Today: Vice President, Strategic Sourcing and Operational Excellence, Wolters Kluwer. In October 2004, Stephen Nied joined Amsterdam-based Wolters Kluwer (WK) as vice president of strategic sourcing and operational excellence. WK is a global provider of information products and services for the health; corporate and financial services; tax, accounting, and legal; regulatory; and education markets. At WK's office in the Chicago suburbs, Steve is a key member of the Shared Services organization — a core plank in the effort to integrate numerous companies that WK has acquired over the past few years. In 2003, WK appointed a new CEO — Nancy McKinstry, another Booz Allen alumni — to lead WK through its integration.

Steve leads strategic sourcing in North America and manages projects that drive operational excellence. Both of these roles exploit operational synergies among WK's businesses. He manages $600 million of spend on production, non-production, and technology categories. Steve identifies opportunities for WK to consolidate suppliers throughout the world, standardizes specifications, and adopts best practices. He and his team are streamlining their supply base to drive continued cost reduction; rolling out a system to better manage intellectual property and vendor contracts; and analyzing their manufacturing and fulfillment footprint and network. He is helping to drive the culture change required to turn many independent acquisitions into a cohesive integrated operating company.

At Booz Allen & Before: Steve served in Booz Allen's Chicago office, where he concentrated in business and operations strategy, working on both "fix" and "build" client engagements. Over a 10-year period, he progressed from associate to principal, and was awarded the firm's highest professional honor — the Professional Excellence Award (PEA) — three times for outstanding client service and project contributions.

Among his achievements, Steve helped develop strategies to double the profits of the core business of a global industrial electronics manufacturer. He designed processes to launch a data networking business for a major telecom operator, which resulted in a multi-billion dollar joint venture that generated $250 million in incremental sales within six months. He also managed the inventory reduction program for a major electronic system OEM, which helped reduce inventory by $2.8 billion in six months and convert two-thirds of that savings to cash.

Steve graduated from the Wharton Undergraduate Division at the University of Pennsylvania with a BS degree in systems science and engineering and a BS in economics. He received an MBA with High Honors from the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business before joining Booz Allen in 1994. Prior to business school, he worked as an engineer at BellSouth Telecommunications in Florida.

Did your experience at Booz Allen help you build a foundation for your current position? Booz Allen provided a great opportunity to learn useful skills — both craft and functional — that are highly applicable to solving business problems. It was an excellent place to apply my academic strengths, make a big impact, learn about business, and gain a lot of real-world experience quickly. I use the whole toolkit constantly, including the hypothesis-driven approach, quantitative analysis, inductive-logic writing, and the industrial organization branch of micro-economics. Sourcing is a great umbrella for these skills; by conducting industry analyses and following the consulting cycle, you can produce significant results in a short time.

I enjoyed the variety of work at Booz Allen. I took an interest in whatever was thrown my way, internalized it, and then re-used it. The firm is often hired to solve the biggest problems in a range of industries. I was able to play a role in solving them, and then advance to leading the work — and that creates value.

At WK, two primary skills that I developed at Booz Allen have been particularly important: Consulting craft skills-such as business problem solving and developing hypotheses — and operations functional skills, including supply chain management.

What were the most valuable insights you learned at Booz Allen? There were many, but the most valuable were:

• Deliver results. CEOs and boards value results, and they value the people who can deliver them.



• Get the facts. Insights start with facts. The more relevant the facts, the better your analysis and insights. Often, the answers to even the most complex problems are easy when you have the data. Relying too much on intuition can result in inaccurate or incomplete answers.



• Stay determined and positive. Sometimes you just have to keep at it, and keep those who need to take ownership of an issue on the hook.

Any favorite moments or experiences at Booz Allen? There are clearly a lot of professional and personal memories over 10 years. One of my proudest accomplishments was rebuilding the Booz Allen consultant recruiting program in the Chicago office in 1999 and 2000.

What was your greatest accomplishment at Booz Allen? Being a key member of the Working Capital Reduction project for a global telecom equipment manufacturer. I led the inventory reduction effort with another Booz Allen colleague, and the team won a PEA (Professional Excellence Award) for this work. The manufacturer had made a commitment to Wall Street on working capital reduction, and when Booz Allen entered the picture, problems that were already serious were getting worse. With our help the corporation exceeded even its stretch goal, which helped it restore liquidity and regain credibility on Wall Street. Then they were able to go to the capital markets to get funding which bought them more time. I'm not saying we saved that organization, but we helped tremendously.

What do you most look forward to each day? Making a difference.

Any advice for people just launching their career with the firm? Develop an area of expertise in some field in addition to rounding out your business skills. Clients are looking for deep functional expertise in fields such as strategy, IT or operations, and this type of expertise also makes you commercially attractive.

If you're achievement-oriented, use Booz Allen as a way of advancing yourself and learning skills, but be cautious when all your experiences don't line up. Joining the operations practice at Booz Allen helped me focus in one direction, which I may not have done otherwise.

What has your work at Booz Allen taught you about yourself? Use time wisely. What you can accomplish is mainly limited by your time. Every business decision does not necessarily require a tradeoff, but every decision you make about using your time does.

profile posted February 10, 2006