Back in 2015, Toni Dugal, who had previously been with Xerox and HP, was named vice president of solution services by Exela’s predecessor company, Novitex. Her charge was to oversee the growth of our Managed Print Service business. In the course of her work, which involved, among other things, collaborating with Six Sigma consultants, services and support teams, and directly with customers, Toni found herself in a position to pay close attention to inbound and outbound communications occurring through a variety of channels, not the least of which was the mailroom, and over time, she came to be integral to Exela’s Smart Office initiatives, including Digital Mailroom. Busy as that makes her, she was kind enough to take a few minutes to chat with us while on a recent trip to the Stamford headquarters, home of, among other things, Exela’s Corporate Marketing team (everyone is waving “hello” right now).

Here’s what we learned:

Us:

Toni, can you tell us what you now do and how you came to be doing it?

Toni:

I advocate for Exela's customers and capture revenue for Exela by leading the Strategic Opportunity team to increase the quality of our deliverables; expand and accelerate the annual contract value of opportunities; and improving the associated processes. I have a deep background in building new offerings and organizations that expanded my understanding of solutions, delivery and operations, customer satisfaction, finance, and contract negotiations.

Us:

What are you currently working on that excites you?

Toni:

Leading an effort to establish operational standards to be used during our solution-ing process for Exela location solutions. Having these standards will improve our ability to respond to customers quickly with a compelling price.  This is expanded work from the standards the legacy solutions team had completed many years ago that improved our solutions execution.

Us:

So...how do you define innovation?

Toni:

Customers define it for you.  If it's aligned with their strategic objectives; different than what they are doing today; and provides unique value to them - it's innovation.

Us:

How about #FiveWordsAboutYou?

Toni:

Since I just had my top five strengths identified for me via Gallup’s “Strengthfinder” tool, I’ll go with those:  

• Strategic
• Learner
• Ideation
• Command
• Significance

Us:

Tell us something most people would be most surprised to learn about Toni Dugal?

Toni:

I used to be ranked 10th in the world in Cowboy Fast Draw.

Us:

Well, we’re officially blown away.

Toni:

(polite chuckle)

Us:

(remembering there’s a reason puns really aren’t all that funny)

So….anyway….we’ve heard you’re a big reader! What’s your favorite book?

Toni:

Illusions by Richard Bach

Us:

Favorite film?

Toni:

A Star is Born

Us:

Favorite superhero? 

Toni:

Wonder Woman

Us:

Can you tell us what you wanted to be when you were a kid?

Toni:

Either a lawyer or a horse trainer.

Us:

Anything else you want to say - a favorite quote, a motivational mantra, etc.? 

Toni:

“DWYSYWD”

Us:

...which means…?

Toni:

“Do What You Say You Will Do.”

Would it be bad if we were to take this moment to observe that Toni Dugal is clearly a straight-shooter? Sorry, we can’t help ourselves. We hope you enjoyed meeting Toni, and we look forward to introducing more of #TeamExela to you here in the Exela Blog.

The novel coronavirus isn’t just impacting world health. It’s impacting global sales,[1] global travel,[2] and the global economy in general.[3] It’s even given way to an unfortunate “infodemic” of fake news that even the World Health Organization is attempting to dispatch with due haste.[4] But there is a silver lining. With necessity as the eternal mother of invention, the coronavirus has become a veritable muse for innovation, with a number of biotech companies racing the clock to pinpoint treatments and vaccines,[5] and reduce diagnostic turnaround time,[6] leveraging AI (artificial intelligence), advanced data analytics, and other relatively cutting edge technologies.[7]

But it appears the most frequently searched question about coronavirus doesn’t relate to how (how it’s diagnosed, how it is treated, how it runs its course). Rather, the question on everyone’s mind appears to be where -- as in where is the disease right now (dovetailing with one of 2019’s most-searched questions, “Where is Hurricane Dorian, right now?[8]). As one might expect, this question has sparked its own flurry of innovators seeking to come up with the ultimate “coronavirus disease tracker.” Not surprisingly, the results have been prolific, but today, we’d like to shout out to these three entries into disease-tracker innovation race:

