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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.

 

 DIRECTOR

1999 – Present 

 

Answerthink, Conshohocken, PA

 

 

 

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

1997 - 1999 

Loading Image, please wait.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

1996 - 1997 

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.

 

 CONSULTANT

1992 - 1995 

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