Access Programmer-Professional Background

Chaston Associates North Andover, MA
Access Programmer

Created a very involved Access 2013 system to capture and report on loan activity for client banks. This allows Chaston to do a very thorough review of bank risk levels prior to a regular planned SEC audit. The app is heavy on the analytical side with over 20 complex reports,

Vartanian Cabinets Palmer, MA
Access Programmer

Created a quoting/proposal utility that replaces those done before in Microsoft Word. Users can select from many categories and materials, some with images and some with extra notes to produce an attractive Proposal with attached Contract for acceptance and signature.

American Plant Maintenance Woburn, MA
Access Programmer

Took on support of an Access program that has been in use for several years, but was left in a compiled (.mde) state with no source code to be found. I was able to locate a company in the UK that reverse engineered the front-end file for a reasonable price once all authorizations were signed.

I was then able to take on support and made some early modifications.

MacNichol Electric, Inc Lynnfield, MA
Access Programmer

Upgraded full-featured business management app from Access 2003 to Access 2010. Fixed several bugs that had been bothering the owner and family staff for years.

Costa Fruit and Produce Boston, MA
Access Programmer

Costa is the largest supplier of products to stores and restaurants in the Greater Boston area. I wrote a complex Costing program in Access 2010 to replace an aging Wang application. It is very much like a Bill-of-materials task incorporating products at 3 to 6 levels of assembly, labor, waste, packaging, and even down to the label.

TEK Microsystems, Inc Nashua, NH
Access Programmer

TEK Micro designs, manufactures and markets a wide range of advanced high-performance FPGA based sensor I/O processing products for embedded real-time computing systems. I imported their Excel data and wrote an Order Entry and processing system in Access 2010.

Valescent Health (div of Apria Healthcare) Nashua,NH
Access Programmer

Wrote an Access 2010 application to track Patients, Clients, Procedures and Providers. The schema was of medium complexity with 16 tables but some of them immediately grew to well over 1 million records. As a result, speed of query optimization was identified as being critical. I migrated all data to SQL Server and performed stress testing before turning the project over to the users.

Leggat McCall Properties Boston,MA
Access Programmer

LMP delivers complex real estate projects as investors, project managers, and advisors. I developed an Access 2010 program to handle their large real estate projects. In addition to the tracking of Projects, team members, and allocation of staff time, I developed an extensive reporting scheme.

FPI Inc. (Jonathan Pond, LLC) Newton, MA
Access Programmer; Excel Programmer, Crystal Reports

Jonathan is a nationally known financial planner with close affiliations with AARP. For many years, his firm has produced a very substantial and complete set of financial reports and advice based on extensive questionnaires sent in by conference attendees as well as respondents to public TV presentations. Done in VB6 and Borland, the report generation became very slow compared to current technology, but more seriously was breaking down. They lost support from the prior programmer and I was called. On my advice, the firm purchased new hardware and the current version of Microsoft Office. I set them up with a LogMeIn connection so I could transfer editions of my work to their site frequently. This became a content management project with dependence on complex combinations of responses concerning age, family, investments, retirement plans, risk preference and many other items. In some cases one of 50 possible responses were determined to go into a particular report section.

Maximus Hartford, CT (also NY, Maine)
Access Programmer, Excel Programmer, SQL Server

Maximus is a substantial IT consulting firm serving primarily the government sector. As part of their team working for the State of Connecticut's Department of Social Services (DSS), I created a program in Access 2003 to replace a large and intricate set of Excel spreadsheets that managed Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) as well as Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF).

There are 12 Agencies involved in this within the Connecticut DSS with names such as Dept. of Children and Families, Dept. of Corrections, Dept of Labor, Judicial, Office of State Treasurer, and so on. Each has many programs and subprograms and is served by many providers. The need was to unify all this data and allow systematic quarterly imports of data from many sources to replace all the manual spreadsheet manipulations that went on before.

An additional task was to create complex Access forms that allocate monies from various funding streams to these programs and then estimate what would be required for the following fiscal year. The program also distills all the actual distributions into two formal annual reports named ACF-196 (TANF) and ACF-696 (CCDF).

