Artificial intelligence has finally found its place in the business world, enabling automation through software to eliminate tedious tasks and free workers to pursue more creative endeavors. Yet the lingering concerns of enterprise AI indicate that software alone can’t change the nature of work. People must remain the focus of a company’s effort to boost productivity and collaboration with AI tools.

At some companies, the impact of automation on quality of life can be observed directly.

“Sodexo recognizes people as being important and feels that in a company, as well as in the environment, that people should be the main focus,” said Latonia Lewis (pictured), senior director of program management at Sodexo. “We provide services that enhance the quality of life for our clients, our consumers, [and] our employees.”

At the operational management helm of a “quality of life services” company that supports teams and individuals around the world, Lewis is leveraging automation via Smartsheet Inc. tools in Sodexo’s internal processes to better meet rapidly advancing consumer needs and improve its own culture of collaboration.

Lewis sat down with Lisa Martin (@LuccaZara) and Jeff Frick (@JeffFrick), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Smartsheet Engage event in Bellevue, Washington. (* Disclosure below.)

This week, theCUBE spotlights Latonia Lewis in our Women in Tech feature.

Bringing out the best at Sodexo

Known best as a food services company that supplies a range of institutions with nutritious meals, Sodexo also provides overall support with the primary objective of sustaining healthy environments for consumers. Its offerings include a breadth of quality-of-life services, such as on-site facilities management, home health aid, child care for parents re-entering the workforce, and customized rewards programs to encourage work-life balance and overall standard of living.

“It is diverse, and we operate across a lot of different industries. We support corporate, energy, education, seniors, sports and leisure,” Lewis said.

Lewis works in Sodexo’s service operations organization, an internally facing team with a mission of providing a safe environment for people to work in. Her team not only supports company-wide growth and support initiatives, but encourages efficiencies within the organization that ultimately extend to end users.

“We’re charged with providing synergies and centers of excellence in the servicing that we do to bring out the best that Sodexo has to offer its customers and its clients, as well as its employees,” she said.

Uniting a global team

Lewis was brought on primarily to start up a project management office for the Sodexo North American service operations organization, and she quickly found the company lacking in systemized methods to enable that scale despite its many cross-functional services.

“From a project management maturity perspective, there was not a standardized process. I was faced with figuring out how to get our arms around the projects we were doing across our organization,” she said.

Smartsheet’s cloud-based collaboration platform was already in use at the company but without a centralized process in place to manage activities from a portfolio perspective. Consistency efforts were manual and time consuming, and the resultant lack of standardization inhibited transparency across teams.

In order to leverage the full range of Smartsheet capabilities in tracking progress across service operations, Lewis compiled company-wide needs and developed a roadmap to reconfigure its functionality. “We had to figure out how we were going to grow and then align that growth with how we were going to identify a tool to use and scale,” she said.

Through the implementation of a standard reporting cadence and optimized utilization of Smartsheet dashboards, Lewis broadened project visibility across Sodexo teams and leadership to allow for more efficient collaborations and high-level decision making. The addition of Smartsheet Control Center fostered further improvements in centralized management practices through the use of project templates, as well as standardized data collection and automated all-in-one reporting from key stakeholders.

“It enabled us to get a strategic view of the work that was taking place in service operations, which was something that was needed in order to stop doing so many things repetitively [and] best utilize the resources,” Lewis said.

Empowering innovation

A global project management procedure overhaul at a company of over 400,000 is a daunting task, and one that was initially met with some resistance — but the impact of Smartsheet Control Center on Sodexo’s productivity has converted teams at every level.

“One of our [vice presidents] who’s been there for over 20 years realized now he can do a lot more reporting, get more [key performance indicators]. He’s got his team on board, and the Smartsheet is growing,” Lewis said.

That deep orchestration and granular visibility Smartsheets enables is encouraging collaboration from the top down, as well as between service operations and the market segments. With Sodexo’s offerings only expanding, Lewis is looking forward to the effect improved workflows will have on the company’s bottom line.

“As we started in this new year and planning for [fiscal year 2019], we had more visibility into the projects, their financial benefit if applicable, as well as their impact in terms of the scope and the number of units that were going to be involved,” she said.

With the success of her initiative at Sodexo, Lewis is sharing her Smartsheet experience and best practices for implementing and leveraging the revolutionary automation capabilities of Control Center.

“It’s about people being empowered to do what they were hired to do. I’m happy as a project management professional that Smartsheet enables that type of empowerment, and it’s helping to facilitate that type of knowledge,” Lewis concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Smartsheet Engage event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Smartsheet Engage. Neither Smartsheet Inc., the event sponsor, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE