BSc MBCS CITP CEng

A business minded application architect and project manager with a thorough understanding of the Oracle DBMS, tools and Oracle Applications (including Oracle Financials) software.

I have extensive technical knowledge ranging from networking and assembler through to Java and SOA. Despite this I am a good communicator and work extremely well with business users.

Much of my work has been around the Oracle E-Business Suite - customising it, interfacing with it, building MIS and OLAP reporting solutions around it, including Oracle Discoverer and Oracle Financial Analyzer.

Most of my clients have been large multinationals running large application databases. Much of my work has therefore been performance orientated - designing to best principles, tuning data models, database structures and programs.

I am familiar with structured methods and am SSADM certified.

Current Status

27 Feb 2007

Available from 1 Apr 2007.
Contract work only
South East, London preferred but anywhere considered

Skills

Oracle DBMS

Expert, 18.0 years

Thorough knowledge of the Oracle DBMS from a developer standpoint. Familiar with schema design, normalisation and application tuning on large databases.

Oracle DBA

Advanced, 5.0 years

Solid experience installing, configuring and tuning databases for Oracle Development and Oracle Applications use.

Data model designer with sound understanding of the relational model, normalisation and denormalisation, logical and physical

Unix

Advanced, 17.6 years

Many years experience of Unix programming and administration. Including Aix, Linux, Solaris, Hp Ux and others.

Advanced shell programming, including ksh. Some C programming.

Reasonably competent systems admin including tuning of database servers.

COBOL

Intermediate, 4.0 years

Does anyone still use COBOL? Still more appropriate for data manipulation than c or c++ but sadly out of fashion.

Competent COBOL programmer including used of Pro*COBOL for Oracle database interaction.

c, c++ and Pro*c

Intermediate, 1.5 years

A reasonable amount of c, c++ and Pro*c knowledge although I would consider a role where this is the primary skill.

Pascal and Pro*Pascal

Beginner, 3.0 years

Good knowledge of Pascal including Pro*Pascal. Anything from writing disk controllers to data manipulation.

Java

Beginner, 1.0 years

Understanding of basic principles of Object Oriented programming and some Java experience.

Oracle Forms

Intermediate, 5.5 years

Extensive use of early versions of SQL*Forms v2.3 and v3.0. Proficient in forms 4.5

Oracle Reports

Advanced, 4.0 years

Extensive use of SQL ReportWriter v1 plus proficiency in Oracle Reports 2.5

mySQL

Beginner

Use of mySQL to support web based applications such as OS*Commerce and Joomla.

Office Tools

Advanced, 18.1 years

Proficient in most office tools including the full Microsoft Office Suite and the Open Source OpenOffice tools.

Employment

Nov 1992 - current

Independent Oracle Consultant

[snip]

Worked as an independent Oracle Consultant specialising in Oracle Financials, MIS and OLAP. Roles included technical development, team leading, project management, business analysis and technical architect.

Clients included [snip] amongst others.

Managed implementations, upgrades and bespoke modification of the Oracle Applications. Development teams have been made up of both contract and permanent staff, where team members include permanent staff, training has been a high priority.

Implementation of management information systems including custom Oracle Discoverer schemas and ETL suites. Designed and built a large Oracle Financial Analyzer (OFA) systems to include sophisticated reporting, budget collation and modeling and interfaces to Oracle Financials and other systems.

I have been responsible for analysis, design and development of bespoke changes to the E-Business

Jul 1989 - Dec 2006

Consultant

[snip]

Trainee consultant in the Systems Solution division with exposure to various business projects. Specialised in Oracle and Oracle Financials development and administration.

Worked on several large development projects using structured methods. Roles included programming (3GLs and 4GLs) and detailed design, system management (Unix and VMS), database administration (Oracle), analysis and design, team leading, and prototyping.

Attained SSADM Version 4 certification and undertook various business training courses.

Education

Sep 1986 - Jul 1989

BSc Computation

University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology

Degree in Computation giving a sound foundation in computing and business theory.

