Open to Sr. Manager & Director roles

Intelligent automation · Governance · AI-era operations

I build automation programs that keep working after launch.

Governed, supported, audited, measured. Sixteen years building enterprise automation that operations teams can actually rely on.

I started Petco's automation function with nobody and nothing and grew it into an enterprise capability. Before that, Lean Six Sigma and process improvement — which is why I qualify work before automating it. Automating a bad process just means making mistakes faster.

José Carlos Viera Popoca
José Carlos Viera Popoca MBA · Lean Six Sigma Black Belt
100,000+cumulative hours of manual work eliminated at Petco
28+enterprise automations delivered
70+automations led across 16 years
$150–250Kannual program budget managed
What the work produces

Capability, not bot count.

Anyone can ship a bot. The difference is whether it still runs in eighteen months, whether the control owner trusts it, and whether anyone can prove what it did. That is the part I build.

  • Capacity released — 100,000+ cumulative hours of manual work removed from the business.
  • Cycle times cut — processes that ran every few weeks moved to daily execution.
  • Audit evidence that holds up, with access and approvals traceable after the fact.
  • Incidents caught and resolved against SLAs before the business notices them.
  • A delivery standard and an intake process the next team can keep running.
Selected work

Three that mattered.

Described without systems, data or project names.

Access governance · SOX audit

Proving who had access

Platform and database access checked against the active user directory, insecure accounts flagged to their managers, and unapproved access revoked automatically. Scripts covered part of the job before; nothing verified the result.

Audit evidence produced on a schedule instead of assembled by hand.

Finance · Daily controls

Invoice review, every day

System records matched against digital and physical invoices and cross-checked against headcount, licensing and vendor reports, with anything that did not line up reported the same day.

Discrepancies surfaced daily rather than at month end.

Merchandising · Inventory

SKU changes in hours

Requests validated and applied straight to the inventory platform, with the routine cases handled end to end and exceptions routed to a person instead of blocking the queue.

Several days down to same-day turnaround.

Definition of done An automation is done when it satisfies operations, audit and the business OPERATIONS It works Usable, timely and reliable for the control owner who depends on it. AUDIT It can be proven Complete, retained and traceable evidence that reviewers accept. BUSINESS It pays for itself Verified time saved, accuracy gained and control risk reduced. ALL THREE, OR IT IS NOT DONE
Career

From process improvement to enterprise automation.

Jul 2026 — Present

Independent Consultant, Digital Transformation & Automation

Parvic (independent consulting)

Helping small and mid-sized businesses work out which technology is actually worth the money, and then putting it in. Current engagement with an optical retailer: inventory system design and digitization, an online platform for managing inventory, webstore integration, and unified social messaging connected to point-of-sale operations.

Apr 2024 — Jun 2026

Sr. Manager, Business Automation

Petco

Started the intelligent automation function with nobody and nothing and grew it into an enterprise capability used by Finance, HR, IT, Legal, Supply Chain, Merchandising, Customer Care and store operations. Hired the founding team of three, set the delivery and development standards, managed a $150–250K annual budget across licenses, infrastructure, vendors and headcount, and reported weekly to a Senior Director with regular VP and CTO visibility.

28+ enterprise automations · 100,000+ cumulative hours eliminated · several critical processes moved from a multi-week cycle to daily

Jan 2023 — Mar 2024

Process Excellence Manager · Regional PM Lead

Roboyo

Led regional delivery across Mexico and the United States with Senior Managers and project managers reporting in, built an internal Center of Excellence covering innovation, tools and delivery standards, and owned escalations, recovery plans and revenue delivery. Worked embedded with UiPath and their partner network under Roboyo's UiPath partnership.

Team of ~10 · automation and Lean roadmaps targeting ~20% operating-cost reduction

Jun 2021 — Dec 2022

Senior Consultant, RPA Project Manager

Roboyo

Led end-to-end hyperautomation programs for international enterprise clients, combining RPA, AI, NLP, OCR, IDP, BPM and process mining, and built automation Centers of Excellence to support adoption at scale.

40+ RPA implementations · $20M+ client business value and ~192,000 annual hours saved across the portfolio

Jan 2018 — Jun 2021

Senior Consultant · RPA ROM Architect

Minsait

Built RPA Centers of Excellence inside Minsait and inside client organizations — structure, documentation, guidelines and best practices — and led teams of 15–20 across Mexico, Peru, Panama and Colombia in BPO, telecom, banking, health, insurance and retail.

40+ robots implemented · deployment times cut by 60%+ · efficiency improved by 50%+

Apr 2017 — Dec 2017

RPA Subject Matter Expert · RPA Project Manager

Ericsson

Found and qualified automation opportunities across Ericsson's own processes and co-led development for teams in India, China, North and South America.

50+ opportunities identified · $387,500 USD saved over 12 months

Aug 2016 — Apr 2017

Service Project Manager

Ericsson

Managed operational delivery projects across North and South America against quality, schedule and budget, and audited KPIs and data sources to stop decisions being made on bad information.

First Time Right performance improved by 8%

Aug 2012 — Aug 2016

Integration Engineer — SPM (Lean Six Sigma Green Belt team lead)

Ericsson

Led quality and improvement projects across the organization using Lean Six Sigma alongside the engineering role, standardized processes, and ran pre-integration and integration for Latin America projects including 24/7 support during major events in Brazil.

$1.5M improvement-project backlog built · 30+ employees trained in Lean Six Sigma

Jul 2010 — Jul 2012

Design Engineer

Inoxidables y Procesos

Designed metal structures and furniture and supervised manufacturing end to end, applying Lean Six Sigma to cut waste in laser welding.

What I work with

Strategy & governance

Automation CoE design · operating models · intake and portfolio prioritisation · delivery standards · production support and SLAs · SOX control automation · access governance

Leadership

Building teams from zero · hiring and coaching · budget ownership · business cases and ROI discipline · executive stakeholders to VP and CTO level · distributed and offshore teams

Process excellence

Lean Six Sigma · continuous improvement · value stream mapping · KPI definition and executive reporting · change management

Technical

UiPath · RPA and workflow orchestration · Intelligent Document Processing and OCR · APIs and system integration · process mining · SQL · Python · PowerShell · Power BI · AI-assisted prototyping and development

Education & credentials
MBA — EGADE Business School, Tecnológico de Monterrey2022
Mechatronics Engineering — UPIITA, Instituto Politécnico Nacional2009
Lean Six Sigma Black Belt
Design Thinking
SpanishNative
EnglishFull professional
PortugueseIntermediate
Writing

Notes from running the thing.

What I have learned about measuring automation honestly, qualifying work before building it, and why good programs still die.

Process excellence

Automating a bad process just means making mistakes faster

Every automation program eventually gets handed a process nobody wants to fix. Building the bot is the easy answer and usually the wrong one.

Read →
Measurement · In progress

Why your automation ROI number is probably wrong

Most programs quietly add two different things together: manual work that genuinely stopped, and new runs the automation made possible. Only one of them is labor savings.

Coming soon
Operating models · In progress

Why automation programs die even when the ROI is good

A program can deliver real value and still run out of demand. What actually kills it is rarely the technology.

Coming soon

All writing →

Contact

Looking for the right enterprise role. Let's talk.

Open to Senior Manager and Director roles in intelligent automation, AI enablement and operational excellence. Remote preferred; hybrid in Mexico City works too.