I have loved computers since my dad purchased a Pentium III computer back in 2003 and, due to lack of space in our small apartment in Cuba, placed it in corner of my shared bedroom. I'm not sure if he though that through.
I proceeded to spend countless hours in front of the computer playing game demos, flash games, and surprisingly, using Power Point. Back then we had not yet migrated to the United States and access to the Internet was illegal. Without the possibility of downloading games or software outside of passing around a USB flash memory with light flash games and demos, Microsoft Paint and Power Point is all I had to express my creative side.
Was I putting together decks with waterfall charts to track EBIT over time? Compare actuals vs. forecast? Walk the CFO through the segment's P&L? Thankfully no. I was 10 years old. What I did do with Power Point was to create animations, birthday postcards, funny stories, and the like. I would insert two pictures of a family member, say my dad, remove the background, and have him run around by having the two pictures appear and reappear in intervals of 0.5s while moving from left to right on the screen. Over time these animations became longer and more complex, with additional characters introduced to my stories, and all sorts of transitions and drawings and text. It was fun. It was addictive. It was all I had.
Fast forward to November of 2007 when, on a quiet autumn afternoon, I opened the door of our apartment to knocks from two Postal Office workers, one of them holding a big bulky envelope. They were there to deliver, for a price, a few documents that my parents needed to continue their application for the American Diversity Visa Program. Unbeknownst to me, my parents had been applying to this program (also known as the Green Card Lottery) as early as 1998. After verifying that the documents were legitimately sent by the US government, for a fee to continue the application we sold everything we had, moved onto the interviewing process and by April of the following year we were living in Miami, starting a whole new life.
Joining High School as a sophomore with no knowledge of the English language was a challenge, but I've always had a passion for learning, and challenges. Within one year I passed the English as a Second Language (ESL) exams and entered into Advanced Placement (AP) courses. During my Junior year I was also placed in the Gifted Program after taking an assessment provided by Miami-Dade County Public Schools (MDCPS), and by Senior year of High School I was taking a few Dual Enrollment courses in English and Calculus with Florida International University I was also working a part-time job as a bagger at Publix Supermarkets which tremendously helped with my English, helping my family, and becoming a bit more independent.
But after graduating High School I didn't attend FIU. Instead, I went for Miami Dade Honors College. Not only was tuition free after getting into the Honors program, but it was a great opportunity to integrate into college after just 3 years in the country. At Miami Dade College I achieved a 3.9 GPA which got me the Eduardo Padron Scholarship to attend FIU tuition-free. Despite being accepted into universities like Berkeley and UCLA for a reduced tuition, I could not look past the opportunity to have a college degree and no debt.
At FIU I continued my studies in Finance and International Business, quit Publix Supermarkets and took an internship with StateFarm, then United Technologies Aerospace Systems (UTAS), and by Senior year I had an offer to join the UTC Financial Leadership program in Connecticut. During this time I had also served as Treasurer and then President of the local Alpha Kappa Psi chapter at FIU, which alongside my internship experience propelled me tremendously in my career.
I started the Finance Leadership Program at 23 years old, nine years after leaving Cuba. In July 2017 I moved to Connecticut. This move away from Miami was challenging in completely different ways. For once, I was by myself, a few hundred miles from my family and what I now considered my hometown. But secondly, Miami had provided much support from a cultural standpoint, due to the so many Hispanics that inhabit the city. I felt like a fish out of water to say the least. But quickly adapted.
While at the UTC FLP I rotated through roles in Finance for UTAS, Pratt & Whitney and Carrier Corporation in the areas of Supply Chain Finance, Operations Accounting, and FP&A. I got the opportunity to live in Connecticut, Arkansas, North Carolina, and as an expat in the United Kingdom. My goal throughout these six month rotations went above just doing the work. To me, it was all about transforming the role as quickly as possible, often by streamlimning reporting via macros, pivots, and Excel formulas, and documenting it all along the way.
In summer of 2019 I graduated from the program and took a job with Internal Audit at Carrier Corporation. It had just been announced that Carrier and Otis would be spun off from UTC, which subsequently became Raytheon Corporation. I moved back to Florida, this time to Palm Beach Gardens, where I started my new role.
Internal Audit was attractive as it involved travel and would allow me to use English, Spanish, and Portuguese since I was part of the Americas Finance and Operations team. My role actually started in January of 2020 since 2019 was dedicated to FP&A due to a need arising from spin-off activities -- an all hands on deck sort of scenario.
