Successful at developing and executing an information technology strategy that supports the goals of an organization and contributes to the bottom line.
Professional Experience
Recruited to lead application development and support, I quickly earned the top IT position. I have the ultimate responsibility for the Company's information architecture and systems functions, IT operating and capital budgets, and serve as a business partner and advisor to the CEO and the rest of the senior management team. The Company is a $150MM+, 7 site material science manufacturing and distribution company with locations in the U.S. and Europe. The company services the personal care industry with customers in over 70 countries. I have been aligning and executing the companys Information Technology plan with the corporate strategy since 1997. This has put me at the center of all organizational change and growth efforts; achieving buy-in from employees with the right balance of technology.
During my tenure functioning as the head of the IT organization, I have taken on many special projects. These include marketing manager for a $6 million line with P&L responsibilities (growing revenue 33% with a 41% increase in profit), and participating in the startup of a new consulting venture. This venture provides IT, organizational change, and other administrative services to private equity and law firms involved in the material science, personal care, and related industries. Consulting has provided me an excellent avenue to hone my leadership and change management skills in many different environments and organizations.
Major Initiatives:
STRATEGY AND PLANNING: Installed the systems and processes necessary to prioritize our IT efforts that have the greatest impact to the execution of our corporate strategy and goals. The system provides the organization visibility into all IT projects currently underway as well as the backlog for the department. The backlog serves as an indicator as to how well we are meeting the demands of the business and provides a mechanism for staff augmentation. Of course, conflicting requests do arise and/or re-prioritization becomes necessary. To work through these conflicts, I utilize a cross-functional IT Leadership Team (ITLT) comprised of other members of executive management to insure the right projects are given the appropriate resources.
E-COMMERCE/WEB 2.0: Lead internal staff, employees and a team of outside consultants in the design, development and deployment of our site. Our site delivers self-service capabilities to our customers and business partners in a clean, succinct manner. The use of standardized web technologies (Apache, PHP, mySQL) delivers superior transactional performance and excellent overall response time on the site. Our e-commerce initiatives have fully embarrassed the emergence of web 2.0 and social networking technologies. We use social networking to enhance our on-line presence, differentiate ourselves from the competition, and facilitate reputation management.
ENTERPRISE RESOURCE PLANNING (ERP): Our company's ERP was awarded Best-in-Class ERP implementation by an internationally recognized technology research company. I provided leadership during the initial software selection and implementation phases of this mission critical software application. Utilizing the very stable IBM iSeries platform, nearly all modules of the application have been implemented. These modules included: Customer Order Processing, Purchasing, Manufacturing, Warehouse Activity Control, Financials, EDI and document output management (printing, email, faxing, etc.) We have also deployed a high availability (HA) solution that continually synchronizes this vital application with redundant systems at our other facilities for contingency planning and disaster recovery protection. My group and I are responsible for having this system available at nearly 100% of the time. The result of this effort has been operating cost reduction of 30%, consolidation of several roles across the organization, reduction in head-count, increased visibility to all processes, improved information flow throughout the supply chain and our organization and is the platform for our growth.
ACQUISITION AND MERGER: Responsible for integrating many acquisitions into the companys information technology infrastructure. Once such acquisition, a $32MM personal care company allowed for removal of redundant systems, eased the process of aggregate financial reporting, and provided seamless communications between entities. This allowed a maximum return on existing IT investments. This effort reduced the holding company's IT expenditures by 36% with the company realizing a return on investment (ROI) of 304%. Acquisitions abroad have also been a part of our growth. With our defined processes, we consistently execute our IT integration plan to bring our acquisitions up on our IT communication infrastructure and reporting platform within 90 days of close.
BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE (BI): Influenced other executives within the organization to commit to and implement our Data Warehouse and web-based business-reporting tool. This tool has simplified and centralized the method in which the company's decision makers access, in logical business terms, the massive amounts of transactional data within our enterprise systems. Built on the IBM Cognos platform with Microsoft SQL Server, the centerpiece of the tool is the CEO dashboard. This single dashboard reports on the company's key performance indicators (KPI's) including, earnings before interest and tax (EBIT), EBIT as a percent of sales, trailing 12 month (TTM) sales, net operating working capital percent of sales, gross margin and gross profit. Similar dashboards support our different business units focusing on KPIs vital to each specific area such as sales funnel opportunity tracking and intelligence around our manufacturing processes. The total cost of gathering data has been reduced by 60% resulting in the system paying for itself in 1.3 years. Return on investment (ROI) = 225%.
