work collaboratively toward a significant agenda, especially with aggressive goals and tight timelines. In our industry, which undergoing significant digital transformation, having the right team makes all the difference. As a Fortune 200 company and a major provider of industrial supply chain solutions, we believe we are leading the way in digital and technological advancements.

Embracing AI as a Transformational Technology

I'll start by saying that AI isn't just a trend or wave—it's the most transformational technology of our era. Embracing AI requires a long-term perspective, ensuring you have the right people, processes and technology stack to fully leverage its benefits. This includes your governance and controls and ensuring that you have mechanisms to receive real-time inputs from your internal or external stakeholders. Additionally, it's crucial to focus on capturing and securing the intellectual property generated through AI initiatives.