Projects

Feb 1998 - Jun 2001

Oracle 10.7 Y2K Upgrade

Independent Oracle Consultant, [snip]

Upgraded Oracle Financials running on an IBM Mainframe to Y2K compliant version 10.7 for a major British Retailer. Role included technical project management, leading development and DBA teams to migrate the core applications and extensive modifications to the new release. Was required to manage the technical relationship with Oracle support and Consulting divisions

Much focus was placed on the reduction of modifications as a way to reduce lifecycle support costs. Due to the size of the database and the platform extensive tuning was required to the core Oracle code, several of my changes were taken on by Oracle Development in the US.

Feb 2001 - Feb 2002

Oracle Financial Analyzer Re-implimentation

Independent Oracle Consultant, [snip]

Re-implemented a large GL linked Oracle Financial Analyzer system for a major UK and international retailer addressing major performance and usability issues.

Delivered an OLAP  system for 300 users which was less complex yet provided richer functionality for users. Included sophisticated modeling, scenario reporting and KPIs. Performance improved by addressing sparsity issues in the Express OLAP database and re-engineering the GL interface.

Feb 2002 - Feb 2004

Oracle Financial Analyzer Budget Modeling System

Consultant, [snip]

Developed two separate Budget systems in Oracle Financial Analyzer for [snip] and [snip] Ireland

Systems replaced fragmented, complex and unreliable spreadsheet based budgeting with consolidated budget tool which included full audit trail and used complex models to derive budgets. Included improved interface to Oracle General Ledger and flat file interfaces to other systems.

Jun 2000 - Dec 2000

Oracle Discoverer Data Mart Application

Independent Oracle Consultant, [snip]

Redeveloped significant Oracle Financials custom data mart to improve the Extract Transform & Load performance and expand the database.

Developed schemas and End User Layers for Oracle Discoverer Front End.

Feb 2004 - Mar 2004

Oracle Discoverer Data Mart Improvement

Independent Oracle Consultant, [snip]

Provided consultancy to [snip] on their Oracle Discoverer implementation.

Improved and automated the ETL process and developed hierarchical reporting facilities based on the Oracle General Ledger hierarchies.

Sep 2006 - current

Oracle E-Business Suite 11i Upgrade

Independent Oracle Consultant, [snip]

Consultant on Oracle 11i re-implimmentation of [snip] applications.

Responsible for re-architecting of Oracle Financial Analyzer for the new international Chart of Accounts.

Consulted on architecture for Apps Mode Oracle Discoverer.

Feb 1993 - Feb 1998

Oracle and Oracle Financials Development

Independent Oracle Consultant, [snip]

Managed development of bespoke changes to all modules to allow Financials to be rolled out into several Nortel business units, including [snip], their global R&D division, and their joint venture with [snip]

Analysis, design and construction of a sales order processing system to integrate with Oracle Financials.

Analysis, design and construction of an interface between non-Oracle purchasing systems and Oracle Purchasing at release 9.3, 10.5 and 10.7. The interfaces were used to load vendors, purchases orders and receipts from external non-Financials systems into Oracle for invoice matching.

Managed the upgrade of Purchasing and Payables from release 9.3 to release 10.5. This involved much re-analysis and specification of PO/AP bespoke code and leading a team of developers in rewriting the code.

Managed development and delivery of Oracle Payables Modified by Oracle UK.

Modules developed included complex forms (V2.3), reports (SQL*Rpt, SQL*ReportWriter and some Oracle Reports), Oracle Alerts, SQL*Plus, Pro*C, Unix Shell Scripts and performance enhancement work including database redesign and SQL tuning.

Much technical development administration including HP Workstation administration, source code control implementation, development tool implementation Oracle tool implementation (including Oracle Book and Oracle Reports).

All analysis and design used a combination of Nortels Gating Methodology and SSADM V5

Jan 1993 - Feb 1993

Oracle Training Environment Update

Independent Oracle Consultant, [snip]

Reinstallation of Oracle Financials on the Sequent used by Oracle for public scheduled courses.

Wrote administration scripts to support numerous Financials installations running across several databases. Set-up Oracle Alert which involved configuring Oracle*Mail for remote database access.

Database was considerably redesigned to provide a higher level of system performance.

