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By Nikki Cabus

Office Depot’s back-to-school Start Proud initiative kicks off

Read Time 4 Minutes

It’s official, Start Proud!, the national back-2-school philanthropy campaign of ODP (parent of Office Depot) kicked-off on August 6th, 2022.

In Summer 2018, Office Depot launched Start Proud! to help foster brighter beginnings for schools in low-income communities, nationwide, and to give students, parents and teachers the supplies they need to start the year confident, prepared and proud.

Start Proud! is hosted at elementary schools in underserved communities in the 15 largest markets across the country: Atlanta, Austin, Chicago, Columbus, Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Minneapolis, Orlando, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Francisco, Seattle, Southern California, and right here in South Florida, where the Office Depot headquarters are located. 

Through its banner brands Office Depot®, OfficeMax®, ODP Business Solutions™, Varis™ , and others, the company offers its customers the tools and resources they need to focus on their passion of starting, growing and running their business. . . or classroom.

The program kicks-off in July with Backpack Bundling Bashes, where associates, friends and family members come together to assemble backpacks full of school supplies for the deserving students of the select Start Proud! schools. 

August through September, Start Proud! comes to life at Celebratory Assemblies across the nation. These inspiring campus celebrations include an exciting program and inspiring event for all with remarks from Office Depot’s senior executives, school’s principals, the district’s superintendents, National PTA representatives and other special guests.

The special day includes hundreds of excited students gathering, cheering, and receiving brand-new backpacks and school supplies; classroom supplies donated to all the teachers of the school; and one ‘All-Star Teacher’ from each school celebrated for their extraordinary efforts in the classroom and surprised with a package of premium classroom supplies including new furniture, teaching supplies, technology and tech services from Office Depot valued at almost $2000.

In 2021, over $3.8 million worth of educational supplies were donated. Associate volunteers assembled 18,000 premium backpacks filled with over $1.8 million worth of school supplies like notebooks, composition books, crayons, pencils, highlighters and more, to provide to students at more than 25 Title I schools nationwide. With support from Boise Paper and Domtar Paper, each backpack also included one $20 Office Depot gift card for families to purchase additional supplies for their child. Let’s see what 2022 will bring!

“After the great challenges of these past three years, nothing could be more important than supporting and celebrating our public school students and teachers as they head into the 2022 back-to-school season,“ said Alex Price, National Director of Community Investment for The ODP Corporation (parent of Office Depot),

“As we traverse the traverse the U.S. adopting Title 1 schools, supporting families in need, and celebrating teachers who are our superheroes, this Start Proud! campaign will shower the most economically distressed schools with everything they need with a special commitment to our home community of South Florida,” added Price.

Did you know that YOU can help make a difference this school year just by purchasing the supplies you need from Office Depot? Simply make a purchase of qualifying school supplies, provide your school’s ID at
checkout (in store and online) and your designated school will receive 5% back in credits for FREE supplies! It’s a small act that can make a huge difference and anything that can help stretch a school’s budget allows them to provide the best education possible.

Office Depot also leverages its retail footprint to provide customers with the opportunity to support a local Title I school in their area, through a partnership with Round It Up America® (RIUA). Simply round up your purchase to the nearest dollar. With these additional funds, selected school representatives can enjoy a shopping spree at their local Office Depot or OfficeMax store to get additional learning essentials, technology and personal protective equipment (PPE) into the hands of the teachers, students, and school administrators who need them.

The Start Proud! campaign is part of Office Depot’s community investment initiative called #depotdifference. As our company continues to change and evolve in exciting ways, so too has the way in which we support the communities where we live and do business. #depotdifference brings an employee-centric, hands-on approach to empower us all to make a difference through robust employee volunteerism and philanthropic giving. To learn more about Office Depot’s investment in local communities nationwide, visit depotdifference.com

 

By Nikki Cabus

Industry leaders and researchers brought together for the FAU Data Science Conference

Read Time 3 Minutes

Back in person for the first time since the pandemic, the Florida Atlantic University Data-Driven Science & AI Conference brought together industry leaders, students, and researchers from multiple industries. This is the fourth conference for the Schmidt College of Science and the first year the conference attracted support from the National Science Foundation!

