I’m happy to share that Ziarul Financiar, one of Romania’s leading business publications, featured my entrepreneurial journey in its Afaceri de la Zero series.

The article tells the story behind Smartway Consulting — from my early interest in languages and my initial ambition to become a translator, to building a business focused on making the language of business easier to understand and apply.

Looking back, there is an interesting connection between those two paths. Although I didn’t become a translator in the traditional sense, the idea of translating complexity into clarity has remained central to my work.

After years of experience in corporate training, I founded Smartway Consulting in 2021 with a clear ambition: to go beyond teaching methodologies and help organisations put them into practice.

Today, through our work in Lean Six Sigma and Business Process Management, we help professionals and organisations understand their processes, identify opportunities for improvement and turn knowledge into practical action.

I’m grateful to Ziarul Financiar for sharing this story and for highlighting the thinking and work behind the business.

For me, entrepreneurship is not just about building a company. It is about turning experience into something useful, creating value for others and continuing to learn along the way.

Thank you to everyone who has been part of the Smartway journey so far.

Read the full article in Ziarul Financiar:
https://www.zf.ro/afaceri-de-la-zero/afaceri-zero-faci-pasul-spre-propria-afacere-alexandra-niculae-visa-devina-traducator-dupa-zece-ani-experienta-training-ales-traduca-limbajul-business-intelesul-altor-companii-proiectul-smartway-23229051

Still processing an unforgettable experience in Bratislava… 

At the ILSSI Conference this September, I had the privilege of taking the stage as a speaker talking about Blockchain, not from a criptocurrency point of view, but from an even more interesting perspective. How can Blockchain support companies to streamline their processes. 

My keynote was centered on a critical yet often overlooked frontier in continuous improvement- Blockchain for Lean Systems and the fundamental distinction between intra-organizational Lean and inter-organizational Lean.

While traditional Lean excels at optimizing value streams within company walls, the real bottleneck today lies across organizational boundaries. In complex supply networks and multi-stakeholder ecosystems, friction, lack of trust, and fragmented data lead to immense waste. This is precisely where Blockchain becomes the missing operational layer—enabling verifiable transparency, immutable trust, and synchronized collaboration across enterprises without sacrificing data sovereignty.

Before You Automate, Understand Your Process

I had the opportunity to speak at the ILSSI event in Cambridge, sharing why process mapping is such an important first step when preparing organisations for automation.

Automation is often seen as a shortcut to efficiency. But there is one question organisations should ask before introducing new technology:

Do we really understand the process we are about to automate?

Process mapping helps answer that question.

By making the end-to-end process visible, we can identify:

• Unnecessary steps, duplication and bottlenecks

• Manual activities that could be automated

• Delays, handover issues and unclear responsibilities

• Exceptions and variations that technology needs to accommodate

• Opportunities to simplify and standardise the way work gets done

This matters because automating an inefficient process does not necessarily make it better. In fact, it can make existing problems harder to identify and more expensive to fix.

My view is that successful automation should start with process understanding, followed by simplification and improvement. Only then can organisations make informed decisions about where technology can create real value.

Map the process. Challenge the way it works. Improve it. Then automate where it makes sense.

Thank you to ILSSI for the opportunity to contribute to this conversation in Cambridge and to exchange perspectives with professionals who are shaping the future of process improvement.

You cannot improve what you cannot see—and you cannot safeguard what you do not understand.

I had the pleasure of speaking at the PECB Conference, where I shared my perspective on process mapping and why having a clear understanding of how work gets done is essential for every organisation.

A process map is much more than a diagram. It is a way to make work visible, create a shared understanding and bring clarity to activities, responsibilities and interactions across an organisation.

When people understand how a process works — from beginning to end — they are better equipped to identify inefficiencies, recognise risks, adapt to change and find opportunities for improvement.

Without this clarity, organisations may rely on assumptions, individual knowledge or informal ways of working. This can make them vulnerable when unexpected situations arise: key people become unavailable, suppliers experience disruptions, systems fail or market conditions change.

With clearly understood processes, organisations can respond more effectively because they know how their operations are connected, where potential weaknesses exist and what needs attention.

This is why I believe process mapping is not simply a documentation exercise. It is a foundation for operational resilience, informed decision-making and competitive advantage.

Thank you to PECB for the opportunity to share these ideas, and to everyone who joined the discussion.