MASTER DATA MANAGEMENT (MDM): Merger and acquisition (M&A) activity within the company required the formalization of MDM within the organization. This effort involving introduced new technologies and business process to bring together disparate ERP databases and created a global and harmonized view of sales, financials, and purchasing across all entities and currencies. We then further leveraged our Cognos Business Intelligence platform to deliver the information to our business users. The foundation of our MDM solution is Microsoft SQL server and SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) as well as Oracles financial consolidation software Hyperion.
MANUFACTURING OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT/MANUFACTURING EXECUTION SYSTEM (MOM/MES): Singlehandedly Persuaded the other members of our senior management team to implement a Manufacturing Operations Management (MOM) and Manufacturing Execution System (MES). These systems are built on Microsoft's .NET platform and C# programming language and has allowed us to gain incredible control over our previously paper laden manufacturing process. The company now has the ability to collect and analyze data at a level that was impossible before. This has translated into increase efficiencies (cycle time improvement of 10%) and has allowed us to gain control over our manufacturing assets, improved process control and improve product quality. ROI for this project was 98% and has paid for itself in less than 2 years. The five year contribution to Earnings Before Interest and Taxes (EBIT) is tracking at $1.2M.
CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT (CRM): Partnered with outside consultants in the design, development and rollout of the company's custom CRM solution. This system has centralized all customer contacts, correspondences, and other disparate customer information and is fully integrated across our ERP and Business Intelligence system. This application has improved the way the companys remote sales force services their customers and is the focal point for all communications with our customers. This platform also provides efficient communication and collaboration between the organization and our international distributors. A recent major enhancement to our opportunity tracking and sales funnel business process has provided unprecedented insight to our new business opportunities. With measures such as Average Win Cycle Time, Funnel Wins and Funnel Fallout tracking, and Funnel Stage Aging, we have created real business intelligence around our new opportunity business process. This new capability is being leveraged to close business more quickly and more often.
INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY INFRASTRUCTURE/DATA CENTER RELOCATION: Lead a multifunctional project team comprised of personnel from IT operations, applications, data networking, facilities management, real estate specialists and human resources to design, build and relocate our corporate headquarters and data center. Critical considerations included a complete electrical power design, fire retardant systems, and mechanical systems (HVAC) for the new computer room. The project also required working very closely with various telecommunication companies to provide the needed services and to insure minimum downtime.
The move of our corporate headquarters and data center provided a unique opportunity to insure that we had the right IT infrastructure in place that could be flexible and support the business for years to come. Major components to this new infrastructure included moving to a multi-protocol label switching (MPLS) wide area network (WAN) and the implementation of a voice-over-IP (VOIP) phone system. Other infrastructure technologies include: Cisco routers, CheckPoint Firewalls, and Juniper Virtual Private Network (VPN) appliance. The net result of this new architecture has been a lower total cost of ownership (TCO), minimized administration and maintenance cost, and significantly improving our contingency planning/disaster recovery capabilities. Our MPLS and VOIP project has a payback period of 2.25 years with a 223% ROI. The addition of our Juniper VPN resulted in a 56% reduction in remote access charges while creating a more stable and reliable remote access environment.
Senior Consultant New Resources Corp., Schaumburg, IL
1994 1995 (Acquired by PSC Group Inc.)
New Resources Corporation is a well-recognized consulting firm known for successful implementations of large, complex technology solutions. My portfolio of clients included:
Allstate Insurance - $29B Insurance Company
Baxter Healthcare - $4B Medical Products and Equipment provider
" Interfaced with Allstates agents to provide enhancements and troubleshoot problems with their homeowners insurance system. Also, was able to ease workloads for their IT staff by developing a more efficient method of rolling out system changes to their over 10,000 agent sites.
" Participated in the consolidation of manufacturing and export systems during the years following Baxter's acquisition of similar sized American Hospital Supply. I was engaged in all facets of software development life cycle for their new billing and accounts payable system.
Education
MBA Leadership and Change Management
Bachelor of Science, Computer Science
Member of the national business honor society Beta Gamma Sigma |