“The conference was reshaped this year to meet the growth of the Schmidt College of Science as well as the dynamic tech, data and AI community we work with in South Florida,” said William Kalies, Associate Dean for Graduate Studies and Conference Chair. “The funding provided by the NSF enabled us to conduct this conference again and provide opportunities for our local industry to interact with our researchers and students to spark future collaborations, internship and career opportunities.”

Throughout the day-long event, participants had the opportunity to attend two panel discussions, six themed minisymposium sessions, ranging from the use of AI in chemistry and molecular medicine to the urban applications of data science, enjoy a student research poster competition, learn about opportunities in the community through Tech Hub South Florida, and had multiple opportunities for learning and networking.

Twenty-six students from FAU High School and FAU’s undergraduate and graduate programs exhibited their research at the conference. Three students, Kayla Ahlness, Dawn Raja Somu, and Deepika Regmi, earned recognition for their studies from faculty judges.

The conference included two sponsored panel sessions by South Florida Tech Hub, including the Health Tech panel that discussed, “Digital Transformation and Data-Driven Insight in Healthcare” with leaders in healthcare technology. This panel had a packed room of students, researchers and faculty interested in hearing about “Where We Are and Where We’re Going” in healthtech.

Meggie Soliman, Director of Strategic Innovations at DSS, Inc. opened up the conversation with a presentation and followed by moderating the discussion with panelists, Pete Martinez, CEO of Sivotech Bioinformatics and former IBM executive, Yenvy Truong, Founder of LSM Group, and  Christopher Kunney, Chief of Strategy & Business Development at DSS, Inc.

The Tech Career & Internship Experiences panel discussion paired recent FAU alumni with their mentors to discuss how they secured an internship and their current full-time industry positions. They also answered students’ questions and shared advice.

Panelists included Rich Viens, Chief Financial Officer at PeakActivity and former intern Valeria Tineo, now the Incoming Account Executive of Organizational Business Development at Cleveland Cavaliers, and Lakshamana Sankarakuttalam, Senior Manager IT, Enterprise Intelligence at Office Depot alongside recent FAU Alum and current Master’s student,  Jose Delgado, Software Developer at Office Depot.

The conference featured mini sessions highlighting everything from “The Impact of AI in Financial Market Investment Strategies” to “Topological Data Analysis Algorithms in Robot Motion Planning.” The final keynote talk of the day was Daniel Uribe, MBA, Co-Founder & CEO, GenoBank.io, and active Tech Hub member. His talk was titled “BioNFTs: Enabling Decentralized Consented Genomics in the Metaverse” discussing the biodata provenance journey with an ethical risk analysis of who benefits, who is at risk, and who decides on the biological assets (biosamples + biodata) and the introduction of Biological Non-Fungible Tokens or BioNFTs that resolve in a public blockchain.

This year marked the return to an in-person event for the first time since 2019. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the last conference was held virtually in 2020. The last conference was successfully supported by the local Boca Raton company, TechStrong Group and Media Ops, which ensured it could be attended virtually. We are already looking forward to 2023!

Student Kerry-Ann Bartley shares how the M.S. in Data Science and Analytics program in the Charles E. Schmidt College of Science provides training in analytic tools, preparing students with transferrable real world skills.

By Riley Kaminer

Member Spotlight | Andrew Parry & Office Depot

Read Time 3 Minutes

Business: A leading provider of business services, products and digital workplace technology solutions to small, medium and enterprise businesses.

