Examples of Work

General 

• Working with small and medium sized organisations, helping to establish valid business systems and processes that provide effective management information. This may involve working with them over several months to enable supported, incremental change to be achieved. Also, providing IT support and troubleshooting on an ad hoc basis for those that do not have their own in-house IT expertise or resources.
• Collaboration with senior civil service executives and secretaries, examining their use of word processing and email systems, helping them to: develop standards for internal and external documents and their production, create templates and macros to automate the production of procedural manuals and streamline Parliamentary communications.

Database design and development

• Exam recording systems to track assignment results and calculate students’ end-of-year grades. (Sheffield Hallam University)
• Employment agency system to maintain employer and employee details, produce and record personalised contract documents between employer and employee and to calculate invoicing and payroll information. (Student Employment Services)
• Manuscript submissions system, for the tracking of research papers from around the world for review and publication in various medical journals. (European Respiratory Journals)
• Caravan stocking system for new and second-hand stock, which also maintains details of sales, customers, warranties, invoices, calculates stock values and produces letters for reminders and marketing mailshots. (Sheffield Caravans)

Financial analysis and control systems development 

• Budget vs actual spend, cost analysis and summaries by department, with all sheets linking into a profit & loss and balance sheet.
• Invoice automation using formulae to link between spreadsheets with different product details, in various currencies.
• Sales forecasting using previous year’s data, with comparison to current monthy actuals and year-to-date totals.
• Extraction of Sage accounting data via ODBC, to enable imports of financial data into alternative (overseas) accounting systems.

Veryan Workplace

The Veryan Workplace database system is designed to meet the reporting needs of EBL organisations, recording details of local businesses and their various involvements in EBL activities. It simplifies the management of work placements, health and safety status and accompanying paperwork. Schools may manage their own work placements using Veryan Webview via browser access and Health and Safety visits are managed via Veryan Star.

Since 2001, I have worked with Business & Education South Yorkshire and other EBL organisations, to help develop and extend their use of these systems internally and in local schools.

Whilst there are many built-in Workplace reports, much of my involvement has been in the creation of additional queries and reports to fulfil the constantly evolving demands for information, internally across the company and externally from funding and regulating bodies. Some examples are:

• YPLA annual returns – EBPS1, EBPS2 and EBPS3.
• Reports, charts and statistics for Senior Management Team meetings.
• Data to support invoicing and Finance department functions.
• Activity charts, by business sector and school.
• Key performance indicators.
• Health and Safety visit scheduling.
• Personalised letters, contracts, certificates, etc.
• Mailings to local businesses.
• Event status reporting, project management information and audit trails
• Needs analysis and training for staff in EBL offices and local schools