Johns Hopkins University’s Coronavirus (COVID-19) Global Cases tracker

On January 22, 2020, the Johns Hopkins University Center for Systems Science and Engineering launched what is likely the most highly respected and highly-referenced coronavirus disease tracker thus far. Tracking the spread of the illness in real-time, the tracker lives here, with data visualizations available for download. The Johns Hopkins tracker draws from a panoply of trustworthy sources, including the World Health Organization (WHO), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the National Health Commission of the People’s Republic of China (NHC), linking to a downloadable Google Sheet containing  information for cities and nations throughout the world, including the United States. As of the time of writing of this Exela Blog post, the tracker has reported more than 75,750 infections and 2,130 deaths as attributable to the coronavirus, although an information session held this week at Johns Hopkins University suggested the infection rate may be higher because the rate reflects only those who have sought medical attention, and not everyone who gets sick will see a healthcare provider. Accordingly, the fatality rate is likely lower than the 2% indicated by the tracker.

Hashlog by Acoer

Blockchain-enabled applications developer Acoer has created a coronavirus disease tracker called HashLog, which pulls data from the CDC and WHO and then leverages real-time distributed-ledger technology[9] (which is what Blockchain uses) to understand the spread of the virus and its trends over time. Despite being less well-known than Johns Hopkins’ tracker, HashLog has drawn interest from public health officials at federal and state levels in the United States, in part because its dashboard is unique and easy for the user to digest, which is something of which we understand the importance here at Exela. For example,  an intuitive dashboard distinguishes the fulfillment solution, we developed for Exela Smart Office, as a tool for tracking shipments, receivables, and other delivery logistics.

“Track Corona Live” by four students from the University of Virginia

“Four high school friends from Virginia are pooling their talents to inform the world about the new corona virus – helping people to track its spread and to learn how they can protect themselves,” Virginia’s Public Radio recently reported.[10] The students report that due to the above-referenced infodemic, their biggest challenge has been getting the correct, most up-to-date data. Thus far, they have managed to leverage data from the CDC, WHO, the National Institutes of Health NIH and a website used by Chinese healthcare professionals to create an online dashboard where visitors can track the disease in near real time. But their plans extend beyond tracking the coronavirus. “Right now we’re actually working on building out a machine learning model that bases off of past virus data – like SARS, MERS as well as past,” in the hopes of predicting the spread of future epidemics.

Ultimately, while we are deeply concerned about the spread of the coronavirus, we’re also excited by the innovation it is inspiring. At Exela, we believe that public health and technology go hand-in-hand. Read about all that technology can do to heal healthcare’s inefficiencies in our most recent edition of PluggedIN, Exela’s quarterly thought-leadership news magazine.

[1]https://news.yahoo.com/china-car-sales-fall-92-105126677.html

[2]https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/02/21/business/coronavirus-airline-travel.html

[3]https://www.marketwatch.com/story/dow-futures-slip-as-coronavirus-death-toll-outside-of-china-rises-2020-02-20

[4]https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/situation-reports/20200202-sitrep-13-ncov-v3.pdf

[5]https://www.barrons.com/articles/biotech-stocks-china-coronavirus-vaccine-51580147139

[6]https://www.jpost.com/HEALTH-SCIENCE/Israeli-tech-may-help-drastically-reduce-coronavirus-diagnostic-time-617796

[7]https://www.information-age.com/technology-help-fight-the-coronavirus-123487520/

[8]https://trends.google.com/trends/yis/2019/GLOBAL/

[9]https://www.businessinsider.com/distributed-ledger-technology-blockchain

[10]https://www.wvtf.org/post/uva-students-track-coronavirus#stream/0