Gary Drack Email & Phone Number

Orlando, Florida, United States

• Program Manager/Director for the technical integration of Harcourt Publishing with the Houghton Mifflin Publishing business. The original project failed, and I was brought in by the COO to rescue the initiative. The project was subsequently delivered after being restructured, re-planned and closely managed through execution. • Post-integration managed a 50-FTE technical staff that provided day-to-day technical support services for the company’s portfolio of order processing, supply chain, content management, product distribution and financial systems. • Directed the planning and upgrade of the company’s core SAP system (from r4.71 to ECC6 plus upgrade to Unicode). Afterwards, led the efforts to re-hosting the system to a (new) cloud environment. • Managed the selection process and subsequent provisioning of two new SAP-hosting arrangements (SAP HEC and then IBM) to support the company’s roadmap for evolving to a new business model/SAP solution. • Led efforts to transition the legacy time/material application support augmentation arrangement with Capgemini to a managed services arrangement with Cognizant. This effort included transitioning a limited number of in-sourced resources to the new Cognizant (AMS) arrangement. After implementation/stabilization, managed the 40-FTE AMS group for several years.• Provided oversight for outsourcing ITIL operations and ServiceNow support.

Orlando

• Directed the technical enhancement and support services for a portfolio of order processing, supply chain and financial systems for two publishing companies owned by Reed Elsevier; Harcourt Publishing (K-12 education) and Elsevier Science (scientific, technical, and medical journals)• Led the implementation of a $7M, 18-month program to retrofit the company’s business systems and business processes to utilize the new industry-wide 13-character product numbering (ISBN) standard.

Melbourne, Florida, United States

• Directed the company’s Strategic IT Programs Office with the mission to identify and implement transformative technology insertions that support business process re-engineering initiatives. This office also provided oversight responsibility for (business) acquisition technical integrations and divestitures; as well as provided oversight/approval for large IT capital requests, submitted by the various business sectors, to ensure alignment with the company’s strategic investment roadmap. • Secured approval for a $15M investment for a next generation ERP application suite for the Broadcast division (a $700M business that grew to $1.5B in three years); the new system replaced six legacy ERP systems running at seven locations. • Completed three successful acquisition integrations. Two in the U.S. and one in Europe. • Implemented a secure computing infrastructure in the U.K. for the manufacture of secure radios for the British Army. This was a key deliverable in a $200M proposal win. • Eliminated $600,000 costs by consolidating engineering applications and associated computing systems from three west coast design centers to a single location in Durham, NC. • Co-authored a Supply Chain Strategy paper that guided company-wide investment decisions for internet-based supplier portals and PDMs. • Saved $800,000 annually by implementing a secure Internet-based supplier portal that allowed program buyers to share/distribute information quickly with vendors including on-line RFP processing, PO placement and engineering document sharing.• Implemented a new PDM system in a major business unit that improved product to market cycle time by more than 2 weeks and yielded $3M annual savings of engineering costs. The new system significantly reduced engineering wait-time through implementation of multi-site collaborative capabilities; secure physical data vaulting and paperless electronic reviews and approvals.

Melbourne, Florida, United States

• Championed the design and build-out of a state-of-the-art NT-based server computing center. The new center became a model showcase for Compaq (demonstrating data centers of the future). The lights-out facility provided a highly secure, highly scalable, latest generation NT computing environment capable of running large volume enterprise-size applications. • Managed the corporate-wide Y2K Programs Office reporting to the Office of the Chairman. Funding for the programs exceeded $40M over an 18-month duration. Under this program, 230 individual remediation projects were coordinated and tracked across 38 geographic/business locations including subsidiaries in China, France, England, Brazil, Canada, and Mexico. More than 200 product engineers and IT professionals were engaged in the various remediation efforts.

Palm Bay, Florida, United States

• Championed/led an initiative to outsource the corporate mainframe, yielding saving of $4M over 5 years. Savings were subsequently redirected to build-out a new open systems infrastructure. • Launched a program to standardize the company’s PC hardware and software environment netting $1.5M of annual operating savings. Over 2,500 desktop devices were impacted. • Managed an IT Operations staff of 40 FTEs with an annual operating budget of $7M; responsible for day-to-day support of desktop computing, UNIX servers, and telecom and data base management services.

• Managed day-to-day development and support operations for the company’s portfolio of marketing and sales applications. Managed 19 technical professionals with an annual operating budget of $2.5M. • Led the (technical) integration teams that migrated the marketing, selling, and customer service operations of the acquired GE/RCA Semiconductor company ($1B business). Integration was accomplished in 11-months; was implemented two months early and 20% under the $2M integration budget. • Led the design and implementation project which integrated Intersil’s order fulfillment system with IMPReSS; the industry’s first multi-site capacity constrained production-planning solution (linear programming-based planning engine built by UC Berkley - INFORMS Edelman Award winner in 1995). The integration enabled the most accurate (real-time) product availability and delivery commitment capability for quoting and bid proposals in the semiconductor industry.

• Various software development positions on project teams that implemented new feature releases for financial, order processing and manufacturing business applications. • Optimized Assembler code to improve buffer performance on engineering computing devices.