Delipod Ltd | Managing Director (Creator & Owner)The Delipod is a compact oval pod offering a full catering facility, which could be operational at a site within the day. Its compact nature involved bespoke refrigeration and appliances. It has 2200 parts, and involved the creation of tooling, and moldings for its manufacture. I designed it along with a small design consultancy and built it with a team of four. AutoCAD and Inventor (3D AutoCAD) were used extensively for prototyping, for production drawings, which were sent to multiple manufactures. VIS was used for real life visualisation prior to manufacture.I ran the Delipod as a catering facility, very successfully with a small operational team, while at the same time fitting out, then running a café, Delipod Hub, to support the role-out of more pods. The café became award winning, and a successful live music and event venue. The tight management of the budget, planning for cashflow and constantly look for savings was, as with any large project, fundamental to taking these projects from the drawing board to commercial operation. During this period, I gained planning permission for twelve new roof flats in an existing 1920’s building, that I live in, as a solution to finance a £2 million communal works program on the building. I envisaged and sold the whole idea to the existing residents (60 flats) holding multiple resident meetings. The hip-mansard roof and need to meet modern fire regulations made this a very complex project. I led the design with a team comprising of architects, structural engineers, M&E and planning consultants which gained planning consent after repeated rejections.

Boots the Chemist A big complex project with 200 legacy systems many of which were transferred to SAP, with SAP BW a key business benefit to enable faster and more accurate reporting.- I built detailed knowledge of the Boots finance legacy applications and business processes and used my SAP FI/CO and Retail expertise to assess and quantify relevant legacy applications for demise and replacement with SAP finance modules, with the focus on simplifying and streamlining head office processes.- Key was the identification of problem areas and prototyping of alternative solutions in SAP for client understanding and decision making. - I led the complete financial design solution with 12 senior members of the Boots finance team and 8 additional FI/CO consultants.- Drawing upon my SAP training expertise, I developed, and part delivered SAP training tailored for the Boots project team, which was rolled out to over a hundred users.- SAP modules used were: FI, AP, AR, Assets, Real Estate, CO, PCA, CO-PA, Internal Orders, Retail (inbound & outbound EPOS), SAP BW.Diagio - I developed an SAP integrated debt factoring solution with a senior treasury client project member, automating the nightly transfer of debtors’ balances from each country to a debt factoring company based in Dublin, which was estimated to save £40 million per year in taxation.- I designed an integrated tool based on SAP internal orders linking AR and AP to fully monitor and report on the costs and effectiveness of promotional spend. It included the capture of supplier and customer discounts based on sales volumes and the capture of different types of advertising spend.

Hoechst Marion & Roussel A German pharmaceutical company, my role was to implement an SAP product costing solution in the UK which strictly conformed to a global standard. - A key focus was to provide accurate production costs at assumed full plant utilisation to enable rational decisions on plant closures in different countries to deal with overcapacity.- A second focus was the use of standard costing and variance analysis so it could be linked to staff incentives and to increase the efficiency of material usage.National Starch & ChemicalA multi-national company producing chemicals, adhesive and resins. - SAP standard processes orders were used but a US headquarters directive to eliminate costing variance prevented the use of SAP Standard Costing functionality and required implementing a client specific Moving Average Costing solution, which gave the benefit of real time production costings. - I developed and implemented this solution in SAP with a senior US client controller in Europe with meetings held in France, Germany and the Netherland. I became the solution expert. - Its successful implementation gained the acceptance and support of the European accounting and production community, which was initially very hostile to the solution, as it reduced business complexity. - I implemented the same solution in Japan working directly with a Japanese team of 15 on a 3 months project in Osaka, Japan.

As a junior consultant I saw a wide variety of projects in the private and public sectors. Two projects are highlighted:- Along with a senior manager I evaluated retail packages for selection to support Northern Utilities (which then sold white goods in retail branches). - On a Department of Work and Pensions project I coded in Cobol to implement changes resulting from changing legislation

Gold Standard Engineering Apprenticeship I built jigs, formers and bespoke tooling to make aircraft for the Harrier, Tornado and Airbus planes. As the most skilled trade, I used lathes, milling machines, grinders; drilled, reamed, tapped, used hardened bushes, regularly heat-treated metals and worked to tolerance of 5 hundredths of a millimetre.