BRIDGES TO THE FUTURE

November 1st, 2022
JW Marriott Bucharest Grand Hotel

ABOUT THE EVENT

ABSL invites you to the 10th Annual Conference, the largest event for Romanian Business Services Industry that brings together around 600 professionals keen to find answers to current concerns, discover the latest trends for a new era of business, and network.

Lots of changes have happened since our last offline conference: the Covid-19 pandemic, Russia – Ukraine war, inflation, the loom of economic crisis, all these creating an uncertainty that might have an influence on the business sector too.

We know the future is unpredictable; both in life and in business. But we can still influence it, as the choices we make, the decisions we take have a great impact on what will happen next. What we do today creates the bridge towards tomorrow. And in business services industry, that is exactly what ABSL has been doing for the past 10 years: building bridges to the future through strong partnerships and well-informed decisions. We have enhanced dialogue and collaboration within the business services sector, engaged with authorities and other stakeholders, and promoted Romania as one of the most attractive locations for business services. We have created an amazing community, driving the growth of the business service industry.

At this conference, we are celebrating 10 years of building bridges to the future. We are interested in what comes next: exciting paths towards added value, digital transformations that will upgrade skills and mindset, game changing makeovers, an innovative future different from what we imagine or not. We are interested in what comes next regarding Romania and Romanian business industry, what we can do to remain an important player in the field.

Join us in celebrating our core values, our people, and all the amazing things that are yet to come.

Agenda

REGISTRATION & WELCOME COFFEE

PLENARY SESSION

Conference Opening

Colin Lovering
ABSL 10th Annual Conference Moderator

Welcome Remarks

Ciprian Dan
President of ABSL

In this report published jointly by ABSL and PwC we are analysing the perspectives and challenges of the business services sector in Romania, regarding mainly the development of labour market, salaries/benefits, and the office market.

Francesca Postolache
Partner, PwC
Bogdana Buhos
Assurance Director, PwC
Oana Munteanu
People & Organisation Consulting Director, PwC

What exactly is ESG from a practical point of view? You will find out how to discuss ESG with various stakeholders and will have a better understanding of sustainability in the Skanska way. We will discuss how to:

  •  create healthy and resilient places for everyone and
  • make a sustainable impact in an industry that accounts for 40% of the world’s energy-related carbon emissions.
Andrei Ivan
Project Director, Skanska Commercial Development Business Unit in CEE

Step into the next level of digital innovation through self-service for finance professionals.

Vincent Orcin
Head of Finance Shared Service Center of Societe Generale Global Solution Centre

Still want to or need to learn a new foreign language? If you think that it’s hard or that you don’t have the time, you might be right. Looking for that miraculous tool or way to do it? Well, unfortunately there is no shortcut. It’s just like going to the gym. You either do it or you don’t. There’s no trying. But luckily, @Eucom we can give you some tips on how to. Join us and it might come in hand what we’re about to share with you.

Jaroslav Unatinszki
COO, Eucom

Businesses set to succeed in the future can deliver the right message to the right customer at the right time. This poses a challenge to businesses, with a seamless omnichannel strategy increasingly essential for delivering for a digital-first consumer.

Adrian Baron
ITSM Process & Technology Manager, Stefanini EMEA

COFFEE BREAK

KEYNOTE SPEAKER

Kjell Nordström

Ten Years in Ten Weeks – a New World is Born

There is indeed a lot going on right now. Before we´ve even have time to contend with the biggest pandemic in a century, a large-scale war breaks out around the corner. At the same time, the climate crisis looms ever larger.

The world has been transformed from comprehensible to incomprehensible for many businesses. Like the subject of an old Polaroid the image of a new reality is slowly emerging. It is indeed a new world … and it offers a huge Momentum for renewal and change.

Say hello to the age of Innovation!

