Stephen Hards Email & Phone Number

Peterborough, Gb

Peterborough, England, United Kingdom

Peterborough, United Kingdom

Peterborough, United Kingdom

Cambridgeshire

IPL’s role within the Asda Walmart family is to deliver value, quality and availability to Asda and Walmart so they can pass the savings on to customers. The Infrastructure team is a critical element which enables IPL colleagues to have the tools and resources in order to reach this goal. Following the acquisition of Fenmarc Produce by IPL I maintained my on site management duties while being integrated into the central Infrastructure team. My role within the infrastructure team is to ensure the smooth running of day to day operations at Westry site and be the project manager for simultaneous acquisition integrations and ERP implementations. As IPL I have managed large capital expenditure budgets on multiple projects, acting as the key contact, liaising with all aspects of the business ensuring smooth integration of new sites. IPL has enabled me to grow my technical expertise, working with large scale, highly available technologies, operating dual active-active data centers across multiple physical locations, supporting 8 sites and operating a large scale ERP system across all locations. IPL is a dynamic, fast pasted 24/7 business which has high demands on its infrastructure and equally on its colleagues.

Senior role promotion after demonstrating great leadership, successfully introducing new technologies into an aging infrastructure and delivering quarterly strategy updates to the board.A key role as IT team leader was to facilitate a growing need for more focused inter-department communication and interaction to support the business strategy. Acting as the main point of contact for all key business stakeholders and the support/infrastructure team colleagues, while continuing to lead the team and deliver our business SLA requirements. Tasks included distribution of workloads, conducting appraisal processes, team building and delivering our strategic business strategy to plan, while maintaining my technical expertise and staying relevant with technology trends.The role enabled me to learn the different working styles of individuals and tune my skills to best suit their ways of working. Testament to the way I delivered this role, I was entrusted by the owners of the private limited company to act as a key figure during multiple due diligence and sale processes including that of Fenmarc Produce Ltd to IPL part of the ASDA/Walmart group.

Wisbech, Cambridgeshire, United Kingdom

Promoted to newly created role designed to give greater focus on medium-large scale projects. Projects included new business ventures such as design and build of new hotels, anaerobic digestive plant and private residence. As project coordinator my key responsibilities were to engage stakeholders, design technical infrastructure plans, manage 3rd party suppliers, delivering to tight deadlines and on budget. Acting as the senior systems administrator alongside my project role enabled me to keep relevant with technology stacks and be the escalation point for the support team. Highlights of projects delivered:-Replacement of large physical sever stack with HP Blade enclosure utilising dell SAN device to create a platform for Hyper-v virtual environment. Reducing year on year costs, lowering business risk and increasing network stability. - introduction of new security protocols for local and remote users, new two form factor authentication and encrypted inter-site communications. Deployment of lumensions endpoint security and new security policies across the domain.- Design and implementation of new hotel network, lowering the risk of downtime and increasing network performance speeds. Linking 6 hotel sites with dedicate tunnels inter linking head office and each individual site. Multiple redundant routes created in the event of a BT routing/exchange issue and independent firewalls to increase security.

Support for all Microsoft technology stacks, Cisco and bespoke ERP software solutions for all colleagues both at our head office and remote sites all across the UK. Supporting over 100+ locations and 1500 colleagues. Supporting dos based video rental systems for convenience stores and windows based ERP solution across ChoiceUK retail outlets. Aided the 3rd line support engineers with building new cisco telephone systems and deploying to head office colleagues.

Junior Years

Btec, Computer Science

Education record