Kevin Cowherd

At Ankura he leads enterprise projects – integrations, global resource planning, organization restructurings, and process redesigns among them – with clients in a broad range of industries, including automotive, manufacturing, software, professional services, logistics, financial services, banking, insurance, entertainment, and hospitality. Over the course of his career, Kevin has developed deep functional expertise in the areas of human resources, information technology, and sales.

Previously, Kevin held senior leadership positions in human resources at IBM, among them chief information officer of the learning organization. In that role, he was responsible for transforming and managing IT for the company’s 425,000 employees worldwide and helped guide the internal implementation of SAP’s human capital management system in more than 50 countries in Asia, Africa, and South America.

Kevin’s professional experience includes:

• Division Integration, Global Third-Party Logistics Provider: Led the integration of two subsidiaries with combined revenue of $2 billion, creating the new organizational design and structuring the legal, finance, sales, and marketing departments to support the merged entity.
• Divestiture, Global Tire Manufacturer: Worked with the $30 billion company on the carve-out of an underperforming division that was combined in a joint venture with a similar division from the parent company’s top competitor.
• Strategic Planning, Global Third-Party Logistics Provider: Facilitated the development of a five-year strategic plan and the establishment of a strategic management office to support the plan’s implementation and to drive growth.
• Software-System Multi-Country Deployment, Financial Services Company: Accelerated the roll-out of an Oracle-based enterprise resource planning system to more than 10 countries, reducing the adoption time in each country by a third compared to original projections and saving the client more than $10 million overall.
• Process Improvements, Record Label: Led the project to make 10 process areas in a shared services center more efficient, efforts which helped lower operating expenses by more than $4.5 million.
• ERP System Turn-Around, Fortune 100 Insurance Company: Led the team that restarted the implementation of an enterprise resource planning system for insurance, delivering a higher quality solution on schedule.
• Talent Management System Upgrade, IBM Corporation: Spearheaded the replacement of more than 100 legacy systems with a comprehensive, global, talent management system serving 425,000 employees. The project also included setting up processes that allowed the company to outsource select administrative services, reducing annual operating expenses by more than $15 million.