Albanese Brothers, Inc. Dracut, MA (Boston area)
Access Programmer

This firm runs a very large trucking and heavy equipment operation, serving many city governments in Eastern Massachusetts. I took over an extremely large Access 2010 program that runs their total operations. This app deals with around 100 integrated tables, three times as many queries as well as many reports. Sub-modules include Customer details, Bidding, Contracts, Equipment Maintenance and Communications,

Earlier Access Programming:

Disetronics Sterile Products Portsmouth, NH (also NY)
Access Database Programmer
Contact: Glen Stadig 603-427-5511 Ext 227

Disetronic is a subsidiary of Hoffmann LaRoche. In a clean-room environment, they manufacture clinical devices, especially insulin pumps for diabetics. They had a pressing need to improve the tracking of numbered work lots to track the entire manufacturing cycle. We divided the4 work into two major tasks: Warehousing and Production.

As Einstein once said about hypotheses, "Make it as simple as possible, but no simpler." Before doing any coding, we spent the first week just designing the data schema needed to support both sides of their world. With this careful analysis, we were able to do the job with a minimal number of tables. The schema was reduced to a core set named tblLotMaster, tblWarehouse, tblItemMaster, tblSuppliers, tblTransactionLog, and just a few other lookup tables. .

Oct 2004 - May 2006
PAX World Funds, Portsmouth, NH, Stanton, MO, Schenectady, NY, Portland, Maine (Access 2003)
Access Programmer
This mutual fund company hired me to finish the work started by a previous Access database programmer. The program tracks commissions owed to brokers all across the country on all kinds of mutual fund transactions. A quarterly import of data is required and I automated this to make life easy for the administrator (Michelle). I later took on Access projects in several other departments. PAX continues to use me for general database support.

Oct 2004 - May 2006
UNITIL, Hampton, NH (Access 2003)
Access Database Programmer
This is the local electric company. They have a program called Demand-Side Management (DSM) that imports data from a wide variety of formats from many vendors. Formerly, it took a serious and tedious effort to handle all the different import and data transformations and calculations in Excel spreadsheets. This was quite tedious and error-prone--in fact there was a huge backlog of data to import. I automated this using Access.

Dec 2003 - May 2004
Fisher Scientific World Headquarters, Hampton, NH and Albany, NY (Access 2002)
Database Programmer
Now named Thermo-Fisher, this major supplier of laboratory instrumentation and equipment had a dozen Access databases containing the results of multiple Quarterly Customer Satisfaction Surveys. They needed a data-aware programmer to unify this data and migrate it into one so that it could be properly queried and reported on and so information across quarters and across divisions would make sense. After merging all data into one set of normalized tables, I have achieved functional equivalence. I am proceeding to rewrite existing queries and add new queries/reports to address the new simplified schema. We are doing this in such a way that an eventual merge of this "seed" data will easily transform into a full CRM system by means of migration into a Siebel ODS (Operational Data Store).

Jul 2004 - Oct 2004
ProTracker, Inc., Hampton, NH, Chicago, IL (Access 2003)
Access Database Programmer
ProTracker is a software development firm with a product of the same name offered to a market consisting of Financial Planners. Data needed to be imported from their ECommerce website into a local database, and then out to Peachtree accounting.

Feb 2004 - May 2004
Acme Brick Company, Sealy, TX (VB.NET, ADO.NET)
DotNet Programmer
A large brick plant just outside of Houston located us by searching for our skillset on the Web. We created a quality control program for their production engineer using DotNet technologies that monitored a high resolution video camera. This camera was continually focused on a production line of precured and precut bricks called a "slug". Periodically, the line operator clicks a button to take a picture of the line going by at 1 foot per second. Our software grabs a frame from the continuous video stream and displays it on a color monitor side by side with a picture of a known high quality standard for that particular style of brick. Depending on the visual comparison, the operator can take appropriate action such as calling for a change in mixture or other operating parameters. If quality is good, he simply does nothing. We log the picture taking events in order to track the operator taking pictures on a prescribed frequency. Hidden from the operator, there is a secured maintenance module so the engineer can periodically check the log, add new standards, tune the camera settings, and perform other data management features.

May 2003 - June 2003
Tyco International, Exeter, NH and Portland, Maine (Access 2002)
Access Database Programmer
A local programming house named Compass Systems and Programming created an Employee Performance program in Access that is deployed at 100 worldwide regions. There were two very different versions done in Access, one for upper management and one for everyone else. I merged the two code bodies and reproduced all the pre-existing functionality.

Just for fun, I changed some 'employees names and ids and published a subset of the data to our password protected .NET website in an editable datagrid. I did this to demonstrate our skills with DotNet and to show the value of centralized, up-to-date, and secure data as well as XML and web services. Currently, like so many others, Tyco exchanges data between regions via EMail attachment of Excel spreadsheets.