Launched: 1986

HQ: Boca Raton

Employees: 40,000+

Website: OfficeDepot.com

Office Depot might just be one of South Florida’s biggest commercial success stories. Founded in Fort Lauderdale in 1986, this publicly traded organization now provides business services, products, and digital workplace technology solutions to small, medium and enterprise businesses. They have an integrated business-to-business (B2B) distribution platform, which includes world-class supply chain and distribution operations, dedicated sales professionals and technicians, online presence, and approximately 1,100 stores.

Andrew Parry is VP of Product and Technology for Office Depot, focusing on application and product development, including customer-facing apps, order management platforms, and tech related to supply chain management. 

While Boca Raton is Office Depot’s headquarters, Parry coordinates with teams in Texas and India to develop the tech that helps the company best serve its customers. “It’s about providing the best experience to customers, from purchasing through to delivery,” said Parry.

Like many businesses, Office Depot had to react quickly to the pandemic. Parry said that technology played a major role in turning this disruption into innovation. He gave the example of consumer deliveries. “Many people are working remote now, so we’re not just delivering to commercial mailrooms anymore. We’re adapting our deliveries to fit the shifting needs and expectations of our customers.”

On the ground, Parry’s mission during Covid has been to “double down on our focus on the customer,” both consumer and business alike. 

Office Depot’s CEO, Gerry Smith, has also noted an increased importance of the B2B market within Office Depot’s overall strategy. Smith said in a statement that the company has “made significant progress on our B2B pivot and digital transformation.”

To get there, Office Depot is investing heavily in all things tech. Parry told Tech Hub South Florida that Office Depot is currently hiring “in all areas” related to technology. “In technology, we can’t grow fast enough,” Parry said, underscoring the company’s commitment to its digital-first approach.

According to Parry, one of the benefits of working at Office Depot is what the company calls its 5C Culture: Customer, Commitment, Change, Caring, Creativity. “These principles help us excel at serving our clients while also making Office Depot a great place to work,” said Parry.

As part of these principles, Office Depot makes an effort to have a positive impact in their communities. Parry is particularly proud of the company launching Elevate Together™ powered by Round It Up America®, a new nonprofit initiative designed to help accelerate the creation, growth and prosperity of Black and Hispanic-owned small businesses.

The initiative, which is run in partnership with the National Urban League’s Entrepreneurship Centers and the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, provides education, access, and aid to minority-owned small businesses with five or fewer employees. Eligible small business owners will gain access to educational workshops, training and mentorship services, professional networks and more. 

Parry has thoroughly enjoyed mentoring a few small businesses in South Florida through Elevate Together. “I loved sharing my knowledge and learning from these entrepreneurs,” he said.

“With initiatives like this, it’s definitely an exciting time to be with Office Depot.”

By Nancy Dahlberg

Member Spotlight | Office Depot

Read Time 5 Minutes

Business: A leading B2B integrated distribution company providing business services and supplies, products and technology solutions.

HQ: Boca Raton

Beginnings: Launched in 1986 with a single store in Fort Lauderdale

No. of stores today: 1.350

Tech Team: 450 people

Robots and automation. Hundreds of real-time applications. Co-working spaces. Internal hackathons and an “Innovation Week.”

At the heart of much of the transformation of Office Depot from an office supplies retailer to a business services company is a IT team of about 450 people.

“One of the great things about my role is I enable [taking] business strategy to reality by using the latest tech. I truly love my job. Working in a retailer is an extremely interesting one because we need to transform and that’s what [Office Depot CEO] Gerry Smith is doing — his whole strategy is to transform the business from a retail based business to a digital services business… and he’s had success with that,” said Andrew Parry, VP of IT, Application Development and Support, who works in Office Depot’s Boca Raton headquarters. “60% of our business is digital now. It’s business to business.”

Parry’s team, about 200 employees, develops and maintains more than 400 applications, essentially all of the applications for Office Depot.

