Ryan Schafer

Ryan has been a member of several engagements involving system and process designs, organizational reengineering, strategic planning, project/program delivery, and technology roadmaps. He has worked with clients in many industries including manufacturing, healthcare, aviation services, and transportation.

Prior to Ankura, Ryan held senior leadership positions in program delivery, technology, and operations areas in several companies. As the assistant vice president of global business services at Aramark, Ryan was responsible for the implementation of a multi-functional, global shared services organization spanning the company’s full back office, including finance, human resources, information technology, supply chain, customer administration, legal, and facilities management. He also was responsible for the strategic planning, project management, and operations excellence functions that developed the service center and supported the initial staff of 300.

Ryan’s professional experience includes:

• Integration Management, Commercial/Retail Manufacturing: Led the data integration efforts for a new joint venture between two global tire manufacturing companies to create a new B2B distribution company with more than 70 US locations. Ryan took over the integrations component of the initiative when it was behind schedule and his efforts covered the development, testing, and deployment of over 150 system interfaces while reorganizing the team and deliverables.
• Process Improvement, Aviation Services: Led the visioning effort to define key business and technical drivers, process and system impacts, and solution options to expand and modernize a services company’s payment processing across over 200 airport facilities. This included analysis of the full value-chain of events leading to/from payment processing and creating tools to help manage and prioritize the areas of project scope over time. Ryan also led cross-team design workshops to create tailored enterprise dashboards that focused on revenue management, human resources, and recruiting.
• Process Analysis and Strategic Planning, Retail Manufacturing: Conducted more than 20 future-state capability and business process design sessions for the client, identifying 70 distinct improvement opportunities and documenting 20 future-state processes and accompanying policies to help simplify and streamline operations.
• Process Analysis and Strategic Planning, Healthcare Payer Support: Developed a roadmap of process recommendations to increase the production performance and reliability of a high-volume printing and systems development processes. Ryan gathered and integrated data/information from 60 stakeholders and four core systems and conducted two workshops to identify 200 risk points in the current processes, resulting in 13 groups of change recommendations. He also developed a prototype dashboard for monitoring the complete end-to-end printing process.
• Organizational Design and Execution, Insurance Services: Created an enterprise delivery management office to support programs and projects across the organization. Upon the resignation of the CIO, Ryan also assumed a portion of the leadership duties for IT, co-leading strategies and operations, refining vendor management processes and technology roadmaps, and implementing the Planview enterprise management tool.
• Merger and Acquisition, Healthcare TPA Services: Led the integration and transition of 200 staff across three locations and 11 IT systems of a major insurance carrier’s long-term care practice into a growing startup, an 18-month, $4 million effort.
• Project Delivery and Process Engineering, Web Hosting Services: Led the integration of a new web hosting platform and the migration of customers to that new platform including process design and metrics for an offshore migrations services partner. Assisted with the stand-up of two additional offshore partners and identified additional strategic initiatives for further improvement in production operations.