My passion for technology comes from the creative process and the challenge to build dynamic applications, that greatly enhance productivity. Underpinning all of my work is the principle of keeping things simple. This reduces development cost, ensuring than IT investment pays dividends immediately. The other benefits are also rapid development & deployment, minimal user training, greater user participation and reduced maintenance overheads. The development of new IT technology is a journey for both the business commissioning the work and developers coding the solution. This is a journey that is best traversed in small steps as the familiarisation of new features and functions often change the direction of a development with both parties gaining insights during the course of the development. Those insights could never have been anticipated prior to starting.
Over the course of a thirty year career, I've contracted to some of the world's biggest companies like IBM and BP and also some of the smallest. Even for companies like BP, where the cost was less of an issue, a simple approach enabled greater user participation on a data collection website. Speed of development is also a big factor. Being able to create a tool for money market dealers at the Union Bank of Switzerland enabled them to take advantage of rapidly changing financial opportunities. One of the most effective applications, I created, was for the birth of EFTPOS New Zealand Limited. Working with the two owners I optimised the efficiency of 9 telesales operators hired at the start of the business. It has since grown to 160 employees and 40,000 customers.
Upscaling from Excel Spreadsheets is one of the most common issues for small to even medium sized businesses.
Although initially useful, Excel issues arise as they grow in size and number. An incremental amount of time doing set up, programming and
updating creeps up gradually until it becomes untenable. Other issues collating diverse spreadsheets, keeping audit trails and integrating
to other applications hold the company back from putting information to productive use. The solution is to create a database and desktop / internet
based applications to manage the data. This process need not be a "war and peace" effort. Very small and simple systems can have a major impact
on businesses where staff are currently losing time and money sitting in front of a computer.
Click on image for details.
Using contemporary web technology (HTML5, CSS3) I built this Responsive page for Augustus Martin Ltd. Account Managers to track consignments, couriered by TNT, to their clients. By resizing your browser window to the size of a mobile phone, a complete change in formatting can be seen. However, Responsive pages are not just important for devices of varying screen sizes. Google now ranks their search results by this "mobile first" compatibility. The data for this page is gathered by an automated FTP process, I wrote, and run by Microsoft Windows Scheduler. That FTP process downloads three separate CSV files from the TNT website every hour to provide the lastest delivery updates to AM staff. Click here to see the working webpage.
A visual example of the power of Linear Algebra. The shape on the right is mathematically provable to be the smoothest shape to pass through a given 48 points in three dimensional space. Consisting of 40,000 x,y and z coordinates the additional 39,952 points were interpolated and calculated using the differential of each point to determine the slope, then optimising the Linear Equations for a minimum. The 48 points represented a shellfish survey in Whakatane harbour, New Zealand. My objective was to enable visualisation of the data for what would otherwise meaningless numbers. My boss said, the map would sell well in the local pub, as it's essentially a map of where all the tucker is. However, I do remember some of my colleagues, who held PhD’s in Mathematics, being quite impressed... and they weren't just hungry. Please click here for more detail.
BP Chemicals had an issue keeping a cumulative summary of their projects accross the world. The Webpage I created, enabled project managers globally to enter the salient details of their projects and their status. Additional pages enabled PM's to enter project financial forecasts by annual quarters. BP management were able to group together a collection of projects, they were administering, and visualise the collated financial position also by quarter year projections. The reports page also enabled managers to click on collated financial sums and "drill down" to the component projects. Please click here for a more detailed view of the front screen. Included are annimated buttons that illustrate their underlying function, a neat little feature I created and have yet to see emulated 17 years later.
A webpage useing the latest web technology to enable Augustus Martin Ltd. account managers to track consignments to their clients.
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