Fast foward to January 2020 and I join the Internal Audit team with my first audit traveling to Georgia, then North Carolina followed by Tennessee. In the plan for the year we had locations to audit in Brazil, Chile, Argentina, and even Jamaica. But in March of the same year, while in Memphis, COVID-19 breaks out and I find myself flying back to Florida, putting the audit on hold.
From that moment on, audit would be carried out online, as most office jobs around the world moved from the office building to people's homes.
I was living out of an efficiency in West Palm Beach when we were directed to work from home for the foreseable future. It was a garage made into a studio on the side of a house in the Lake Worth area. I had purposedly moved to a small place as the audit role required travel for 2 - 3 weeks out of the month. "Might as well saved money in rent", I had thought to myself.
But here I was, working out of a studio without the possibility to do much outside for a while. I thought to myself it was the perfect time to start learning programming, so I started with MIT's Intro to Python and Harvard's CS50X Intro to Computer Science. These are easily accessible Massive Online Open Courses, or MOOCs for short. But I didn't get anywhere with that knowledge. I wanted to directly apply it to my role in audit and IT restrictions were not condusive to it.
In an attempt to reset, I took the class "Learn How to Learn" from Coursera. It was just four weeks of studying how to best train the brain for lifelong learning.
It was a game changer.
By the time I wrapped up the class, I had done much research and came up a very strong idea for my next area of study: Microsoft Power BI and the Microsoft Power Platform.
Toward the end of 2020 I had managed to download Power BI to my work laptop and had put toegether a few dashboards, kept offline, that were basically superpowered pivot tables built to identify anomalies and trends in the data I'd receive from the auditee. These dashboards, although used for sampple selection and personally a game changer, were completely ignored for a few months. But I was so set in my goal to change the way we audited that went as far as as raising it up to the then VP of Internal Audit.
I was ignored, told to first speak to my supervisor, who was not interested. But there was one person who believed in how game changer it could be. Within a few months I was moved under his leadership in Compliance. The stars aligned when a new manager joined our team in January 2021 and shortly after a new CAE replaced the Internal Audit VP in summer of the same year. Both of them, alongside the Compliance Director and myself shared the same vision on Data Analytics. Fast forward to the summer of 2022, just one year later, and we had started to change the way we audited in big ways:Each of these tools were game changers in their own ways. Finalytics was an offline Power BI dashboard that tapped into a standardized macro-enabled Excel workbook that used SmartView to retrieve figures from HFM for auditable entities. Then, Finalytics had a set of standard visuals for the Balance Sheet, P&L, and a few other KPIs on the entity selected. This tool was made mandatory during the scoping phase, moving auditors away from ad-hoc analysis and into a streamlined process. Similarly, the Data Analytics library tapped into a series of files, in this case standard templates, to produce visuals on Revenue Recognition, Duplicate Puchase Orders, Account Reconciliations, and much more. The difference here is that the DA Library used files provided by the auditee, whereas Finalytics did not. Then, in 2022, we developed our first continous monitoring tool on travel and expense to visualize trends, highlight abnormal transactions, and ultimately identify fraud.
Over the next three years the sub-function grew in volume of solutions developed and team size, going from just myself as the only fully dedicated resource to myself and two more direct reports in Europe and Asia, plus the ocassional summer intern. Continuous monitoring solutions were developed on ServiceNow, Ariba Indirect Spend, HFM, and AuditBoard. We also started to support the Finance and Operations audit team with ad-hoc requests and moved onto RPA solutions that tapped into already centralized data to send out notifications and alerts. In early 2025 we built Carrier's very first agent on CoPilot Studio, appropriately called the Walkthrough Wizard, and subsequently released a few more agents and a library in PowerApps to better streamline the audit process.
In April of 2025 a new initiative was kicked off at Carrier to transform the way that Finance works. A new team was put together to form the Finance Transformation office. A huge focus here is to use analytics and automation to streamline business processes. In May of this year I started to lend 50% of my time to this inititive, placing myself at the forefront of the analytics and automation piece. I will be expanding on this work in the weeks to come.
My ultimate goal is to spread what I have learned, helping people and companies along the way. There is so much that can be done with the Microsoft Power Platform to automate and streamline the way we work.