About Edoardo
Bio
Edoardo Colman was born in the Principality of Monaco in 1996. Italian born, raised in Monaco, he grew up mixing French and Italian cultures on the Mediterranean coast. He studied in the French System until the French Baccalaureate in 2014, in which he achieved the best result in all of Monaco (19.71/20).
Throughout his childhood and teen years, he played basketball, reaching a youth professional level in the last 3 years. He played for 14 seasons with AS Monaco Basket Club, and for the Monaco National Team from 2010 to 2014 (U-16 & U-18). In those years, he played in 5 FIBA European Championships, winning the title of European Champion for Small States U-16 in 2012 and U-18 in 2014.
After obtaining his French Baccalaureate, he moved to the United States of America to pursue a Bachelor of Science degree in Industrial and Systems Engineering (IE), with a Minor in International Affairs and a Certificate in Entrepreneurship, at the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) in Atlanta, GA - the best IE program nationwide for the past 30 years. Edoardo graduated with Highest Honors in 2018.
Work and Projects 2014-2018
Generating Value in Multinational Corporations as a Student
While in his undergraduate studies, Edoardo started developing his professional career in a number of 3-month long internships. He worked two summers for P&G Southern Europe, in the Supply Network Operations organization – in his first experience, he organized, constructed and implemented the transition to a new technical work procedure with Spanish local suppliers, impacting 85% of the office’s complexity and 60% of annual expenses ($4.5 M). In his second experience, he single-handedly engineered, developed and designed an online, unique tool for initiative tracking for all stakeholders in the Supply Chain Customization in Southern Europe; using MS SharePoint, MS Access, JSON based on Process Flows designed from scratch. Other internships included a Director Assistant role at a factory-dealership site of Fiat Chrysler Automobile, and an experience in Financial Portfolio Management at Julius Bär. In addition, he delivered a Capstone Design Project in a team of 7 Industrial Engineers on his Senior Year of college, for Newell Brands. He led his team to deliver a standardized chargeback process that would allow Newell to recover millions of dollars from their chargeback process.
Work & Projects 2018-2019
Impact in Supply Chain Engineering
After graduating with Highest Honors in his B.S., he undertook a Master’s in Science of Supply Chain Engineering still at Georgia Tech, throughout which he had the opportunity of applying his Academic skills into several real-world industry projects. These include: a warehousing re-layout for VWR, a subsidiary of Avantor; a UPS Supply Chain Division project consisting of building a tool to optimize staffing for pickers at certain warehouse site to minimize cost and meet order lead times; a Supply Chain operations planning & decision-maker tool for South Shore, for all North American zone, to maximize revenue and order fulfilment; a project for Motion Industries (subsidiary of Genuine Parts Company, GPC) to replace a manual, book based search process for hazmat categorization & labeling of shipments, with a digitally automated error-proof solution, using distributed ledger technology.
His Graduate Academic path enabled a specialization of the technical skills of IE into supply chain systems modeling at every level. From Ocean Freight, fleet management, container repositioning management all the way to last mile delivery and Traveling Salesman Problem, intermodal, warehouse operations optimization, and even more abstract, innovative concepts such as the Physical Internet and the sharing economy.
Focusing on some of the aforementioned projects, feel free to take a look at the interesting case of VWR Avantor's warehouse re-layout project. You may also explore some highlights from the innovative, Hyperledger based prototype that was designed for Motion Industries' Hazmat shipment process.
Warehouse Layout Optimization
Experience 2019-2020
Growing in Technology and Innovation Spaces in the Corporate World
As his ultimate milestone for the Master's degree in Supply Chain Engineering, Edoardo was decided to complete his Capstone Design project as an internship at AB InBev's Tech Incubator, in Silicon Valley, California. Once again, he threw himself out of his comfort zone, working in a fast paced environment where tangible results and a product had to be delivered in just 11 weeks. As a project manager, in a cross functional team made of two Subject Matter Experts from the brewing department, a senior employee in the Analytics department, and an external partner, Edoardo and team built an MVP for predicting the sensory quality grade of the beer at any stage of the brewing process. The sophisticated product, a ML random forest prediction algorithm leveraging the Manufacturing Execution System data and PLC data, received $1.2M in funding and was adopted for acceleration by the Brazilian division, Ambev. After this success, Edoardo signed a full time offer at AB InBev, as a Global Innovation Manager. In this new role, he learned how to navigate in a global corporation and faced many managerial challenges that taught him a lot. His 3 main responsibilities included :
Technology innovation for Supply-Manufacturing – addressing internal business challenges by researching emerging technology solutions in the market, prioritizing a solution, setting up and assisting in the execution of a pilot – to dictate an innovative mindset
Co-management of Tech Incubator program – building MVPs/PoCs in house in 11 weeks, to solve global business needs using technology, accepting submissions company-wide, partnering with vendors and hiring tech talents from masters level pools
Studying emerging technologies and educating peers through lectures, academic partnerships, mentorships or organized exploration
Below, we draw the focus on two work streams where Edoardo was particularly invested, individually. As an engineer, Edoardo's inherent curiosity has always pushed him to study complex constructs, and technology has been a major interest since his time at Georgia Tech. This inevitably led this passion into his work. Above all, Edoardo stated getting fascinated by the open blockchain systems in his senior year of undergraduate studies. He studied conceptually Bitcoin and the Proof of Work components, to try and understand fully the technology that allowed this new economy to function so flawlessly. He educated his peers in his graduate studies, on his own time, and when he joined AB InBev he cultivated the innovation mindset by creating technology education environments. From there, fascination for and interest in many other technologies that allow ourcivilization to advance became natural. The collections below allow you to catch a glimpse of what this looked like in the company.
Panelist, Exclusive Interviews, Blockchain Education Alliance