Close to the end of my stint at HRP Distribution I realized that I had reached my ceiling with regards to what I could learn or achieve from a career and personal growth perspective. Everything from a technical and business process point of view was running smoothly. From the daily data syncs to the reconciliation of Proof Of Deliveries on the system. What I was lacking was a challenge and this was when I applied for the consultant role at Quantum System Integrators (Which would… Show more Close to the end of my stint at HRP Distribution I realized that I had reached my ceiling with regards to what I could learn or achieve from a career and personal growth perspective. Everything from a technical and business process point of view was running smoothly. From the daily data syncs to the reconciliation of Proof Of Deliveries on the system. What I was lacking was a challenge and this was when I applied for the consultant role at Quantum System Integrators (Which would later on become Persetel QData Business Intelligence (PQBI) and then finally Comparex Business Solutions).In my mind a Data Warehouse Consultant was a person that looked after several other companies' operational database systems, much like a Database Administrator would do for a single company, just bigger and broader. I was optimistically surprised when I realized what data warehousing was all about.Quantum System integrators was primarily a Cognos shop delivering Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing solutions to their customers. The orgnization was essentially database platform agnostic which allowed us to work across SQL Server, Oracle and DB2 database platforms. It was here that I started excelling at implementing Ralph Kimball styled Data Warehouses making use of Star Schema aligned database models.We honed the art of building dimension maps and combined bus matrixes, plotting all the various shared dimensions and measures, which in turn would facilitate the designing of the star schema for the database models.I was part of the initial 4 consultants, with the team growing to about 15 people by the time I moved on to my next challenge. Little did I know at the time that the opportunity that I was granted by the General Manager hiring me, would have groomed me for so many bigger and better things. Show less

This was where my career started, working in the database field of technology.HRP Distribution was a logistics company transporting parcels for some of the big retailers during that time frame. This included Truworths, Topics, Markhams and Pages as some of their clients. My responsibility during my employ with HRP Distribtion was to ensure that their systems were always up and running to facilitate the receiving and dispatching of deliveries to the various stores from the… Show more This was where my career started, working in the database field of technology.HRP Distribution was a logistics company transporting parcels for some of the big retailers during that time frame. This included Truworths, Topics, Markhams and Pages as some of their clients. My responsibility during my employ with HRP Distribtion was to ensure that their systems were always up and running to facilitate the receiving and dispatching of deliveries to the various stores from the distribution centers. This included activities related to system administration, network administration and database administration. I was responsible for all 7 distribution center's monitoring, maintenance and disaster recovery of their systems.They were running a distributed SQL Server V6.5 architecture with the consolidated head office server situated in Johannesburg. All the remote DC's would replicate/syncronize data back to head office on a daily basis to ensure routing of deliveries were correctly reflected in the system.It was an excellent starting point for my career as it gave me a broad spectrum of responsibilities and the opportunity to learn quite a bit about how the IT for a medium sized business worked. Show less