James Harper Email & Phone Number

Chicago, Il, Us

Charlotte, North Carolina, United States

Greater Chicago Area

• Established organization Data & Analytics practice in the U.S., hiring full-time U.S. Data Solutions resources including Analytics Specialists, Data Engineers, and Delivery Managers. • Supervised a staff of 22 resources, developing and implementing training plans to guide team in delivering Blue.cloud Solutions offerings, Snowflake, ThoughtSpot, and Azure. • Created effective customer proposals and presentations for Blue.cloud offerings, successfully increasing client base; delivered a team of 18 resources to a client, contributing to business growth for a working run rate of $2M annually. • Managed Data Team at client supporting client’s application, technology stack: reactjs, C#, CosmosDB, SQL Server, Snowflake, ADF, ADLS• Oversaw client engagements including the screening and onboarding for all resources; directed processes for estimation and negotiation of roles and rates for client projects. • Launched the Chicagoland area office, spearheading moving processes and communicating with the leasing company; served as the office administrator, maintaining all office operations. • Implemented a global HR system including employee profiles, performance assessments and processes for hiring, onboarding, and offboarding. • Streamlined operations by developing and introducing a resource management tool; created utilization insights and projections to support future resourcing needs.

Chicago, Illinois, United States

• Oversaw the ERP applications development and support teams responsible for General Ledger, Accounts Payable, Asset Management, eProcurement, and Concur T&E, facilitating efficient daily processes. • Managed engineering resources, software systems, a group of contractors, and 15 offshore resources. • Built a successful offshore L3 Development team to replace contractors, by developing effective career trajectory plans, gauging feedback from internal customers, and monitoring personnel assessments. • Performed bi-annual assessments for all team personnel, ensuring team alignment with business goals.• Coordinated with the Corporate Controller and Head of Procurement to fulfill key objectives.• Optimized asset management systems by implementing automated systems to replace previous manual process. • Assigned offshore team to a backlog of asset management tickets and facilitated ticket list completion. • Augmented the nightly batch run process, decreasing run time by implementing performance tuning exercises including database tuning and partitioning, successfully exceeding nightly PLA.• Leveraged ServiceNow to maintain software for all ERP applications; effectively oversaw and safeguarded security for all applications.

Managed development teams that implemented an assortment of successful business solutions utilizing CI/CD DevOps and Agile project management and delivery methodologies while working with finance, database administrators, infrastructure and vendors to achieve results.● Developed three-year technology roadmap for department hardware and software. Executed appropriate actions to keep systems upgraded and in support.● Managed performance tuning efforts for underperforming applications, PeopleSoft Internal Transaction Matching (ITM) and Enhanced Managed Query (EMQ). Achieved an 83% process time savings in ITM, and a 75% reduction in average report execution time for EMQ reports. Both exceeded key performance indicators.● Implemented Pivotal HAWQ, for Big Data analytics and reporting. Collaborated with the vendor to procure licenses and improve the performance of the product prior to go-live date. ● Performed a proof of concept to determine the best reporting tool for Google Cloud project. Oversaw the installation and setup of Tableau, license procurement, performance testing and the implementation to the United Kingdom. ● Upgraded Finance Transformation Program, PeopleSoft General Ledger, from 8.9 to 9.2 for U.S. and Canada. Designed and implemented an upgrade method and data conversion strategy. Managed project plan and resources.● Conducted staff performance management reviews and crafted career development goals.

Served as the Technical Team Lead/Business Relationship Manager/Subject Matter Expert for the PeopleSoft General Ledger implementation at HSBC locations in Mexico and France.● Full software development life cycle (SDLC) implementation of PeopleSoft General Ledger 9.1.● Managed the collaboration between IT developers and finance. Communicated status to the program manager on a weekly basis.● Traveled to Mexico on throughout the project to provide pre-implementation reviews of current system, fit-gap analysis and proof of concept support. ● Supported User Acceptance Testing Team and Finance Team with reconciliation efforts and configuration guidance; reference data and run controls.● Assembled support structure for the teams in Mexico and France to support the new system.● Performed data analysis to determine reporting needs, assisted in creating ad hoc reporting capability using database development tools, PeopleSoft Query and nVision reports.● Designed Control-M batch processes, which utilized parallel processing to meet processing SLA.● Led onsite post-implementation firsthand support and user training in Mexico.

Served as the Technical Team Lead and Business Relationship Manager for the general ledger portion of a large-scale, multi-dimensional Finance Transformation Program. Managed a team of twenty, which included business analysts, developers, contractors, and offshore employees. ● Full software development life cycle (SDLC) implementation of PeopleSoft General Ledger 8.9 to North America (U.S and Canada).● Satisfied system requirements with both delivered PeopleSoft objects and custom modules. Designed the new system to allow Finance to perform a daily soft close.● Delivered an intraday reporting capability with a custom on-demand trigger, which allowed Finance to see reports in real-time.● Designed a Control-M batch process flow, which ran automatically, based on data-driven characteristics. Utilized parallel processing to achieve batch performance processing SLA.● Built reconciliation controls into the batch to identify issues before batch completed. The program was designed to automatically send notifications to support staff.● Successfully converted all legacy source system data to new financial platform. This included 18 months of monthly data and 2 months of daily data.● Created scripts, test cases, and managed defects using Quality Center. Passed all go-live audit requirements on time.● Implemented a new code migration flow from development through production using QuestSTAT.● Deployed the system to Hong Kong and Asia Pacific. Trained Support staffs in each location.

Assigned as a Team Lead/project manager to oversee the upgrade of the Household International general ledger system.• Created and managed upgrade project plan for PeopleSoft Financials 7.5 to 8.4 upgrade for • Worked with various groups to successfully achieve project dates (DBA, Unix, Windows Server Teams) to deliver on time and under budget• Performed system stress testing using Mercury Load Runner, test proved system to be performant and deployable to production• Completed upgrade steps using PeopleSoft Change Assistant and created scripts to use for go-live.• Served as the primary contact with the software vendors for the products we licensed. Managed support cases opened, and applied fixes supplied.

Business Systems AnalystAssociate Business Systems Analyst