The Global Foundation Services group within this corporation handles the hosting, support, and internal billing for all of its public-facing properties. The billing system had significant opportunities for reducing errors, reducing rework, improving timeliness, and providing analytical content. We replatformed the system, built out a strong ETL for data collection, mechanized the report generation, and added indicators that allowed business managers to clearly see what factors of their billing had moved the most, and which had moved disproportionality to their peers for the period, and which had moved disproportionally to their own history. We reduced monthly processing from two week's duration at three week's effort, to two day's duration and one-half day effort. This freed up operational resource to move away from making reports, and instead make real contributions to the business.

To comply with state legislation and city ordinances, this utility needed to integrate its billing system with the federal EPA’s Automated Benchmarking System. Particular challenges included the highly compressed timeline, the absence of development resources at kickoff, and ambiguous requirements. Responsibilities included system design and compliance, resource selection and management, and overall project delivery.

Brought in by the VP of IT to resolve a specific set of problems; managed 5 engineering staff and 4 project managers. Responsible for the company's reporting/BI portal and development, CRM, management of all internal technical projects, and SOX as it applied to IT. Transitioned team to OpenText upon acquisition in 2009. ERP, Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS)Determined that the existing implementation could not handle the company's needs and successfully re-implemented on an aggressive 6-week schedule; established 24x7 support, 99.9% uptime, improved performance on all key metrics, accelerated month-end close procedures, and lowered costs; dramatically reduced the number of existing and new help desk tickets through education and business owner accountability; improved quality through training and higher standards for testing and deployment.Reporting PortalInstituted system audits to evaluate health of ETL layer; established protocol and communication procedures to report on failures and establish confidence; resolved issue around silent failures and corresponding problems with incorrect report output; oversaw development of reports, ensuring that deliverables consistently exceeded expectations.CRMEnsured system availability for worldwide sales audience; oversaw routine development, deployment, and maintenance activities; brought development in-house to lower costs and improve quality. Product ActivationOversaw the completion, deployment, and support of the web-based system used to activate customer products around the globe on a 24x7 basis; spearheaded initiative and design for further enhancing availability.SOX ComplianceWorked quarterly with internal audit to ensure compliance with SOX regulations; addressed SDLC, change management, and system security.Personnel Management and DevelopmentExtended individual responsibilities to provide growth opportunities, stimulate team, and extend capabilities.

L2 Insight: Worked on a rewrite of the SOP previously developed for Princeton Press.SpecificationRevisited needs, documented enhancement opportunities and prioritized features to ensure proper functionality and establish actionable work list.UI/UXExplored UI motifs and established high-level UX requirements that produced an intuitive, efficient, and engaging interface. DesignRe-tooled ERD and generalized objects to improve extensibility and supportability. Market ResearchInterviewed industry consultants and specialists to understand industry needs, common marketing approaches, and opinion of SAS.

Oracle E-Business Suite, ERP implementationEstablished and maintained accurate project plans and load levels for technical team of internal and external resources; coordinated interaction and meaningful communication between technical and functional teams; developed functional and technical specs; developed effective cutover strategy that minimized downtime and mitigated cutover risks; reviewed development activities to ensure quality, timeliness and repeatability of data loads; managed execution at cutover.Data warehouse (development)Consulted on DW approach and architecture; developed and/or extended Oracle views for all DW extracts, spanning all reporting areas; engineered solution for capturing financial aging data.

Oracle E-Business Suite Implementation, support, and development: developed conversion rules and transformation scripts for loading legacy data; designed and developed customer-facing business documents; modified core ODP functionality to accommodate Cranium’s unique forecasting requirements; tier 1 support for OM and PO modules; tier 2 support for ODP module; developed interfaces for custom applications. EDI Brought EDI processing in-house to increase timeliness, uptime, and reliability: Service and hardware moved in only 60 minute outage and no dropped transactions. Designed and developed mechanized audits to ensure completeness and accuracy through pipeline; maintained and extended 7 different interfaces across 4 different portals; designed and developed new EDI interfaces to support changing business needs; integrated 40 partners carrying 90% of Cranium’s revenue; selected and negotiated EDI management partner as company matured to offload internal resources. E-Commerce Re-skinned and reengineered Cranium’s online store on an aggressive 30 day schedule to support marketing initiatives; designed and developed two high-volume API’s using XML RPC for registering customers on partner sites with built-in failure detection and notification; rebuilt website to parse environment variables to support code portability across servers and environments. Reporting Implemented MS Reporting Services with an Oracle connector to provide daily operational and mining reports; engineered complex manufacturing packets from Oracle BOM, combining multiple technologies to save time, improve quality and establish audit trail; produced credit card refund audit to support 3rd party refund guidelines.

Working hard with information technologies can squeeze out time for other creative work: After building information systems for Getty Images and Princeton Press for a number of years, it was time to recharge and recenter, focusing on designing and creating in the 3-dimensionsal space. Remodeling my home and designing and building furniture are my preferred outlets.

Custom SOP, Princeton PressDesign and DevelopmentAssessed needs, designed, and developed sales order processor for independent press: manages orders through their entire lifecycle from order entry to invoicing; includes stale event monitors and error reporting; reduced paperwork, improved order accuracy, timeliness and customer satisfaction; reports and metrics provide information about customer and product profitability; still the only SOP in use today.TrainingTaught internal resource how to work with PERL and SQL to maintain and extend the system; established autonomy for client and lowered cost of ownership.

Deployments and Change ManagementResponsible for change management and code deployment of all EBS objects: Designed and developed engine for deployments; mechanization guaranteed repeatability across environments and predictable timing; built-in analysis and logging ensured expected results.Customer Facing DocumentsCollected requirements, designed, developed and maintained professional-looking documents: checks, purchase orders, invoices, statements, and pack slips, spanning 5 countries of origin and 3 languages.Pipeline AuditsDesigned and developed audits to ensure timeliness, completeness and accuracy of order channel; provided early notification of silent communication failures enabling tactical responses; metrics identified root-cause issues which could be corrected systemically.IntegrationsResponsible for developing EBS integrations with FedEx and UPS (domestic and international), Bloomberg for exchange rates, and various banks for cash management and positive pay.LeadershipProvided day-to-day direction for four-person technical team, handling questions of priority, design and approach; headed up hardware evaluation and procurement; managed relationship with Oracle technical support and handled escalation as necessary; represented technical team on daily conference calls during weeks before rollouts to resolve blocking issues; managed resources in tactical situations.

Research and DevelopmentIdentified available technology for passing queries from web to MS OLAP, investigated alternatives for mechanized chart generation with various web technologiesTelecom Solutions ­ Built prototypes for NetWatch and AirCompare. These applications perform online analysis allowing users to quickly identify the source of problems in their networks and billing processes. Statistical calculations across time dimension allow users to be positively alerted of abrupt shifts in trends.

Awarded Presidents Club, 1997Web-based Analytics and DevelopmentEarly adopter of the internet and its technologies: built applications for collecting and analyzing data, and communicating results to management through corporate intranet; source systems ranged from manual input to corporate mainframes; covered remittance processing, billing, and switch-level data; data visibility credited with driving down remittance processing backlog from 3 days to 80% same-day.Personnel Management and DevelopmentResponsible for two staff employees: Oversaw priorities, quality, deliverables; reviewed designs. Taught web development languages and SQL, principles for good database design and tuning procedures, how to design and build controlled processes.