Feb 2003 - May 2003
BMR Thermal, Hampton, NH and Maine (Access and Excel 2002)
Access Programmer
BMR is a regional sales office for a major West Coast supplier of furnace/boiler equipment. I analyzed the Excel spreadsheet system they had been using to manage the regional sales activities and built a completely new territory and customer management system, including parts inventory and history. I provided easy links from an Access app to Word documents for quotes and order processing under a MailMerge subsystem.

Feb 2003 - June 2003
Big Brothers-Big Sisters, Exeter, NH
Access Database Programmer
This is a highly visible branch of a nonprofit organization that matches and places underprivileged or troubled children with mature and stable adult mentors. The staff needed to migrate their Excel-based data collection into an Access database that would coordinate their activities and take them into the future. I did that plus providing links to the national database which resides on the Web.

Aug 2001 - Oct 2002
UnumProvident Insurance, Portland, Maine
Access Programmer
Created and tested two Websites for HR.  One that allows employees to register questions regarding their benefits and which sends EMail to a UNUM HelpDesk and one that allows employees and retirees to view their pension benefits. Used Visual InterDev, Visual Studio/Visual Basic, and MS Office components, SQL Server7.

Pension Administration.  As part of a large team of pension managers, analysts, and technicians, I managed a transition of a large database involving over 30,000 current employees plus retirees (pension annuitants) from an outside vendor to in-house usage.  Used Microsoft Access, Excel, and Visual Basic.

Jan 2000 - Jul 2001
State of NH, Concord, NH
Access Programmer
Created WIA Tracking and Reporting System (Dept of Labor mandated)
Created Dept of Youth Services Tracking System.

Sep 1999 - Nov 1999
Holyoke Mutual Insurance, Salem, MA
Access Developer in Access 97.  (Contract)
Created complete multiuser system to track all Agents, Staff, Lines of Business, Agent Evaluations, Business Volume, and other entities.

Sep 1998 to Feb 1999
Cabot Corp., Billerica and Boston, MA
Access Programmer plus Crystal Reports
Using a wide variety of modern tools on a Windows NT platform to render enhancements and support to five major areas:
1) The company's WinLIMS application, a globally used lab sample/results/finance tracking system
2) Crystal Reports
3) The Analytical Billing System (ABS) and 24 other lab-oriented Access databases.
4) Y2K compliance studies of all systems
5) Long Term Incentive (LTI) program developed from scratch in Access.

July 1998 - Sep 1998
State of Mass. Dept of Public Health, Boston, MA
Women, Infants, Children program ("WIC")
WIC is a statewide program (140 sites) administered with complex software written in Clipper 5.2. This was primarily a Y2K job which used my Clipper, Access, and VBA skills to thoroughly analyze the system to insure that no little children will starve after 1999.

May 1998 - July 1998
Cambridge Technology Partners, Cambridge, MA
Senior Developer for globally deployed Sigma Sales Software
Visual Basic and Access 97 used to enhance this large Siebel Systems Sales Management system.  Client/Server with Windows NT/Oracle.

Jan 1998 - Dec 1998
Liberty Mutual, Dover, NH
New Life Business System
Full life cycle development of  this complex data mining and reporting system including fully automatic downloads from their mainframe.  Extensive use of SQL and very complex joins of up to 30 tables/ queries and subqueries.  Liberty continues to call me in to add new reports and tweak older ones.

Mar 1996 - Jan 1998
The New England, Boston, MA
Lead Designer/Programmer for Sales Illustration Software
3500 life insurance agents and brokerages around the country depend on this complex multi-product software which was written in Turbo Pascal. Although The New England has a more powerful Windows product, the older (legacy) code must be maintained at least through 1998 since many of their user sites are not Windows capable.

Apr 1994 - Mar 1996
Watson Wyatt Company; Wellesley, MA
Contractor/Programmer in Compensation Analysis and Flexible Benefits
Wyatt's Boston office is responsible for the maintenance of elaborate Human Resources software, called WyComp. There are Clipper and Access versions installed at many worldwide Fortune 500 client firms, hospitals, and universities. While on contract to Wyatt for a year and a half, I made extensive modifications and wrote many new utilities. I was responsible for design, coding, testing, customization, and maintenance updates on complex multiuser software. I served as technical expert on phone support as well as field trips to client sites with the the HR consultants.

Independent Database Programming: