My career began in 1981, in the grocery industry. Working part-time in the family grocery business, I performed various customer service roles & in 1986 I was promoted to Office Manager. It is during this period that my nascent IT interests & my inherent leadership skills coalesced for the first time. Having recently taught myself the BASIC computer programming language on my Commodore 64 & learnt to use the Apple IIe office computer, my next initiative was to replace the manual bookkeeping system with a more efficient computerized ACCPAC accounting system. I subsequently trained & supervised 4 new bookkeepers on the use of this software.

From 1988 to 1993, while studying for my B.Com. & MBA, I worked part-time throughout the school year & full-time during the summer at jobs that enabled me to practice the business skills I was learning. In the spring of 1990, as an Entrepreneur, I launched a business partnership to sell & distribute personal water filtration systems. Concurrently, in January of 1991, I became a Business Consultant for the SBCS & I was subsequently promoted to Manager in September of 1991. Finally, in May of 1993, what was to be a three-month international work internship in Sweden, as an Export Consultant, turned into a full year at the request of the Swedish firm's president.

In 1994 I began my IT career by managing the operations at MCS, a computer systems reseller. Slated as a temporary assignment, my term was extended after I provided management with a business consulting report in the fall of that year. Driven by my passion for IT & the challenges of managing a sales team while growing a business, I forged a customer-focused culture that garnered higher customer satisfaction & grew yearly sales from $5.5M to $8.5M within 2 years. In 1998 I provided another consulting report that outlined industry trends & current organizational inefficiencies to justify the proposed value added services & a new organizational structure to the director.

Simultaneously, in 1998, I submitted a business consulting report to Merisel, a Fortune 500 computer products distributor, that outlined IT industry threats & a 4-pronged services program that Merisel could implement to help its resellers mitigate these threats while simultaneously helping them secure their reseller market share. Ironically, my inspiration for this IT industry proposal stemmed from my grocery industry experiences more than 10 years earlier. Specifically, I had witnessed first-hand how this sector's automation (i.e. Telxon bar code scanners) & vertical integration (i.e. National Grocers & the Valu-Mart program) initiatives had greatly improved ordering, shipping & invoicing efficiencies while helping independent grocers compete against supermarkets. I felt that computer resellers were now facing similar circumstances & likewise would embrace such services. Seizing on the E-Commerce component of this proposed program, Merisel created the E-Commerce Manager position & I then successfully competed for this posting. Subsequently, I led the design, development & implementation of this successful B2B2C E-Commerce solution.

In July of 2001 I completed the Ryerson University Advanced Training Designation in E-Commerce. The in-depth technical understanding I developed in this program was highly complementary to my previous E-Commerce strategy & project management experience. Furthermore, I have also recently studied the PMI's PMBOK (i.e. tools & methodologies) in anticipation of becoming PMP accredited. These new skills & knowledge have added to my credibility & versatility in my current role as an eBusiness Consultant / Project Manager / Web Developer. I am currently a Project Manager at the Electronic Commerce Council of Canada, ECCnet.

In August of 2004 I moved to Melbourne Australia to work as Senior Advisor - Professional Services at GS1 Australia (formerly EAN Australia). In that capacity I managed the implementation of EANnet consulting projects. I also developed & delivered EANnet training courses to Australian suppliers. Since May 2005 I have been GS1 Australia's Manager of Data Pool Systems, where I led a team that specified system requirements, outsourced the development, tested & supported all information systems relating to the operation of EANnet & GS1net. I also submitted GSMP change requests & participated in GDSN Work Groups.

background | résumé | projects | references | contact