Revenue Recognition

Created a new revenue recognition system in 2000 for the MasterPack ERP business suite running in UniVerse, in order to maintain revenue reporting compliance following the organizations IPO. Rewrote the revenue recognition system in UniVerse and interfaced to a new ERP product, Microsoft Dynamics AX, in 2012 for a 2013 go-live. The primary components to the revenue recognition system consisted of calculating the estimated selling price for line items on a sales order and revenue timing i.e. when can the organization recognize the revenue (forecasting) based on fulfilling contractual obligations (selling product along with professional services). Imported the processed revenue recognition data from UniVerse into a reporting product (QlikView) nightly, providing a financial dashboard for executives, management and staff.
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System Conversions / Migrations

• Migration of a large retail (CSI) and catalog (QOP) system from ADDS Mentor PICK to UniVerse, running on HPUX / UNIX. Rewrote and or modified many of the standard routines that had interaction with the operating system.
• Played a key role in the conversion of a large call-center order processing and warehouse management system written in Thoroughbred Software to the MasterPack ERP application suite running on UniVerse and DGUX / UNIX.
• Migration of the MasterPack ERP application suite from HPUX to Redhat Linux running on a virtual server (VMWare). This migration included an upgrade of the UniVerse database and modification to some routines that interacted with the operating system.
• Conversion and data migration from the MasterPack ERP application suite running on UniVerse to Microsoft Dynamics AX and MSSQL.

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ACH Payment Processing

Custom developed ACH processing in the MasterPack ERP system:

• Fully integrated into the accounts payable module
• Faster turnaround of vendor / supplier payments made electronically in order to take full advantage of early payment discounts
• Automatic import and AP invoice creation of employee expense reports from OpenAir (SAAS product) in order to make electronic expense reimbursement payouts
• Automated ACH and ARP (Positive Pay) data transmissions to Wells Fargo
• Provided the necessary reporting for tracking and auditing
• Provided email notification to accounts payable staff for successful and failed transmissions (Korn shell scripting)
• Provided email notifications to employees upon ACH submission to the bank for payment

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Credit Card Processing & Settlement

Created a custom developed real-time credit card authorization system within the MasterPack ERP system and UniVerse:

• The system supported 3000-4000 sales orders per day with a telesales staff of over 200
• Fully integrated into the order entry system
• Leveraged a product called CLEO and a dedicated lease-line to transmit the request for authorization and capture the bank response record
• Leveraged the standard bill-to and ship-to features within the order entry system in order to avoid customizations to the accounts receivable module
• Created and automated the end-of-day bank settlement and provided the necessary reporting and auditing capabilities

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Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)

Provided new development and ongoing support of the MasterPack ERP system running in UniVerse and System Builder (SB+) since 1997. The supported ERP modules include accounts receivable, accounts payable, inventory, purchasing, general ledger, order processing and invoicing. Notable custom developed add-ons include revenue recognition, contract management, ACH processing for vendor and employee expenses, quote-to-order integration, eliminate most of the printing by pushing ERP reporting to the WEB. Implemented AutoShip for recurring customer orders.
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Contract Management

Created a custom contract management system within UniVerse for managing service agreements held by customers. The consumers of contract data are primarily the technical support staff, used to identify customer owned hardware and software under a maintenance agreement.

• Heavily integrated into the sales order entry module
• Allowed for the reporting of renewal and attach rates
• Allowed for the identification of customer owned hardware and software under a maintenance agreement for technical support staff and engineers
• Integrated with the revenue recognition system for the proper amortization of revenue based on contract start, end, confirmed and invoice dates
• Facilitated the contract renewal process via workflow and the automatic creation of renewal cost quotes expiring within 120 days. Auto generated quotes are groomed by the renewal team and delivered to the inside sales organization for review. Captured a won / lost reason code to drive renewal rate reporting
• Provided automated push notifications via email to the sales organization for periodic grooming of customer contact data associated with products under maintenance by site location and serial number
• Provided automated push notifications via email to contract renewal teams and back-office staff for active contracts containing suspect data e.g. missing dates, dates out of range, missing customer contact information
• Provided a system and process for auditing contracts that included five levels of workflow based on the overall value of the contract, allowing for the review and approval by the contracts team, purchasing director, operations director, controller and CFO. This process greatly reduced errors found at month-end and quarter-end audits
• Provided all the necessary web based reporting to all the teams involved in the selling and management of contract information

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Reporting & Support

Reporting activities include data exports for consumption in Microsoft Excel, data integration for front office systems, other reporting systems such as QlikView and a custom UniVerse developed WEB based reporting framework called InfoWEB. Other forms of reporting and report distribution were accomplished via email attachments or sending a URL via email that would open the specific report in InfoWEB. Security was applied to reports when required.

• Sales reports: open orders, closed orders, invoices, gross profit, revenue recognition related details such as:
• Estimated selling price (ESP) by line-item
• Revenue stage by line-item e.g. Open, shipped but not invoiced, shipped but not installed, recognized
• Forecasted revenue recognition by line-item
• Purchasing reports
• Open / closed purchase orders by buyer by manufacturer by period (metrics)
• Open purchase orders by product category
• Forecast reporting for estimated product receipt and invoicing
• Customer purchase history
• Contract reporting
• Expiring contracts by maintenance renewal associate and by sales team
• Reporting by reason lost categories
• Renewal rates and attach rates
• Project reporting and revenue forecasting by period (Daily Engineering report)
• Audit reporting for internal and external audits
• Ad hoc and one-off reporting
• Provide on-going support for the UniVerse database
• Install / upgrade
• File resize and monitoring (hash.help)
• Record lock management (list.readu and unlock)
• User management in SB+ and Linux
• Researching and addressing application performance issues
• Disk utilization monitoring
• Active UniVerse process and job monitoring (port.status)
• Tape and printer device setup in &DEVICE&
• Customized printer device driver scripts in /usr/spool/uv
• Backup & restore (tar, uvbackup, uvrestore, t.dump, t.load)
• Perform hourly disk snapshots after suspending I/O using suspend.files
• Modify UniVerse tunable parameters in uvconfig, activate with uvregen
• Spooler and print queue management using usa, usm and usp from the Linux command line
• Set proper Linux permissions on UniVerse files for owner, group and other (chmod, chown, chgrp)
• UniVerse file repair using uvfixfile command
• Batch job automation using cron and "at" for one-off job runs
• Modification to the VOC>LOGIN paragraph for setting up user login defaults and properly handle phantom and uniobject processes
• Make use of VOC remote pointers in order to setup additional security for sensitive commands
• Properly handle UniVerse account location changes and the impact to indexes (set.index) when required

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Database, Tools and Utilities

Rocket Software U2 UniVerse database (11.1.9 MultiValue), System Builder / SB+ in character mode and UniObjects for WEB integration. UniBASIC programming and database management.

Frequently utilized Linux / UNIX tools/commands to automate routine tasks such as housekeeping activities, end-of-day processing, banking transmissions, backups, report generation, UniVerse table resize and data transfers between systems. Tools included Korn shell scripting, CRON, tar, sftp, find, xargs, etc...
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