Dec 1992 - Jan 1993

Oracle Client Training System

Independent Oracle Consultant, [snip]

Implementation of complex training environment for provision of courses to a major Oracle customer. The environment demanded two separate databases running twelve implementations of the Oracle Financials package on a multiprocessor Sun SparcServer system.

Installed Unix, the complete Oracle tool set and Oracle Financials MPL 8.3 onto a SparcServer. Installed twelve instances of prepared data across two Oracle databases.
System and database tuning to get high performance from such a non-standard database architecture.

Wrote housekeeping procedures to ensure that the course could be administered and reset, on a daily basis, by Oracle Application trainers with no technical knowledge. (Functions such as database reset, user process termination and file system housekeeping were all available on a simple, custom built, Unix menu system.)

Mar 1992 - Nov 1992

[snip]

Consultant, [snip]

System design of an application to be implemented at all magistrates courts in the United Kingdom.

The system was developed to be POSIX compliant and used Oracle V6, SQL*Forms V3, SQL*ReportWriter V1.1, PL/SQL, Pro*C and shell script.

The work was performed under extreme pressure and to very tight deadlines with a development team reaching 40 people.

Technical designer and lead programmer, a lot of emphasis was placed on transferring Oracle knowledge to other team members. This role also involved much application tuning.

Managed a team of programmers through development of an entire subsystem. This included database design, detailed module design, project management and reporting responsibilities, technical support and team building.

Human computer interface prototyping with of end users, developed a common look and feel for the application.
Presented a training course to Clerks To The Justices from courts around the country.

Oracle*Case was used for data model design and Database generation, Reverse engineered an existing data model into Case*Dictionary.

Feb 1992 - Mar 1992

Oracle Financials database Administrator

Consultant, [snip]

Systems administrator supporting user acceptance test across all European subsidiaries of [snip] from Hamburg, Germany. More than ten instances were in use, running several different versions of Oracle Financials (MPL8, MPL9 and MPL9x) and different subsets of the complete suite of software.

Receiving daily bug fixes for the different releases from Oracle development in America and applying them to the necessary instances.

Nov 1991 - Feb 1992

Intervention Board for Agriculture and Produce

Consultant, [snip]

SSADM entity life history analysis on a custom software development to interface with Oracle Financials. The Entity Life Histories were produced using Automate Case.

Sep 1991 - Nov 1991

Oracle Financials Government Demonstrator

Consultant, [snip]

Internal initiative to develop an Oracle Financials demonstrations for Government clients.

Installed the Oracle RDBMS and tool set and Oracle Financials on an ICL DRS6000.

Implementation of General Ledger, Purchase Ordering, Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable and Revenue Accounting to meet Government Accounting requirements.

Provided DBA and Systems Manager support for Oracle Financials under Oracle RDBMS V6 on Unix SVR4.

Jul 1991 - Sep 1991

Oracle Financials Demonstration System

Consultant, [snip]

Joint initiative with Oracle Corporation demonstrating Oracle Financials to potential clients.

DBA duties - installation of the Oracle Financials software suite, Oracle database and tool set. Provided support for users including identification and resolution of application errors.

This role continued on a part time basis until 11/92.

Oct 1989 - Jul 1991

Electricity Privatisation Systems

Consultant, [snip]

Very large Oracle development for the newly privatised Electricity companies. The system comprised several hundred programs and used one of the largest Oracle databases in Europe, performing electricity metering, financial settlement and contract trading functions.

Performed under extreme pressure to very tight deadlines, with the development team peaking at 100. The quality of this job was instrumental in [snip] gaining BS5750 quality certification.

Programming and unit testing modules in SQL*Forms 2.3 (including Pro*COBOL user exits), Pro*COBOL and DCL. Much of the work carried out was in a lead programming role.

System Manager and DBA , responsible for numerous development, test and training environments. Implementation Manager, planning and execution of a phased implementation of the system.

Performance tuning of VMS, the Oracle database and individual programs.

Training of development team members in good Oracle design and coding.

System design and team leading of a team of programmers on a performance critical part of the system.

Migrated of the entire development and support environment to the clients own machine, including specification of system management procedures.

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