CIO Bulletin

CGS is an enterprise software, IT services, workforce transformation, and global outsourcing company

All businesses and startups in today’s environment require the help of dependable software and IT services. If you own a business, you can’t help but ignore the benefits that emerging technologies genuinely provide, such as increased supply chain visibility, streamlined back-office management, enhanced workforce training, first-rate customer service, and more.

With this in mind, we would like to introduce you to Phil Friedman, Founder and CEO of CGS.

With five employees, Phil Friedman founded CGS in 1984 to offer expert IT services in New York City. CGS steadily increased its business both domestically and abroad through organic expansion and various acquisitions.

Celebrating its 40th year in business in 2023, CGS now employs over 8,000 people in North America, Latin America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. It serves clients in 52 different countries by providing business applications, enterprise learning, and outsourcing services. Among others, the fashion, apparel, healthcare, retail, financial services, hospitality, technology, and telecommunications industries are among those in which CGS has clients.

Highlights from our conversation with Phil Friedman, Founder & CEO

Q. Why was CGS founded? Did you ever predict the unprecedented growth of the company?

I was born and raised in the former Soviet Union. Early in my professional life, I built electronic equipment for submarines and airplanes. In 1976, with a background in electrical engineering and degrees in economics and finance, I immigrated to the U.S. and settled in New York City. Once there, I enrolled in a program for Eastern European professionals, where half my day was spent learning English and the other half was spent studying information technology.

As you can imagine, it was quite the culture shock – seeing the advertisements, billboards and commercialism of America. During this time, I responded to one of those advertisements from a company looking for an RPG programmer, which happened to be the programming language I was studying. I was hired for that role by Charles Greenberg and Sons, a company in the fashion industry. Within two and a half years, I went from programmer to systems analyst to running the department, which provided me access to companies like IBM for whom we had been a reference account. Over time, I developed expertise in IT consulting, which eventually led me to pitch the owners on the idea to create a new business that I would run. In 1984, I founded Computer Generated Solutions (CGS) with five members of my previous team to provide professional IT services. Through both organic growth and strategic acquisitions, I was able to grow CGS steadily throughout the U.S. and then internationally.

Today, we have diversified our solution offering across multiple, discrete business units to include software and IT managed services, immersive technologies, workforce transformation services including enterprise learning through mixed and augmented reality, and customer experience and outsourcing services. We serve leading global brands in 52 countries with customers in the fashion, apparel, healthcare, retail, financial services, hospitality, technology, and telecommunications industries.

Q. Can you tell us about CGS’s growth, from its inception as an idea to now as a market leader?

CGS really started as a dream with just five employees. Early on we were fortunate enough to close deals with some very visible customers and the businesstook off.

From those early days and right up to the present day, I believe that when it makes more sense to buy a capability, buy it. Over our now 40-year history, we have successfully acquired and integrated multiple companies into CGS. Each of these acquisitions helped solve critical customer problems by fulfilling specific skill sets either functionally, geographically or both – much more quickly and at cost effectively than building organically.

We’ve always remained very agile as an organization, which has given us a unique ability to expand and diversify to open new lines of business. We grew both opportunistically and by design. A big part of our approach was never wanting to depend on a single line of business or a single product. At one-point conglomerates were en vogue. In every line of business, you have ups and downs. Because of diversification, we’ve always been profitable and have created a reputation for ourselves as a very unique mid-size business executing different strategies across a variety of business lines today.

Q. What are CGS’s philosophy and culture at the workplace?

As CEO of a global tech company, I only spend about 10 percent of my time on tech-related matters. The rest is spent on the people who make up CGS. As a business owner, from an early stage, I felt that I was not only responsible for the people I employed but for their families, as well. I still remember the time when we had 200-300 employees. I knew everyone’s names — spouses, kids, and sometimes the parents. It was a very different environment. Everyone was local.

As we’ve expanded and now have employees working all over the world in many different industries, I’ve learned the importance of understanding the local environment, customs, laws, and accounting processes. The learning never stops. You make mistakes and learn from them. You read a lot and interact with people. Sometimes your colleagues are the best sources of information.

We’ve always stayed true to our entrepreneurial roots. We believe strongly in investing in our employees and making sure they have a career path and the opportunity to grow within the company. Most of our management in the U.S. has grown up the CGS ladder. When we open new offices abroad, we believe in bringing in local talent to make sure we are focused on the right things in that market. Overall, our managers and leaders are very empowered. This entrepreneurial philosophy and approach have resulted in an incredibly high employee retention rate — the average tenure of our global leadership team is 11 years. What’s more staggering is our overall global employee retention rate — the average CGS employee has been with the company more than eight years. These numbers speak to the power of our culture and the impact that has on our customers’ business as well – our average customer tenure is over 10 years.

Our company’s core values:

Continuous Innovation. We are OPEN to new and different ideas and approaches. The best ideas don’t always come from leadership – they come from colleagues who engage daily with customers.
Focused Agility. We are RESOURCEFUL in dealing with new and challenging situations.
Be Number One. We don’t aspire to be all-things to all people. We are DRIVEN to surpass our competition and excel in the categories and solutions in which we have committed.

Q. What are the various solutions provided by the company?

CGS currently has four Business Units that focus on different solutions for different types of business problems and industries. These are: 1) Supply chain software and IT services for the fashion, apparel and home goods industries, 2) Workforce transformation and enterprise learning, 3) Enterprise-ready immersive XR solutions, and 4) Customer experience and global outsourcing services.

Software & IT Services. The first is delivering global supply chain solutions through our SaaS product design and manufacturing solutions. CGS’s BlueCherry^® Enterprise Suite Platform includes ERP, PLM, Shop Floor Control, B2B eCommerce, Warehouse Management and Logistics, and other key modules to provide clients with a powerful, comprehensive set of tools to drive deep insights into their supply chain and improve core business processes. Focusing on the needs of high-growth organizations, the BlueCherry Enterprise Suite is capable of addressing the needs of all core management, planning, product development, manufacturing, logistics, finance, and sales functions, which are also supported by our IT managed services, managed cloud and cybersecurity capabilities.

Workforce Transformation & Corporate Learning. The second solution is CGS’s Workforce transformation and enterprise learning solutions, which deliver custom learning solutions that are essential to scaling organizations’ people, processes, and performance.

Our custom professional development solutions range from global strategy consulting to interactive game-based eLearning and transformational technology rollouts with mixed Reality, Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality components. Each solution is designed to keep clients’ employees beating out competition in today’s competitive environment. Customers relying on our Enterprise Learning Solutions include Fortune 200 clients across a wide range of industries.

CGS Immersive Technologies. Next is our Immersive Technology division, which leverages emerging technologies such as Generative AI, ChatGPT, VR/AR and mixed reality to name a few, along with our flagship mixed reality solution, TeamworkAR.^® TeamworkAR uses the best of today’s mixed and augmented reality technology to “Make Everyone a Genius” — bringing a hands-on learning experience to frontline workers, innovative collaboration to global teams and self-service to customers from home. TeamworkAR accelerates learning and delivers collaborative expertise whenever and wherever it is needed. Companies are rapidly adopting this powerful technology to beat out their competition by providing superior customer service while lowering training costs. Through partnerships with Google, Meta, and Matterport, we are seeing exciting real-world applications and customers are realizing measurable business improvements.

Global Outsourcing. The fourth solution category, CGS’s Global Outsourcing and Customer Experience division, provides multi-lingual customer and technical support experience solutions. With optimized call center resources to serve global clients, we offer a unique, hybrid approach through automation and live agents, whether remote or in our contact centers located in North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. Our solutions leverage AI-enriched chatbot and RPA technologies to complement the customer support services provided by thousands of multi-lingual call center agents. This approach enhances the customer experience for many of the world’s industry-leading brands, including global retailers, healthcare providers, technology and telecom providers, and Financial services. Our innovative, scalable, and flexible outsourcing capabilities include traditional BPO, technical support, customer care, outbound tele sales, channel enablement, and back-office support.

Q. Can you briefly talk about CGS’s BlueCherry Enterprise Suite? How can the solution be applied in diverse and varied business sectors?

Our BlueCherry Enterprise Suite is the market-leading digital supply chain management solution for the consumer lifestyle, retail, apparel and home goods industries. Whether you’re a brand, retailer, wholesaler, or manufacturer – we enable you to connect the dots throughout the supply chain in order to control product and operational costs, manage ongoing supply chain complexities, reduce time to market, improve visibility and meet growing social and regulatory compliance.

We believe if you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it and if you don’t have the visibility, you don’t even know what you’re measuring. The BlueCherry Suite address this because we have the understanding that this first begins with manufacturers, whose visibility into the efficiency of the shop floor is fundamental. Further, this extends from machine output to how much employee time is wasted during the off-standard time.

Even a clearly visible supply chain can be negatively impacted by the moving parts and independent “bubbles” within it. For our clients, events are made visible, tracked, filtered and linked allowing the data collected to be effectively leveraged to achieve real-time tracking and visibility critical for business insights and decision-making.

Q. How will augmented reality and virtual reality change the business world? What are your thoughts on this?

Mixed Reality (MR) is finding its footing in corporate learning as it brings teams together for collaborative experiences regardless of physical location. It’s opening doors to safer and more effective hands-on training scenarios while limiting risk, downtime, and time-to-performance.

Employees across a growing set of industries, including QSR, manufacturing, healthcare, and retail, are utilizing tech to get better at their jobs and problem-solve on their own. Additionally, these new ways of learning can often be more effective. A PwC study recently found that Virtual Reality (VR) learners train 4X faster than they do in classrooms, and they become 275 percent more confident to apply the skills they’ve learned.

Another area to consider is the labor shortage. Between an aging workforce and increased demand from businesses in a growing economy, the labor shortage is a persistent challenge that many companies are already beginning to adapt to. With a predicted worldwide worker shortage of 85.2 million by 2030, corporate leaders are investing in ways to adapt and overcome.

Although we usually associate worker replacement technologies, like robotics and business process automation, as solutions to help address the labor shortage, technology can also help offset the labor shortage. It does so by augmenting existing employees to make them more effective, as well as attracting and onboarding new talent. MR technologies, such as Augmented Reality (AR) and VR, are particularly suited to these challenges.

As part of our annual survey of dozens of operational leaders at top enterprises, we saw why 80 percent of respondents either agree or strongly agree AR will help their organizations gain a strategic/competitive advantage. Benefits they point toward show ways AR helps alleviate the labor shortage, including:

increased employee productivity (43 percent),
remote connectivity/collaboration (26 percent); and
accelerated training (32 percent).

Q. How can businesses implement CGS’s TeamworkAR to improve operational and team performance?

TeamworkAR™ is a next-level learning, development, and field support solution. Through an immersive experience, TeamworkAR provides workers with seamless visual demonstrations, real-time guidance, and interactive, on-the-job training to empower people to learn remotely while reducing overall time to knowledge reception, getting people into the field more quickly.

The solution allows for continuous training for global employees through cost-effective means. From knowledge capture and transfer to collaborating with and assisting remote workers, the platform allows for more efficient learning, while increasing employee productivity. Teamwork AR moves beyond static digital assets, handbooks and video to take practical workplace learning to the next level.

Q. What were some of the challenges faced by the company during its years of growth? How did CGS overcome them all?

One area of concern is cybersecurity. I don’t believe that we’re alone here; most companies are increasingly concerned about cybersecurity. It’s a big issue because a breach can have a major impact and affect a company’s reputation – which is hard-earned and even harder to repair. We have a very capable team covering our cybersecurity efforts globally, but every company is a target. The world is interconnected and a breach can have many ramifications so we work very hard to stay up-to-date and ahead of threats.

Managing people is the top priority. You can’t be successful if you don’t have the right team in place. This is especially important as a company grows and expands internationally because you’re working within very different cultures. We realize the importance of hiring the right people and making sure they have the resources they need to deliver on customer commitments. This has always been a big part of our strategy.

Q. What are CGS’s plans for the future?

Our plan, even in today’s challenging business environment, is to keep expanding our services to our global customer base. To support our aggressive growth plans, we’ll continue to invest in infrastructure, hiring, and opening offices in new geographies. For ‘CX and Outsourcing’ we have plans to open new offices in Latin America, Central Europe, and Asia.

We see our Immersive Technology group, in particular TeamworkAR playing a dual role. First, through strategic development and go-to-market partnerships with Google, Meta, and Matterport, we anticipate seeing continued adoption and real-world business impact from a variety of industries. Second, TeamworkAR will support and expand the capabilities of all our major divisions, especially within our Workforce Transformation and Corporate Learning business and our Customer Experience and Outsourcing business.

Overall, we’re very excited about the year ahead and CGS’ future.

About Phil Friedman

Phil Friedman was born and raised in the former Soviet Union. After spending 12 years in numerous positions in the electronics industry, he immigrated to the U.S. and settled in New York City. In addition to his degrees in Electrical Engineering, Economics, and Finance from his native country, Mr. Friedman also studied Information Systems in the U.S.

In 1984, Mr. Friedman founded Computer Generated Solutions (CGS), a diversified IT solutions and services company providing software, consulting, systems integration, training and help desk support. Today, with close to 8,000 professionals and a global presence spanning North America, South America, Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia, CGS maintains a leadership position delivering end-to-end, award-winning solutions in 52 countries around the globe.