New and used vehicle sales. The Tony Graham Automotive Group has been operating since 1969 in the Ottawa area.http://www.kanatatoyota.com/

Four month contract technical position

Seasonal sales for major appliances and home theatre

•This was originally a seasonal position for Christmas 2010, which turned into a full time position. I had to know detailed information for various appliances to be able to differentiate and enable a customer to make the appropriate decision based on their needs and desires. This position required trust on the part of the customer that you could deliver the product when they needed it. In some cases the orders were over $10k. •This position also required many detailed processes to ensure the product was properly delivered - often many months into the future. There were also delivery issues that had to be resolved when things didn't go as planned.

I originally started with Digital Equipment Corp. (DEC) in 1985, then Digital merged with Compaq Computer in 1998. This was followed more recently by a merger with Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP) in 2002. As you can imagine there were many changes both economically and technologically within the computer industry and the companies during that time, so that required adaptability.

• Buyer for high priority P1 service parts to support field engineers. The focus was providing parts for next day delivery from an extensive network of 3rd party suppliers, the selection being based on their reputation, pricing and availability. The normal goal was a fill-rate of 95% for next day delivery, but occasionally same day delivery was specified if at all possible. This included both normally stocked company parts, and also multi-vendor parts depending on the service contract.• Managing urgent customer escalations and working to improve a part’s ETA to resolve a customer issue. This often involved looking through some of the technical details and suggesting alternative parts which were on hand or available to purchase. Often these were for very high profile customers. • Additional resale support for HP Sales to sell Cisco gear (2005 – 2010). HP was a high level partner with Cisco, and met customer demand for new Cisco gear when requested. This involved configuring the order online with the Cisco Market Place (MP) web application. A corresponding HP PO was also cut in SAP to cover the order. Often these orders were in excess of $1 million and could be 150 lines or more in the MP configuration tool. • Logistics support for local product repairs and inventory level screening. Documented processes and recorded cost savings when doing procurement.• End of Service life analysis to determine if an older product could still be supported. For example contracts were sometimes requested for 25 year old DEC VAX systems. • Retail buying support for the Digital PC Service Centres for a couple of years until they were phased out. Also some component purchases for the Product Repair Center.

• Hands on repair of a large variety of computer equipment: power supplies, terminals, PC’s, micro/mini/PDP/VAX computers, networking gear, large data centre disk drives.• This provided a very good background for my role as a parts buyer.