Sysco Corporation
Analyst/Developer, Consolidated Financial Reporting — Sept ‘00 to Dec ‘00
I had been working full time with a group of small businesses during their startup when I get a call from Andy Haut, President of Technical Star Consulting who I had been associated with for the previous several years. He had a potential client with some big problems and he knew I could sort them out.
Lotus Consulting–the now defunct internal consulting operation of Lotus before the IBM acquisition–had two or three suits loitering around and Sysco Corp. was dissatisfied with their efforts and were giving them the boot, as the story was told to me. Was I interested? Sure, why not. I always like to follow behind the big boys and sort out their expensive messes.
I can see why Lotus had a small team in there though. This project turned out to be one of the most mentally demanding pieces of work I’ve ever done. One giant math problem. Four months of heads down, non-stop mental computations. But since I enjoy a challenge it was rewarding, too.
Here is what I did:
- Performed complete system modification of Sysco’s consolidated financial reporting system, a massive and complex application used to consolidate weekly and monthly production data from Sysco’s 80+ operating companies.Metrics as granular as number of stops, pounds per delivery, miles per route, etc were tracked on a daily basis for every delivery route for every operating company. Key data from each form would bubble up to the next level of granularity and then to the next level. Eventually the forms were collecting data about product lines instead of delivery routes.At the end of the process hundreds and hundreds of pages of data bubbled up to a single summary report for executive management.
- Automated process of adding operating companies to the financial reporting system by implementing a control panel-type interface eliminating the need for a programmer each time a new company was acquired
- Corrected scalability problems caused by “hard coded” functions left over from previous consulting firm
- Identified and corrected serious performance issues due to poor application design from previous consulting firm
The last three bullets were not part of the initial requirements. In fact, the client didn’t even know about the last two; it was just a slow system. This was a hard dollar job for TCS so there would be no extra money for the effort but I corrected the problems anyway and still came in on time and on budget.
We never received any more work from Sysco (the dot.com bust was looming) but these were definitely some Happy Customers!