ABSL ANNIVERSARY

LUNCH

PLENARY SESSION

Around the world, organizations have adopted hybrid work policies, but haven’t changed their offices to support the new realities of hybrid work. Workplaces will need to earn people’s commute by meeting a new set of needs: support hybrid work, establish connections, create a sense of belonging and promote wellbeing — all of which suffered during the pandemic. Rather than basing office design on the need to fit more people into less space, the workplace should draw inspiration from a new source that is less about efficiency and more about humanity — the vibrant communities in which we live. Join us in a conversation around how the office can create the same energy and connection people feel sitting in a sidewalk cafe or the same level of solitude they experience in their library or the privacy of their own home.

Ilinca Popescu
Sales Director for Central, Eastern & Northern Europe, Steelcase

Employers need to meet today’s challenges in the actual context that disturbs the wellbeing of employees. How do external factors affect the professional level in Romania? What means to be top of the class when we talk about wellbeing benefits and how to restore the wellbeing of the employees.

Georgiana Andrei
Corporate Sales Director – Subscriptions Division, Reteaua de Sanatate REGINA MARIA

While we are advocates for always looking forward, there are crucial insights to be gained from past experiences. Evaluating previous trends is the first step to a more straightforward path to success and a shorter learning curve, especially while facing unconventional emerging needs from our clients. During this session we’ll look back and analyze the way the real estate office market evolved in the past 10 years, while also making predictions on how the next 10 years will unfold. We will discuss tenants’ ever changing and evolving requirements and we will provide you with the tools to make informed choices according to the current and future circumstances. We will go on a journey within our region and try to understand the trends and how Romania has evolved and will continue to evolve in the coming years compared to our neighbors, in order to ultimately comprehend if we are ready for the future.

Maria Florea
Key Client Director, JLL Romania

We’ve been living through the greatest workplace disruption in generations and the level of volatility will not slow down soon. What will change is how variable that disruption becomes. Leaders need to learn how to thrive in a period of disruption that plays out unevenly across their organizations. HR executives need to be aware of the underlying trends that will shape the workplace of the future and be prepared to tackle inherent legal challenges. Globalization of work, the war on talent, social protection of workers, the migration towards flexible hierarchy systems and alternative remuneration models are some of the topics we will address during our presentation.

Cătălin Micu
Partner, Zamfirescu Racoți Vasile & Partners

COFFEE BREAK & NETWORKING

BREAKOUT SESSION HR

Redefining remote and hybrid work strategy is one of the trends shaping the workplace in 2023. Hybrid work has been and continues to take a front-row seat in conversations about workplace future and people engagement. The common denominator is flexibility and how flexible working offers companies a competitive advantage. While some employees prefer remote work and others prefer hybrid, in-office work, or a combination of the two, what employees aspire to is flexibility and the possibility of choosing what best fits their needs.

Corina Făurescu
Senior HR Manager, Booking Holdings Romania

Practical advice regarding improvement of employee engagement and superior business outcomes through courageous leadership and cultural and behavioural change in the organization.

Florin Grama
Director of Business Services, Euromaster Tyre & Services Romania

A practical approach to hybrid onboarding with instant impact on increasing retention and decreasing time to productivity.

Sorin Păun
Co - Founder, CODE OF TALENT

With so many learning products and services at hand, many companies still encounter skill gaps. Moreover, the covid-19 crisis changed how organizations invest in their employees even more and required new ways of L&D approaching. We have conducted an inquiry among our clients in which we discussed how their learning solutions have changed after the pandemic. The results show that sporadic training activities are no longer a choice since the companies are more focused on the creation and resilience of a sustainable learning ecosystem. We will explore some new long-term solutions and tools that create a greater impact on L&D activity in the new way of working.

Alexandra Gherguț-Babii
Learning Communication Ambassador, Talent Collection

At the centre of our Future of Work model stands the feedback of our employees. The result? A flexible framework where business leaders & teams can choose their preferred set-up: hybrid; remote or in office.

While running this model on the ground, important lessons emerged – some are in line with what we already know from the market, some are different. Let`s get together for a condensed sharing session on the topic.

