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Mr. Braun is a Director in the
Business Intelligence practice of Answerthink. Mr. Braun offers over a
decade of experience in the Information Technology industry. He has
directed multi-million dollar, multi-site, complex, technology
projects. He has managed teams of various sizes and organizational
structures including project teams in excess of 25 developers and team leaders
for the past 5 years. He has participated on many sales pursuits both
domestic and international with responsibilities ranging from sales strategy to
estimation and proposal development. He excels when taking these pursuits
through the delivery cycle where he possesses solid leadership skills. He
has contributed to all phases of a project including strategy, analysis,
design, prototyping, coding, testing, implementation and production
support. He has led several analysis and development teams with responsibilities
including planning, budget and task tracking, reporting and all other aspects
of managing a team. His experience spans multiple industries including
Financial Services, Insurance, Mortgage Services, Health Care, Communications
and Process Manufacturing. He has co-managed a regional practice group
(approximately 75 consultants) addressing salary, bonuses, terminations,
mentoring, career growth and training direction and other aspects of human
resource management. Has also served as geographical Community Leader
where he oversaw corporate activities for over 150 consultants in his region.
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Answerthink, Conshohocken,
PA
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For a leading global financial
institution, led a strategy engagement to accomplish a variety of enterprise
goals. Namely, simplify the data and
access architecture of the household/client/account relationship information
for use by the application network, create a common relationship database for
market segmentation, messaging, sales execution and product development, create
a context basis for administering the client experience and optimizing client
profitability, and rationalize the company's view of account groups from an
unwieldy 30 to more manageable number.
This was accomplished using an approach that focused on current state
assessment, future state visioning and an intensive socialization of the
business and architectural vision to gain organizational consensus.
For a leading global financial
institution, led a strategic workshop engagement to examine and discuss best
practices in knowledge management and portals, develop a high-level end state
with related business objectives and construct a roadmap which identifies
accelerators, barriers, priorities, resource requirements and timeframes
For a regional snack cake maker, led an effort that
identified between $4 and $9 million of growth opportunities (2 to 4% of gross
annual revenue) tied to operating efficiencies and best practice-based
processes. This effort spanned the process areas of Finance, Sales and
Customer Service, IT, HR and all aspects of the Supply Chain from Procurement
to Production Planning to Production, Inventory Control and
Distribution. In addition to capturing the current state and performing an
opportunity assessment, the team was extended to guide the client through their
ERP implementation and assist with process optimization, change management and
PMO initiatives.
For a major international media corporation, led
and was the key process analyst for an “eAppraisal”
effort. This effort examined the project management processes and
architecture of a major international Media corporation for a key business
application. The examination resulted in the assessment of the current
state of the project and numerous detailed recommendations for improving both
the process followed and the architecture employed to ensure that the project
would be delivered on time, on budget, and would support the business needs in
the future.
For a global financial institution, led a large
international development effort from the strategy phase through to
implementation. The aim was to enhance their online web presence with a
primary focus on the distributor and institutional investor market segment in
an effort to improve its online relationship; therefore making the online
offering more robust and specific to the needs of its targeted
audiences. In addition, the aim was to leverage the opportunity to acquire
new distributors. The site became an evolving offering whereby more
functionality, content and transactional capabilities was added over a period
of time in logical stages. The application components were developed using
a J2EE architecture implemented with JSP components running on IBM’s
WebSphere application server, Netscape’s iPlanet web server, content
provided through Interwoven’s TeamSite suite of products, eCRM reporting
through WebTrends enterprise reporting server, graphs dynamically generated
through KavaChart’s signature product, RDBMS support from Oracle 9i and
the entire site layout and user management functionality developed in Epicentric’s
Foundation Server.
For a successful “dot com” startup
company, led a multi-million dollar engagement that helped develop the company
from scratch. He was responsible for Project Management of all custom
development of the portal web site and vendor integration issues, and directly
championed the CIO’s initiatives. The application was developed
using a J2EE architecture implemented with JSP/EJB components running on
Netscape’s iPlanet Web server, BEA’s WebLogic Application Server,
Oracle’s 8i RDBMS. The product was developed in multiple languages
using a database driven, flexible, scalable solution.
MANAGING CONSULTANT
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1997 - 1999
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triSpan,
Conshohocken, PA
For an international banking company, served as
Project Manager/Team Leaderfor delivering a data access layer for amulti-tier,
multi-site global distributedfinancial application using Encina++, Sybase
System 11 on Sun Solaris,RogueWave DBTools.h++, C and C++. Built a
multi-currency, multi-timezone global cash transfer system that operates 24
hours X 7 days.
SENIOR CONSULTANT
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1996 - 1997
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Cap Gemini America, Bala
Cynwyd, PA
For a large financial services/insurance company,
served as a Team Leaderand Systems Analyst in all phases of the development
life cycle for a customerbilling system. Responsibilities including gathering
requirements in RADsessions for prototyping; authoring detailed functional and
technical specifications;developing logical and physical data model and process
flows; leading athree-person team through development, unit test, system test,
and implementationphases; constructing approximately 50 windows utilizing 80
stored procedures;creating and executing unit and system test cases; reviewing
code and performanceof windows and stored procedures; and conducting
presentations and trainingsessions for extensive user and business groups. This
work was completedusing PowerBuilder, SQL Server, ER/Win, and BP/Win.
For an international banking company, developed
and implemented a functionalprototype of a Web-based, artificial intelligence,
customer service application.Acted as vendor liaison for the development team
and designed and developeda server-based application that communicates with the
user through a thin-clientbrowser interface. In the back-end the system
communicates with an artificialintelligence application to guide the user to
their desired subsystem oraction. This work was performed using IIS 3.0 and
Active Server Pages (ASP)as the front-end and a Visual Basic (Active X/OLE
Server) application onthe server to handle all other communications.
For a large cable operator, served as a GUI
prototyper. Performed productevaluations on data extraction, reporting and distribution
tools, maderecommendations on which tools may meet the needs of the project
with appropriatecost comparisons, assisted in the creation of the reporting and
distributionenvironments, and created and documented the live reports and
distributionmethods. This work was performed using Oracle as the relational
databasedata warehouse, Front Page as the intranet web page builder, and Brio
Queryas the reporting and distribution tool.
Cap Gemini America, Bala
Cynwyd, PA
For a large mortgage finance company, developed
and implemented numeroussystems including Process/Productivity projects,
"leading edge" initiatives,and system enhancements for a proprietary
loan origination application.This work was completed using a proprietary
application on IBM PCs writtenin C, using modem communication, local database
access and form printingusing PCL5.
For a large mortgage finance company, developed
and implemented a menu-drivenapplication for collecting data from various host
systems and downloadingit to Paradox for easy manipulation. The application
performed monthlyaccounting functions and calculated financials. It also
generated reportsthrough an external report writer. This work was completed
using PARADOX.
For a large mortgage finance company, provided
staff extension assistancein daily Information Systems needs for over 700
employees. Served on theHelp Desk and helped support a number of independent
small applications.This work was completed using a variety of tools.
University
of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA
Bachelor of Science in Engineering (BSE), System
Science Engineering 1992