“We have multiple websites, multiple customer facing apps, mobile apps, retail stores … It’s all a real-time enterprise. When someone buys in a retail store I know not to sell it online for in-store pickup – the omni-channel just works and we spend a lot of time making these applications real time,” said the British-born Parry, who joined Office Depot in 2003 as part of an acquisition. He has lived in South Florida since 2006.

“Within IT we have so many roles,” he continued. “We are investing a lot in modernizing user interfaces. Also automation – we are in a wonderful world right now where the tools are available to us to do automation in a big way.”

A part of that is through CompuCom, a company Office Depot acquired in late 2017 that provides IT services to many organizations.

“We are having huge success with integrating those services to our customers. There’s tech services, building, automation services. Services has been doubling year over year, and that’s been awesome,  and moves us  away from selling traditional office products to providing real value add services to our customers. Sticky services.”

A big innovation within the company is its Workonomy platform, which offers comprehensive business services married with “human touch” expertise to small- to medium-sized business customers. This includes in-store tech service kiosks, self-service print and copy kisosks, pack and ship services in store and online, and most recently co-working.

Office Depot opened its first ever integrated co-working space within a retail location in California last year, and recently announced Workonomy Hub openings in Texas and Chicago. Customers can buy membership plans to use the modern in-store coworking spaces, including private offices, dedicated desks and conference rooms, all with access to mailing, shipping, marketing, printing, concierge and tech support services.

“It’s not like any Office Depot you have seen before in your life,” Parry said.

And then there’s Office Depot’s recently announced partnership with Alibaba that aims to connect its 10 million small business customers with the Chinese e-commerce giant’s 150,000 global suppliers to better serve the needs of its small to medium-sized businesses.

“Alibaba is a very exciting opportunity for Office Depot … there is a lot of opportunity. We are right in the beginning of this relationship, and I am looking forward to seeing that come to fruition,” Parry said.

Closer to home, Parry says he learns a great deal by being involved in the Palm Beach Tech community.

“We hosted Palm Beach Tech community hackathon in October here on site and doing the same again this year. It was a great success. We actually hired some of the talent and I’ve kept in touch with a number of the winners.”

Leveraging what it learned from the community event, Office Depot plans to do an internal hackathon in addition to another community hackathon, Parry said.

“We have 40,000-plus employees and they all have great ideas. We have an Innovation portal – an idea collection site, if you will  – and a number of them lend themselves to a 24- or 48-hour sprint to develop them through a hackathon-like event. We will wrap around that a whole Innovation Week to really show our people the art of the possible. If they can see what is possible, they can see what they can change about what they do for the better of Office Depot.”

Office Depot’s first Innovation Week will be in June; the root of this came from listening to what others are doing in Palm Beach Tech, he said. “That was the seed that made this grow.”

For the upcoming Innovation Week for its employees, Office Depot Invited in top companies to show their innovative tech, Parry said. “But also we have some great tech that goes on within Office Depot; for example, CompuCom has a building automation platform. Building automation is a big area – think switching on and off lights, the environment, security, panic buttons – and we will showcase all that. We will showcase what we are doing with our robots in warehouses – they are pretty cool, actually.”

He said he learned some different agile development best practices and strategies from the Palm Beach Tech community, and it goes both ways. During a meetup Office Depot hosted, Parry talked about the company’s success moving data warehouse platforms to Snowflake, a Silicon Valley SaaS company, and now other companies are using Snowflake too.

Parry says it’s important for him to get out into the community,

“I love going to meetups in Palm Beach Tech and talking to people outside of my environment to get new perspectives on things. I am always meeting interesting people. I love that. It lets me see different ways of doing things and bring that back to Office Depot and I can think about different trends going on in the market that maybe we weren’t thinking about here.

“I’m most impressed with the bench strength of the tech in Palm Beach County.”

Office Depot’s back-to-school Start Proud initiative kicks off
Industry leaders and researchers brought together for the FAU Data Science Conference
Member Spotlight | Andrew Parry & Office Depot
Member Spotlight | Office Depot