Christine Kropf
Employee Experience & Talent Strategist, Accenture Romania

Who are our Key Employees and more specifically Why? We will try to define values into criteria, in order to better understand what is important to you and how is that obvious to Others. We will separate the Pains into 3 concepts: Retaining, Engaging and Key People. The focus will be on Key People upon understanding Your Needs. You might consider « A People » or « A Positions ». Both strategies are good, just need to be coherent within practice. There are huge benefits and some tricky risks that might impact our intentions to drive results within the organisation.

Iuliana Leurent
CEO, Temps HR

The SG GSC Talent Management Program takes on the mission to attract and develop the Leaders of tomorrow at all levels within the Network, Leaders who will shape and drive the SG GSC Romania Strategy. The presentation consists of the Talent Management Program Overview and the Talent Management Program key results.

Florin Lăzărică
L&D Manager, Societe Generale Global Solution Centre

BREAKOUT SESSION TECHNOLOGY & BUSINESS

While most of the Upskilling programs decide to act on knowledge trainings as their key to success, we decided to add to this principle 2 ingredients, that should boost engagement rates, grow mindset, and create a more dedicated process improvement culture. With this, using local volunteering communities, we already benefit from people interest, involvement, and dedication, so in this case redirecting our automation improvements to their projects sounds like a fair trade.

Using local projects, we are able to activate passive digital awareness, through updating our employees on the automations that are done for the processes that they already use. Having a strategy that has “Personal experience” as its core – we were able to boost knowledge adoption and its adoption further into Global Business Processes.

Irisha Toderici
Director of Marketing Automation Development & Execution, HP Inc.

Our client was facing typical issues of an emerging shared service center – unclear vision, need of scope expansion and appetite for transformation lacking leadership support. We’ve helped our client define a clear vision, strategy and action plan to transform into a Center office and a valuable partner to business – a real peer instead of a mere low-cost transactional service provider. Join us to see how they’ve managed to kick-off their transformation journey, overcome typical obstacles and gain leadership support to bring their GBS to the next level.

Oana Plătică-Vidovici
Senior Manager in the Consulting practice, Deloitte Romania
Tomas Husner
Senior Manager in the Consulting practice, Deloitte Czech Republic

The future of work holds the key of driving organizational innovation and changes the existing way of working. In many cases, the Global Business Services (GBS) or Shared Services organizations are the catalyst in driving change, starting from core processes. During the presentation we will discuss about the transformative potential of GBS organizations with focus on:

  • Human-centricity and organizational culture
  • Re-thinking new ways of working for GBS to become a digital transformation engine
  • Creating an ecosystem based on people, processes and technology
  • Sustainability, scalability, adaptability and agility as the core pillars for Digital Transformation
  • Continuously investing in innovation and digital culture
Cristina Duță
Director Intelligent Automation, AECOM

Generation 2 Automation is the direction where enterprise organizations are moving. Wider technologies are involved, generating larger benefits which can finance digital transformations. EY ASpace is AI Platform that can empower enterprises to rapidly adopt AI, resulting in faster, smarter, and more future ready businesses.

Marius Antonie
Associate Partner | Head of Intelligent Automation CoE, EY Romania
Sachin Premnath
Director of AI & RPA, EY India

Optimizing support department services towards our employee through implementing innovative tech solutions under the format of a common online platform for all HR, payroll, inventory, IT equipment topics.

Leonard Crișean
BI Manager Taskforce, Majorel Romania

More than once, we have seen discussions around scope expansion in GBSs focusing mostly on numbers – business cases quantifying the impact of the anticipated changes, complex formulae incorporating all potential costs and savings, hoping for that desired net positive result. While a positive business case is, in most cases, a key factor for a setup or expansion decision, when implementation comes about everyone realizes there are other, equally important matters that should have been considered in preparation of the actual migrations. We have seen higher rates of success in GBSs that sought to understand, factor in and proactively address key stakeholders’ concerns (explicit or not). These were based on maturity assessments conducted to understand the starting position as well as desired evolution in terms of effectiveness, efficiency and quality on five key pillars- Strategy, Operations, Processes, People and IT. Such assessments and the resulting action items, when factored in a scope extension discussion, would address stakeholders’ concerns, increase visibility over the GBS operations profile and maturity and facilitate the decision.

