examples
Here I have a collection of different aspects of my life. They are examples of things that contribute to my professional and personal life. I am always learning new things and acquiring new skills. Please take a moment to learn more about who I am.standardization
Here in the IBM COE (Center of Excellence) we stress standardization and optimization. The business is constantly expanding and more work is coming to our department. Often, the contracts are signed so quickly that there is not time to train and assign a new Financial Analyst. Our manager chooses the more senior analysts to take on the job. We constantly reinvent streamlined processes.
My first desk rotation was as a Contract Financial Analyst. I immediately stepped up to the plate and started to find areas that were the same month over month. I made comprehensive lists of different indicators that guided my manual coding. After a few closes, my list was complete and I immediately began constructing a standardized close package. My work cut 10 hours off the first month and 16 off the subsequent months after some refinements. Soon after, I was given all of the work of my colleague and had absorbed the work of a full time person with incremental stress and large savings to the company. Similar work was done on a labor claiming process. I designed a process to capture labor hours and charges across multiple contacts with very little work. The time savings for me and colleagues has been immense. Our reports (or managers) have really enjoyed the standard reports. There is no more hunting for cell references or questioning data accuracy.
I took my next role and immediately started to find process improvements and opportunities to standardize the process created by the previous analyst. I developed new and innovative queries to capture all of the financials month over month. Also, I made education packets to be used by our team to help improve financial integrity and drive accuracy.
I have driven standardization across my entire department for my current role. I worked with our director to build and implement a brand new forecast loading template. Also, I made a process that analyzes new departments with ease. My labor reporting skills dramatically increased. I wrote Visual Basic code to retrieve actuals from one program, input them into a completely different one, perform basic analysis and consolidation and then email my support groups the result. This took 10 hours off my desk and turned it into a click of a button.
invoicing
Invoicing is very important to any organization. It is important to make accurate invoices so both client and customer are satisfied. I developed a process to pull contract related actuals from the ledger and cross-reference these results with contract specifics and the utilization from claim reports to automatically generate the invoices. Further, I implemented several different client specific invoicing technologies into one standard way of doing things. I did some additional research into these programs and found advanced features to use to save manual / redundant labor. This was a massive cost savings for several contracts and areas in my group.
cross platform
It has been my professional experience that working across many different platforms happens daily. I constantly pull data from different sources and meshing it together. I have developed the abilities to make these programs work together seamlessly. It is important to do this as we typically have tens of thousands of line items hit our ledgers monthly. I have gained such great skills by doing research about advanced features in my spare time and often by teaching others my findings. Again, these abilities have been great time savers for my entire department and those managers we report to.
reporting
Reporting actuals and building forecasts are large part of our duties. I have made this process a delight for many of the people I report to and the managers I support. For instance, some managers want to see every detail while others only want the main drivers. I consolidated all of my requests into one standard, repeatable file that is sent out monthly. There are areas to select preferences and build custom views.