Mark Fielden Email & Phone Number

After management training with BOCM, now a Unilever company, in 1964 I joined the fledgeling IT department at Bristol Siddeley Engines (now Rolls Royce) as a trainee programmer, working first on Finance, Engineering, and finally Production systems. We were really systems programmers, analysing requirements, designing and coding solutions. After a while as Chief Programmer, I joined a team building one of the UK's first ERP systems, implemented in 1971.Later, I moved from systems development to Production Control, first on systems strategy, ending up working in the director's office. Whilst there, I became interested microcomputers and began to build one. I gave up half way because it took too long. Instead I bought a microcomputer, paid for by developing software to sell on the open market.That led an interesting few months: helping introduce distributed computing to RR, when centralised mainframes were the way to it. It wouldn’t have happened if my director were not an innovator, nor if the IT department hadn’t been stuck with a years-long backlog of unfinished system development. After a presenting my ideas to all the company executives in a long evening session, the production director bought a microcomputer for each of his departments.After 20 years at RR, I followed my then boss into Manufacturing Management Ltd, a small company dedicated to taking ERP from big corporate manufacturers to SMBs. We ran 5-day, simulation-based training courses for directors, initially in the aerospace supply chain.In the 1980s, minicomputers became affordable so we developed MAX, the UK’s first, successful, SMB ERP system. It ran on UNIX (now Linux) and a relational database. This changed my career from development to marketing and sales. By the 1990s we'd sold it to manufacturers in Europe, ME, Africa, China and behind the iron curtain. I was the first foot on the ground in many of these markets. MAX was eventually acquired by a global market aggregator and is no longer for sale, though it is still used in a dwindling number of companies - after nearly 40 years!With my son, I now own BlueTree Website Design Ltd, a small family business that helps local entrepreneurs stand out on the internet. We started with big-company projects in 1998 and ended up developing an easy-to-use CMS. I also volunteer with Visit Portishead CIC, our local online tourist information and resources website based on that same CMS.My best memory is being part of the MAX team that provided interesting jobs for 100s of people worldwide. I hope they all enjoyed it as much as I did.