Radu Andrei
Director Management Consulting, PwC Romania

WHY YOU SHOULD JOIN

Keynote Speaker

Kjell Nordström

Swedish economist, management thinker and best-selling author (co-author of Karaoke Capitalism, Funky Business and Urban Express). He holds a doctoral degree in International Business from the Stockholm School of Economics. His research and consulting focus on the areas of corporate strategy, multinational corporations, and globalization.

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Kjell Nordström

Swedish economist, management thinker and best-selling author (co-author of Karaoke Capitalism, Funky Business and Urban Express). He holds a doctoral degree in International Business from the Stockholm School of Economics. His research and consulting focus on the areas of corporate strategy, multinational corporations, and globalization.

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Speakers

Georgiana Andrei

Corporate Sales Director – Subscriptions Division, Reteaua de Sanatate REGINA MARIA

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Radu Andrei

Director Management Consulting, PwC Romania

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Marius Antonie

Associate Partner | Head of Intelligent Automation CoE, EY Romania

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Adrian Baron

ITSM Process & Technology Manager, Stefanini EMEA

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Bogdana Buhos

Assurance Director, PwC

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Leonard Crișean

BI Manager Taskforce, Majorel Romania

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Cristina Duță

Director Intelligent Automation, AECOM

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Corina Făurescu

Senior HR Manager, Booking Holdings Romania

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Maria Florea

Key Client Director, JLL Romania

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Alexandra
Gherguț-Babii

Learning Communication Ambassador, Talent Collection

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Florin Grama

Director of Business Services, Euromaster Tyre & Services Romania

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Tomas Husner

Senior Manager in the Consulting practice, Deloitte Czech Republic

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Andrei Ivan

Project Director, Skanska Commercial Development Business Unit in CEE

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Christine Kropf

Employee Experience & Talent Strategist, Accenture Romania

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Florin Lăzărică

L&D Manager, Societe Generale Global Solution Centre

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Iuliana Leurent

CEO, Temps HR

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Cătălin Micu

Partner, Zamfirescu Racoți Vasile & Partners

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Oana Munteanu

People & Organisation Consulting Director, PwC

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Vincent Orcin

Head of Finance Shared Service Center of Societe Generale Global Solution Centre

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Sorin Păun

Co - Founder,
CODE OF TALENT

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Oana Plătică-Vidovici

Senior Manager in the Consulting practice, Deloitte Romania

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Ilinca Popescu

Sales Director for Central, Eastern & Northern Europe, Steelcase

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Francesca Postolache

Partner, PwC

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Sachin Premnath

Director of AI & RPA, EY India

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Irisha Toderici

Director of Marketing Automation Development & Execution, HP Inc.

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Jaroslav Unatinszki

COO, Eucom

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WHY BECOME
A CONFERENCE PARTNER

Event Partners come to ABSL 10th Annual Conference to display their latest products and services and to explore business opportunities. Being a partner of our conference will give you the opportunity to:

If your company is part of ABSL, you can benefit of discounted partnership packages.

STRATEGIC PARTNERS

EVENT PARTNERS

Platinum partners
Gold partners
Silver partners

REGISTRATION & TICKETS*

*Tickets are limited according to the hall capacity & first come, first served basis

Early Bird

150 € + VAT

before October 20th

Regular

300 € + VAT

starting October 21st

FREE FOR ABSL MEMBERS & PARTNERS (according to the membership type).

Check here the membership type of your company: https://www.absl.ro/members/

Discuss with your company representative about participation and register afterwards.

ABSL CONFERENCES AT A GLANCE

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