Resumé

The early years

I started to play with a computer at the age of 13. I remember that my dad just bought a TRS-80 for his business. My first program was a "guess my number" written in TRS BASIC. Since then, I grew up and attended the IRAM school, now the Haute Ecole Roi Baudoin where I graduated my Bachelor degree in Business informatics in 1994.

My first job

I then joined the company eurologiciel in 1994, where I took part in the development of GICA, an ERPwritten in C and running under IBM AIX. This part learned me to integrate a development team.

Ciments d'Obourg

After that, in 1995, I joined Ciments d'Obourg, who would later be known as Holcim France Bénélux, where I served first assecond line support to help the users with their Excel Macros and ACCESS databases. I also started to develop Lotus Notes applicationsand administrated the company site. I then joinded the financialconsolidation team, where I helped maintain and develop the Excelpackages used by our parent company, at the time Holderbank. I helped in the implementation of the Group consolidation software,who was Hyperion by then. I also set up an Excel based reportingsystem that allowed to create a reporting package per division,region and companies.

Holderbank

In april 1999, satisfied with the work accomplished with theimplementation of Hyperion system, I was asked by Holderbank to join their team in Holderbank, Argovia, Switzerland. I moved tothe small town of Hunzenschwil and created a finance planningapplication, also based on Hyperion. I also created a consolidationinput package in Excel, that were sent to our subsidiariesworldwide, filled and then returned to the corporate headquarters.The content of the packages were exported into a file that was usedto fill the consolidation system.

Clariant

As financial system administrator

I joined Clariant in 2002. My task was then to reimplement the same system that Idevelopped for Holcim. This time, our subsidiaries received an excelpackage, as well as a program written in Visual basic. The programwas doing some validations (i.e. liabilities equals to assets) andsend back the consolidation data. In 2006, we migrated theconsolidation system from SAP ECCS to SAP SEM with BPS used as anentry module. I created some python scripts that allowed to extract,convert and import the data in the new system. I also recreated theExcel forms in SEM BPS web interface with FOX formulas. In 2010, weimplemented the Eureka reporting system, a unified reporting systemfor the entire group. The idea was at the time to create Excel basedreporting packages that will be sent to our customers, i.e. BUcontrollers, regional controlers and local finance managers. Wereused the existing excel reports, mainly created with SAP Bexqueries, to create a automated package that would match theexisiting ones.

As Global Process Expert

In 2015, as we created our first services centers in Poland, a morerobust and user friendly method needed to be developped. I createdROBUR, a C# application that was extracting the data from our SAP BWsystem (still reusing existing BEX queries) into an SQL server. Theapplication was then filling the different excel packages based onglobal/regional/local criteria.

Today

I am working as an independant contractor, and I am writing articles on Excel, Python, Finance or the world in general.