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At the 2024 edition of the North American Finance Executive Summit series we sat down with Dr. Kelly Richmond Pope, a professor at DePaul University and a national instructor with Becker Professional Education, to talk about fraud. Senior executives working in Finance need to understand fraud, both because they are their organizations’ best line of defense against it, and also because so often the opportunities for fraud are connected to their roles and responsibilities. In this wide-ranging interview with a forensic accountant, author, and award-winning documentarian we explore motivations and examples of fraud that the attendees of NAFES24 need to understand, as well as how Becker helps Finance professionals educate themselves and even receive certification for expertise on the issues of fraud. Give this episode a listen!
Dr. Kelly Richmond Pope
Professor, Author, Documentarian,
and National Instructor for Becker
 
Kelly Richmond Pope is a forensic accountant, a professor at DePaul University, and a filmmaker who analyzes corporate crime. Her 2017 documentary on Rita Crundwell's embezzlement from the city of Dixon, Illinois, All the Queen’s Horses, won the HBO Spotlight Award for Best Documentary at its World Premiere in 2017 and the Golden Laurels Award at the 2018 Beloit International Film Festival. In 2023, her book Fool Me Once: Scams, Stories, and Secrets from the Trillion-Dollar Fraud Industry was published by Harvard Business Review Press.
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Becker Professional EducationBecker, known for more than 60 years as the leader that people trust for the best in CPA Exam Prep, has over the years invested in an extensive library of CPE courses, designed both for credentialed and non-credentialed accounting and finance professionals. With more than 700 On Demand courses available for streaming 24/7, and 100+ scheduled Webcasts per month, Becker has you and your team covered. Also, as a strategic partner of the Institute of Management Accountants (IMA), we’ve enhanced every aspect of our CMA Exam Prep to be as close as you can get to the exam. Becker remains fully committed to CPA Exam Prep, with over 1 million candidates and counting! We are proud to share that the top 100 accounting firms and an expanding clientele of corporations, rely on us for their staff’s exam preparation.
www.becker.com

At the 2023 edition of the Biomanufacturing World Summit series we sat down with Diluks De Silva to talk about one of the most important topics everyone working on the future of medicine today is facing: If the next generation of Advanced Therapy Medicinal Products really is everything we think it is going to be, where are we going to get all the skilled technical operations experts and senior leaders we will need as our specialized and relatively niche part of the larger pharmaceutical manufacturing industry takes center stage? This is not a small challenge, and it is not one with an easy solution. A lot of people are needed with very specific skillsets that currently only relate to a small and little-understood part of an industry that has always had to compete for young people against other business sectors. What can be done, what is being done, and what still needs to be done to meet the demands CGT and other ATMP manufacturers are going to have now and in the future? Give this episode a listen to learn more. 
 
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Compliance Architects LLC delivers high-value compliance, quality, and regulatory consulting services to companies directly regulated by the U.S. FDA and other global regulatory authorities. With capabilities ranging from quality systems implementations to audits, inspection readiness, enforcement remediation, and outsourced compliance services, Compliance Architects LLC has the experience, expertise, and delivery capability to significantly improve your company’s business outcomes. Jack Garvey is CA’s founder and CEO, a chemical engineer and a practicing regulatory attorney, and has spent his entire career helping companies navigate the challenges at the intersections of science, engineering, business, and law.
 
www.compliancearchitects.com

At the most recent edition of the North American HR Executive Summit we sat down with Jessica Jones, the VP of Human Resources & Legal Compliance at Alliance Technical Group. Jessica hosted a themed lunch discussion on culture transfer strategies during mergers and acquisitions, and in this interview she shared some of the key takeaways from that conversation. M&A activity is one of those topics where HR professionals have a lot of important work to do in a tight time frame, but are often reluctant to talk about specifics. One of the great advantages of the themed lunch discussion format is that it’s an hour around the table with people who opted into this specific topic because it’s relevant to their own experiences and expertise. What an opportunity for like-minded people to share best practices and lessons learned on an important but specific and sometimes sensitive topic. Give this episode a listen! 
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Jessica JonesVP of Human Resources & Legal Compliance at Alliance Technical Group
Jessica Jones specializes in helping companies establish fair policies and procedures that help support employees while protecting the company. With Alliance, she has helped the company with dramatic growth and shifting its HR/business operating strategies. Jessica has redesigned all aspects of the company’s Human Resource structure (on-going project), while ensuring the protection of the Company’s values and building culture. She enjoys all facets of HR from benefits and compensation to employment and labor law. She has extensive experience with greenfield and turn-around projects, HR project management and analytics, acquisitions and culture transfer.

In preparation for the upcoming North American Information Security Summit taking place this June 16-18 in Denver, we spoke with Cynthia Kaiser, a Deputy Assistant Director with the FBI’s Cyber Division who leads the FBI’s cyber threat intelligence, cyber policy, and cyber partner engagement efforts. She offers an overview of how the FBI works with companies to address cybersecurity threats, updates relevant to Chief Information Security Officers, and also offers a preview of some of the content she plans to talk about in her presentation at NAISS24. Don’t miss this episode!
 
Cynthia KaiserDeputy Assistant Director, Cyber Division at Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)
Cynthia Kaiser is a Deputy Assistant Director with FBI Cyber Division, where she leads the FBI’s cyber threat intelligence, cyber policy, and cyber partner engagement efforts.
Cynthia has covered cyber, technology, and counterintelligence issues for almost 20 years for the FBI, served as a PDB Briefer in two presidential administrations, and has led FBI cyber threat analysis and served as an FBI election lead since 2017. In these roles, she has reshaped FBI information sharing and collaboration with the private sector and federal, state, and local government officials to be robust, proactive, and aimed at imposing risks and consequences on malicious cyber actors.
Cynthia is also passionate about increasing diversity in cyber and tech professions. She was named a Women Tech Leader Ambassador by GovCIO in 2022, a Top Government Tech Leader to Watch by WashingtonExec in 2023, and received Cyber Guild’s “Warrior Award” in 2023. She holds a Master’s degree in security policy focused on science and technology and an Executive Master’s degree in leadership.

At the 2023 edition of the North American Supply Chain Executive Summit series we sat down with Steven LaBruzzy, a Value Engineering VP and Supply Chain Expert at Celonis, to talk about how an evolving business landscape offers opportunities for supply chain professionals to rethink and reevaluate their systems and processes, tactics and toolkits. As businesses move from reactive responses to unprecedented disruptions into proactive planning for a less stable working environment with a more diverse range of challenges, what should they be thinking and doing differently? What should they be learning about, and who should they be partnering with? For all this and more, give this episode a listen. 
 
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Steven is a Value Engineering Vice President and supply chain expert at Celonis.  Steven’s 25 years’ experience as a management consultant and leading technical and value-oriented engineers affords him insights and lessons learned from helping hundreds of companies and operating units improve their business processes.  Today, Steven heads up a team of value engineers focused on finding, framing and fixing valuable business problems in their enterprise processes through process mining.  Steven and his team are proud to have helped nearly 100 diverse manufacturing, energy, automotive and distribution Celonis customers realize over $700M in cost reduction and working capital improvements.
 
 
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CelonisCelonis enables customers to optimize their business processes. Powered by its leading process mining technology, Celonis provides a unique set of capabilities for business executives and users to continuously find improvement opportunities within and across processes, and execute targeted actions to rapidly enhance process performance. This optimization yields immediate cash impact, radically improves customer experience, and reduces carbon emissions. Celonis has thousands of implementations with global customers and is headquartered in Munich, Germany and New York City, USA with more than 20 offices worldwide.


www.celonis.com

At North American Food Safety & Quality 2023 we sat down with Kim Daniels and Cheryl Alesso of RQA to talk about the power of proactivity in Food Supply Chains, some of the big trends food and beverage manufacturers are facing right now when they look at their operations, and what companies can do when they need specific expertise and extra hands in moments of crisis. This is a wide-ranging conversation that touches on everything from supplier relationships to crisis management to auditing and inspections to the importance of after-action remotes to learn lessons that can be applied moving forward. Give this one a listen!
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Kim Daniels is RQA’s Director, Crisis & Risk Management.  She has more than 20 years of experience in the food and beverage alcohol industry including Quality, Food Safety, Recall, Crisis Management, Supply Chain Management, GFSI Auditing, Governance and Consumer / Customer Care.  Since 2018, Kim has consulted in a variety of consumer products industries including preparing organizations for GFSI audits, conducting 3rd party due diligence audits, training on Recall, Crisis Management, Food Defense and Allergen Cross Contact Prevention, leading global Consumer Care gaps analysis and optimization and supporting organizational program maturity development, design, and strategic talent planning initiatives.
Kim was the Director of Quality Excellence at Diageo responsible for Design Quality, Supplier Quality, Manufacturing Quality and Consumer / Customer Quality. Kim was responsible for developing and delivering Global Quality strategy and identifying best practices solutions to improve organizational effectiveness.  She implemented Diageo’s first Consumer Care program for North America and Latin America, developed a Global Consumer Care strategy, completed a 12-month program focused on developing Woman in Leadership for Supply Chain Excellence and received two President Spirit of Supply awards for Brilliant Execution in Global Quality Excellence and Crisis Management.
Kim holds an Associates in Science, and an undergraduate and MBA in Organizational Leadership.
She is certified in the following disciplines:  Certified CQI & IRCA FSSC Lead Auditor, Implementing SQF Systems, FDA FSMA PCQI for Human Food, Foreign Supplier Verification Program, Intentional Adulteration Vulnerability Assessment, HACCP, Lean Six Sigma Green Belt, Supply Chain Professional, and as an Agile Scrum Master. 
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RQA, Inc.Founded in 1989, RQA is the global leader in providing quality assurance and food safety consultancy, training and services to the food and beverage industry. RQA offers Retail Quality Audits, Counterfeit Investigations, Consumer Complaint and Product Retrieval, Crisis Planning and Management and Product Recall Services globally. RQA Food Forensics™ is the leading provider of foreign material identification services. FSMA compliance training includes PCQI for Human and Animal Foods, Foreign Supplier Verification Program, and Food Defense Programs. RQA’s consultancy team also assists with the development of these programs.
www.rqa-inc.com