Product Owner | Product Manager
2021 - 2022Dollar General- Gathered business requirements, then technically developed and delivered a Power Automate (Flows) solution over SharePoint to replace a 20-year-old app. Built responsive Power Apps Canvas solution to streamline UX with minimal cost to Dollar General.
- Created advanced Power BI screens with data toggles, which included DirectQuery returning 365 rows from a 100 billion row table based on user filter selections internal to the SQL. Tested solution in Snowflake and then looked at a Google solution.
- Kept project on time, pulling in resources and aligning technical answers to determine cost and timeline presented to the CTO. Acted as project manager in this key engagement to find a vendor solution for the Distribution Analysis Application project.
- Built and moved new technology stack (Microsoft Power Platform) into production. Defined Active Domain user groups. Configured user security in SharePoint, Power Automate flows, and Canvas Power Apps. Resolved application security, all docs, and SDLC.
DW App Development Team Lead | Product Owner
2019 - 2019Union Underwear- Served as an Agile product owner for the backlog, roadmap, user stories, and release of new features on two custom Salesforce applications. Worked with users, stakeholders, and a scrum master to validate releases.
- Saved 30 minutes in the daily schedule by resequencing DataStage ETL jobs for eCommerce, inventory, accounts, orders, items, forecast, trade spend, and shipments.
- Established an Agile Kanban solution for local and remote teams using a Jira backlog board with screens configured for each team — offshore and onsite contractors, onsite employees, managers, and one view for refining backlog with business users.
- Delivered P&L of CPG trade management data by product, account, and week with the integration of Salesforce data into the data warehouse application. This included appropriate promotions applied before and after dilutions.
- Delivered P&L of proposed future trade promotions and product pricing by product, account, and week based on POS forecast added into the data warehouse. Legacy Excel forecast and business acumen were moved into the DWH for reporting data processes.
- Managed the data warehouse application development team composed of in-house employees, offshore team, and onsite contractors. Completed three months of knowledge transfer as IT was then outsourced to an offshore company.
Lead Business Analyst | Product Owner
2013 - 2019Union Underwear- Delivered eCommerce process improvements. Documented and improved new item load processes, oversaw Salsify mastering of eCommerce product details, and contributed to the back-end data analysis and tracking of trade management promotions.
- Served as an Agile product owner for Salesforce Audit App, delivering vision, roadmap, epics, user stories, and backlog. Had varying data access rights and empowered users to configure their own audit criteria and severity.
- Migrated a multi-million-dollar trade spend from Excel spreadsheets into a Salesforce SaaS plugin, CPGToolBox, and defined trade promotion approval automation and reporting. The solution supported over 80,000 SKUs.
- Served as a PO for merchandiser display migration (25% revenue). Mapped processes, architected solutions, achieved buy-in, and migrated legacy into Salesforce and Oracle. Overcame business realities conflicting with Oracle processing requirements.
- Delivered user-empowering Power BI reports and trained users on making Power BI reports.
- Defined and built MicroStrategy nested SQL reports per business needs. My ability to quickly learn MicroStrategy and create complicated reports with embedded SQL was held as the standard when onboarding the new offshore support team.
- Proved forecasting needs to use point of sale instead of shipments to accurately predict customer needs using Teradata SQL to load data into RStudio for final analysis.
- Proved the benefit of business analyst and product owner roles to Fruit of the Loom, then built a team of six business analysts streamlining company processes. Improved many different business processes based on business priorities.
Project Manager and Product Owner
2010 - 2013Union Underwear- Served as an Agile product owner to deliver an operational analytics web app (Java with Solr) integrated into AS/400 Manhattan PkMS warehouse management system, including wireframing, backlog, user stories, SQL, screen updates, and release testing.
- Created user documentation and trained users on the new operational analytics solution at six locations.
- Reduced corporate investments with simulations that proved that product pickers using inexpensive push-cart picking matched the throughput of expensive complex pick-and-pass solutions in processing orders at the distribution centers.
- Proved forecasting should use point-of-sale data, not shipments, to predict user trends. Spent six months as a data scientist using R on corporate data at Fruit of the Loom.
Senior Manufacturing Engineer
2007 - 2009General Motors- Awarded the Boss Kettering Engineering Excellence Award 2008 for team creation of the plug-and-play machine to IT systems interface that saved over $2,000,000 during equipment installations at three facilities.
- Eliminated the need for servers in China to communicate production statistics by overseeing offshore .NET program development in a Windows CE device inserted into the programmable logic controllers (PLCs) within manufacturing systems.
- Met the electric car battery manufacturing schedules by enhancing a plug-and-play solution to support the data required to audit battery manufacturing processes.
- Drove the implementation and upgrade of the General Motors stamping plant lean manufacturing solution created in my pilot at Grand Rapids facility that was selected to go across all stamping facilities.
Manufacturing Engineer
1989 - 2007General Motors- Created a GM stamping lean manufacturing production solution, resulted in a 20% reduction in support trade response times and 10% improvement in production throughput and schedule accuracy. It became standard for all General Motors stamping facilities.
- Served as a project manager and product owner aligned with Indian engineers to build a .NET solution to move production monitoring and control into a Windows CE module in the equipment programmable logic controller.
- Managed the installation of fiber-optic, CAT 5, and wifi networks into the stamping facility enabling production support with machinery connected to servers and programming workstations.
- Connected all plant floor equipment to servers for disaster recovery, Uploaded, downloaded, and compared, and quickly recovered from catastrophic machinery production controller failures at least six times, saving a million dollars.
- Defined the need, acquired funding, then built, installed, and supported computers in workstations on the plant floor to troubleshoot production equipment and increased equipment uptime by 10%.
- Replaced production line proprietary user interfaces with generic computers running Wonderware.
- Installed SQL Server in the server room and saved and read production recipes to and from SQL Server tables, resulting in a 60% improvement in change over time.
- Managed the plant server room upgrade to dual UPS power distribution and dual networks.