“I have to say that AAJ made me look like a rock star!”
When Jennifer Torlone, VP of IT Willis Lease Finance Corp., came in and graciously allowed us to shoot the first (of many) AAJ Success Stories, the interview, conducted by Amjad Shamim our CEO, lasted over 30 minutes. We have already published a 2 minute version (available here) of this interview.
What follows is a longer, more in depth version of the interview. The interview provides more details on the working relationship Jennifer has with AAJ Technologies, a business relationship that spans two decades. In that time, Jennifer has not only worked in the same company as our Founder, Amjad Shamim, but has hired AAJ with two companies that she was the head of IT at: Amerijet and Willis Lease Finance Corp.
“AAJ’s team is incredibly talented, incredibly bright and they’re very forward-thinking. At the heart of things there are technologists. You can sit with them at lunch and talk about quantum physics, so those are the kind of people that I want to associate with, that are the forward thinkers, that are constantly going to the edge of technology to the edge of the universe, and helping you dream up and execute and create things that maybe you didn’t even think were possible at the time.”
We have also taken the time to transcribe the interview, which can be found below the video.
TRANSCRIPT OF AAJ SUCCESS STORIES: JENNIFER TORLONE, WILLIS LEASE, VICE PRESIDENT OF IT, FULL VERSION:
Editor’s note: Previous to Willis Lease. Jennifer ran IT for Amerijet. Both companies are mentioned in the interview. Since this is a transcript of a video interview, and how people speak does not 100% translate to writing, we will do our best to either identify and clarify certain items using [brackets], or we may make slight edits to the transcript for clarity.
“Our first company Willis Lease Finance Corporation is a finance and credit company. We actually provide financing and Leasing to Airlines for engines and aircraft. We have a second line of business in Willis Lease Finance Corporation, which is actually trading, so we look for good buys and we look for buyers and we kind of do just like what stockbrokers do for trading.
We have a parts and materials business, so we actually buy for salvage or brand-new parts. And then we most recently purchased a company in Wales that actually does maintenance services and fleet management so those are the basic four lines of business under Willis Lease Finance Corporation.
My role at Willis is technology. I’m the Vice President of Information Technology and I’m responsible for building a global IT department at Willis, it’s not something [a global IT department] that we had as we were growing by acquisition.
A lot of the companies had their own IT departments, and everyone was kind of growing and singing to their own songbooks. So I was brought in in January to help merge all of the IT functions at the holdings level and then actually standardize and modernize the company.
At some point the only way you can grow if you’re not automated or streamlined is by adding people. And the company had reached a point in its growth where the only way it was going to double or grow in size was actually to add [IT and technology] headcount. so, I called Amjad [AAJ Technologies CEO, Amjad Shamim] and it was 3 o’clock in the morning in Wales because we had had an incredible meeting that day and it was like hurry up let’s do this incredible thing called “constant connect”. And I’m happy to say we launched it last week.
It was an obvious choice to partner with AAJ [Technologies] because not only do I have a long relationship with Amjad one of the founders and owners. He and I have worked together since I guess around 1992. We both started at a software company together, and he was my customer, I ran IT, so I’ve had that relationship with Amjad.
And then as I’ve moved along in my IT career and I’ve gone to different companies – because I know how Amjad ran development and ran the business at the software company we worked for, I knew I could trust him and count on him and his crew [his company AAJ Technologies with 300 employees and offices in 3 countries] to do things that my team and I maybe didn’t have time to do, maybe we didn’t have the skill set to do.
So that’s why I’ve always worked with Amjad [at the same company and after he created AAJ Technologies in 1997].
One of the best examples that I can give you of why [Jennifer chose AAJ Technologies for her digital transformation platform] was when I was getting ready with my team Amerijet [Jennifer’s former company[ we were launching our first big website that would be customer facing portals where they could log in and see their actual shipments, the invoicing, run their business with Amerijet through our portal. We went to launch, and we had a problem – we had major problems – not just a little problem – and the team [at Amerijet] worked all night long trying to figure out what the problems were so that we could launch and be successful. [We, the IT team at Amerijet] can’t figure out why the code is broken. The site has been working fine in UAT, but we went to roll into production and it doesn’t work. So Amjad found it [the code issue] you know Amjad, AAJ Technologies] had a resource, he said here’s a developer and within I think 30 minutes the person [from AAJ] who had fresh eyes and wasn’t as familiar with the code looked at it found our error and we were able to launch within a two-hour window of when we [were supposed to launch]
So, I think that’s one of the big advantages of a partner like AAJ is because they’re local to my business. I can meet with the [AAJ] executive team when I need to. They can understand and learn my business. They have known me for a lot of years. They know how I like to work, and you can count on them when you’re in a bind.
Other projects that we’ve done with AAJ include building cubes and dimensions in our data. They helped us create our SharePoint environment.
Knowing that Amjad could help us with SharePoint and help us with any web coding, one of the things, strategies that I used when I came with to Willis was that I had decided that I wasn’t going to really hire development [in house], that I was going to outsource development. Why? Because Amjad has so many tools in his toolbox, people [developers] that are keeping up with technology, that are learning the latest and the greatest, or that he grows by acquisition and that way I don’t have to keep a fleet of fighter pilots in my stable, because that way they don’t have to all know the latest and greatest and constantly evolving.
As such when I met with the CEO and the President [of Willis lease], one of the things that they were very keen on was that we improved communications in the company – that was I think one of the biggest hurdles that I had to overcome – and being that it’s a company that grows by acquisition and we didn’t have a centralized IT department, the company wasn’t sure about how we could share data and information across all of the globe. So, I reached out to Amjad, and I asked can we build a SharePoint environment with you? (and that was the by the way the 3 o’clock in the morning Wales call) – was this is something that we need to do, it’s a mission-critical thing for this year, and Amjad’s team turned it around and we wowed them [the CEO and the President] and when we showed them some of the demos, they were so excited, I mean they were like kids, I can’t even believe it, they didn’t know what they didn’t know. So it was a big win and I have to say that AAJ made me look like a rock star. So that was kind of fun.
[other] Things that AAJ has helped us do is to rebrand the company, so the intranet “constant connect”, we took the opportunity to change logos of the company. We changed the color scheme and we’ve modernized the look. And we’re going to carry this through with AAJ and on to our external websites.
But what was fun is that we were able to bring newer technology into the handhelds [mobile apps] so, we started working on a flight tracking program. Originally it was just to put in the lobbies of our offices for our customers to be able to see our depth and range… mainly the engines that we lease, the airframes that we lease, and the fleets that are using our products. And in the development process, Amjad’s team would ask us a lot of incredible questions and the tool is actually very useful now besides being fun. And it’s been a lot of fun watching the CEO and the President look at all of our assets flying around the world and again it’s something that it’s a little surprise for everybody when they find it on the intranet now and it’s like “wow look at all of our airplanes flying around” or “look at all of our engines flying around and oh my gosh one [is] over Greenland”, and we watched it over several times that day as it circumvented the world. And I guess that just makes you realize how big we really are as a company, and it’s brought a lot of the people together when they realize that we all made that possible.”
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