Profile

I graduated from Rose in 1985 with a degree in Mathematics and Mathematical Economics with a Technical Translator's certificate in German. I was fortunate to be tapped to be one of the first people that the old Arthur Andersen firm hired from Rose. I went to work in the Chicago World Headquarters office in an internal support group that interfaced to third party software vendors. Since I had a technical background and also spoke German, I was quickly assigned to work with a unknown software company at the time called SAP. Now they are probably the second or third largest software company in the world and I have been consulting on SAP projects ever since. At that time, they only had 2 installations of there software in North America. My responsibility was to learn the software package, where upon I was called on it assist any AA office that had a project where SAP was to be implemented. Fortunately for me, I was "lured" away by Deloitte & Touche to start up their SAP practice in Cincinnati 1990, before all of the turmoil between what became Accenture and Arthur Andersen began to play out.

I spent another 5 years at D&T helping them build their practice. I worked on SAP implementation projects for them at companies such as Haarmann & Reimer (a division of Miles Inc), Hubbell Corp (manufacturer of wires / wiring devices), and Cooper Cameron (a valve and oil tools manufacturer). The systems that I helped implement at these companies included Purchasing, Accounts Payable and Sales & Distribution applications.Over time, I started specializing in Sales and Distribution applications and solutions formulti-nationals.

At the 10 year mark in my career with the ERP (enterprise resource planning) software market exploding, I decided to take a chance and venture out on my own and have been an independent SAP software consultant ever since. In the 13 years since I've been consulting on my own, I've implemented / supported large scale systems for the following companies:

Compaq Computer, Hewlett-Packard, Motorola, Schering-Plough, Consol Energy, Medtronics, Amgen, and Kimberly-Clark

I've become an expert in Pricing systems and a lot of my work revolves around trying to implement efficient and complete product pricing solutions in the organizations that I consult for. The interesting thing is that much of the underlying logic has more requirements in accounting than true "marketing" pricing.

I always tell folks whose eyes glaze over when the word "computer" comes into the conversation, that I view myself as a translator between Business and the IT professionals that support their computer systems. I am not a coder (although I have coded in the past and have the understanding of a coder), and I am not a marketer ( but I understand how they need to run a business effectively and efficiently). In that regard, all three of my educational building blocks from Rose support me in a great career.

I help build computer systems and applications (Mathematics), in a business environment (Economics) and bridge the world of business and technology (Translation skills) to provide my clients an efficient and workable solution.

I currently live outside Denver in Castle Rock, Colorado and enjoy the outdoors here as much as time permits. But I spend a great amount of time traveling and have been to Costa Rica, Germany, the Netherlands, Thailand and Cambodia already this year. Since my project work is borderless and getting ever more so, I'm contemplating taking an overseas assignment in Asia or Europe for a year or two after my current contract is completed (which has me based in Appleton, Wisconsin).