Business Analysis

• Full lifecycle methodology
• Gathering business requirements
• Functional / technical specifications
• User acceptance training (UAT)
• Issue and escalation procedures

ERP

• System21
• BPCS
• JD Edwards World / OneWorld

Integration / Workflow Technologies

• Microsoft Message Queues
• OS400 Data Queues
• GenCOM
• Radio Frequency terminals

Databases

• SQL Server (5 years)
• DB2/400 (15 years)
• Access (12 years)
• Oracle (2 years)

Miscellaneous

• Architect design of technical solutions
• Management of developers
• Mentoring of junior staff
• Database administrator on SQL Server
• Pre-sales campaigns
• Managing heavy workloads to tight timescales
• Interpersonal skills to communicate at all levels of company
• A team leader
• Pragmatic rather than technology ideologist!
• Over 50,000 expert points on [snip]

Key Projects

This is a brief summary of key projects and if required I can provide a more detail description of each.

Role: Technical Architect / Lead Software Developer
Date:  Dec 05 - 3 month contract + 3 extensions of 3 months (still ongoing)
Business: [snip] / Consultancy House

Working on their main high profile project for a manufacturing company as lead developer for team of three. Developing a new Service Management system application to control the maintenance, repair and servicing of existing and new customers, routing and scheduling of engineers, payment and revenue streams of each service contract Application architecture heavily based on datasets and customised objects. Before I joined the project specifications were standard waterfall technique and I took this to create the class design using UML for the other developers to start using.
As part of the design, we have to create specific user controls that are being deployed throughout the application.
Key skills – Visual Basic.Net, SQL Server stored procedures, ADO.Net, Datasets, UML, Create user controls

Role:  Software Engineer
Date:  Oct 05 – 6 week contract + 1 extension of 6 weeks
Business:  [snip] / Consultancy House

[snip] won the contract for a local government department to upgrade and deploy new XP desktops to 1400 users and move the server farm from Novel and Unix to Win2003 Server. I was brought in to develop the practice and procedures for moving the so called “specialist applications” as used by the lead-users from the old Win 95/98 platform to XP. This varied from simply organising new versions from suppliers to designing and testing a series of manual procedures to manipulate the registry and scripts to simply get old software working within the XP platform. This was the main reason I was brought onto the project as the overall project manager knew me from a previous employer and trusted my troubleshooting and analysis skills
Key skills – Wise for Windows Packaging software, vbScript, managing and analysis of problems, troubleshooting

Role:  Technical Architect / Lead Software Developer
Date:  May 05 - 3 month contract + 1 extension of 2 months
Business:  [snip] - Software / Consultancy House

Working on their main high profile project for a pharmaceutical company as lead developer for team of four. Developing replacement application to control the sale and production of drugs to pharmacies and hospitals around Europe dealing with patients needing heart and cancer drugs. System to be deployed running over Citrix infrastructure with the application in Brussels and the database in Vienna. Application architecture heavily based on datasets and software design was done using Enterprise Architect to produce UML 2.0 documentation. Due to nature of industry this was a heavily QA validated / audited process.
I also had to create specific user controls that were deployed throughout the application.
Key skills – Visual Basic.Net, SQL Server stored procedures, ADO.Net, Datasets, Infragistics 3rd party controls, UML, Create user controls

Company:  [snip]
Date:  March 98 – March 05 (Permanent role)
Business:  Software House

Viability of moving the underlying products to a .Net framework. This has involved creating prototypes of product and also replicating current product applications with a .Net equivalent.

Key skills – Visual Basic.Net, SQL Server stored procedures, ADO, OLEDB, Access

The data now being collected within the Efficiency database part of the middleware product needed to be made available to users. I created an extract program that retrieved data based on dynamic queries created by the user and made this data available with Excel using the object model interface available. Then with VBA and macro scripting in Excel to create custom charts and graphs based on the raw data.

Key skills – Visual Basic, SQL Server stored procedures, ADO, OLEDB, Access, VBA, Excel, Macro scripting, XML

The middleware engine was now successfully being implemented in all projects and the amount of data throughput was exceeding the original design. The product needed to be changed so any batch style transactions (fire and forget, ASNs, EDI etc.) needed changing to run over a SQL Server database rather than the original Access, with more functionality within the viewers of this data.

Key skills – Visual Basic, SQL Server stored procedures, ADO, OLEDB, XML, Access

Create new Microsoft based product set to allow the company to move from its legacy iSeries (AS400) platform to a more neutral Microsoft server platform. This was to allow scalability so any ERP system could be integrated with without changing the core middleware. The engine runs over the concept of ERP factories that implement different coding requirements but with consistent interfaces to each so the whole process is dynamically loading DLLs dependant on what the user wants to do.

This has proved a success in the market place and all projects for the last four years have been delivered using this engine as a core.

Key skills – Visual Basic, SQL Server, Access, ADO, OLEDB, XML, COM, JDE Specific GenCom

To remove the need to depend upon skilled C programmers to develop front end applications that emulated to radio frequency devices and controlled the user’s workflow with the middleware engine, the company decided on having a proprietary development environment that created interpreted code to generate front end applications.

This involved buying in an existent product that was developed in Visual Basic 4 and Microsoft C v1.52 from a company that specialised in batch Psion devices. We then took this base and converted from VB 4 using DAO to Visual Basic 6 using ADO as well as C v1.52 to Visual C++ v6.

The architecture was also changed to use Telnet servers so the applications could be emulated to the RF devices rather than run as thick clients on the devices.

This also allowed the company to employ a wide range of staff from business analysts to graduates who were all trained to use this tool and therefore the company has 100% skill set in it main customer deliverable. With the use of graduates this is also a profitable business development.

Key skills – Visual Basic 4 and 6, ADO, OLEDB, DAO, Access, Porting legacy applications

Create new diagnostic tools to work over current product set plus one version back. This was pulling together existing applications as well as creating new ones all to run from one menu and therefore was connecting over multiple database platforms

Key skills – Visual Basic, ADO, OLEDB, SQL, iSeries (AS400) stored procedures, Access, SQL Server

New product enhancement to take files from outside suppliers or customers within the supply chain and to process these files in an automated, unattended method with full traceability and monitoring tools. This was to aid the supply chain within business to business commerce.

Key skills – Visual Basic, ADO, OLEDB, Access, XML, Integration with Windows Services

After purchasing a site that had a going concern of a running factory, an external customer had an urgent requirement to change the integration of a 3rd party application for which there was no documentation or support from SAP to BPCS. This as done using both our product set as well as bespoke programs for formatting to and from the SAP structured messages that the 3rd party application required.

Key skills – Visual Basic, ADO, and XML, MSMQ, ability to backward engineer to work out database and message structures required.

Part of our product captures an operative’s time to process a business transaction, e.g. picking, and therefore holds an efficiency database of users’ duration and productivity in order to give the business a KPI of their warehouse.

As each customers data warehousing will be different and one customers report requirements different to another, I developed an extraction routine out of the efficiency database and integrated it into Excel spreadsheets that could then be customised by the customer using macros, charts etc.

Key skills – Visual Basic, ADO, SQL Server stored procedures, Excel integration from VB

Project managed one of our product implementations into a large pharmaceutical company (Snip) and also created a European Track and Trace system to manage Pallets / Cases being delivered between Basle (Switzerland) and Cambridge (UK). From initial sale to full project completion (over a number of phases) was 18 months.

Project managed a high-risk implementation for an automotive company that had bought an existing site in Spain with an existing standalone 3rd party shop floor product that integrated to SAP. This had to be changed in three months to integrate to a BPCS system in USA without any knowledge of how this system worked and no English speakers on site.

Even though this was meant to be a short term solution, it has proved so successful the company is even looking at rolling out this 3rd party product to other sites – even though no documentation exists other than the integration points that I introduced !

Previously I have also built a mini ERP system – Purchasing / Ticketing / Mail Order / Point of Sale / Memberships – for Football and Rugby clubs. Initially this was built on the iSeries (AS400) with RPG but was then redeveloped to the Microsoft platform using Visual Basic on an Oracle database.

Key skills – Visual Basic, Oracle, Oracle stored procedures, RPG, iSeries (AS400)