Summary

A senior systems programmer and analyst, with many years of experience in
designing, debugging, implementing and maintaining database systems in various
applications.  Databases are user friendly, robust, easily maintained and
modified.  Strengths include hardware as well as software skills, excellent
written and verbal skills, the ability to handle several different projects
simultaneously, and interface well with clients.  A good team player as well as
manager and teacher, freely sharing skills and information, but also able to work
alone and independently.  I have provided you with some of my success stories;
there are many others.  I have worked with Access since Access 2.0, as well as
VBA, ODBC and SQL Server.  This is the type of work I want to do.  If you give me
a tool, I will use it.  If you give me a problem, I will solve it.  If you give
me a job, I will get it done.  That is who I am.  That is what I do.

Education

Master’s Degree in Computer Science, Fairleigh Dickinson University 
19 graduate credits in Applied Mathematics, Polytechnic Institute of New York 
Bachelor’s Degree in Electrical Engineering, Manhattan College 


Technical Qualifications

MS Access, VBA, SQL Server, Word, Excel, Visual Basic, Rexx, COBOL, PL/1,
Fortran, DB2, VSAM, SQL, ODBC, RAMIS, APL, HTML, Syncsort, EXEC, EXEC 2,
Photoshop, Front Page, DBase

Companies

AT&T				NYC Transit Authority				M&M Mars
Merck				Merrill Lynch					State of New Jersey

Strengths and General Accomplishments

 Create and design complete database systems from scratch, based on user
inputs. 
 Work well with non-technical users, translating their business
requirements into computer solutions. Have received many Letters of Commendation
and Recommendation for my professionalism, the excellence of my work and the
speed with which it was done.
 Have also taken systems which were either not working or not working
well enough and transformed them into showcase systems.  My ability to find and
fix problems, to convert systems, and to improve run times and throughput are
well documented.  
 Create systems that are flexible, robust, easily maintained and easily
and quickly modified, giving clients the ability to respond to business
opportunities, knowing that they will have a database to support them.
 Use extensive error checking and critical path techniques so that the
user cannot enter bad data or cause the system to break.
 Service multiple clients and multiple projects per client
simultaneously.  I have the ability to work under pressure and stress, and with
multiple deadlines.
 Provide users with a User Reporting Facility, which enables them to
write their own reports and user queries.  These facilities have been written in
several different programming languages.
 Believe in good documentation, and include it as part of all my
systems.  My written, verbal, documentation and presentation skills are
excellent.
 Taught programming on both a college and corporate level.  Have also
conducted many informal seminars among peers.  Have prepared and given many
presentations.


 Professional Experience for Ron Weston

Grocery Haulers, Inc. (GHI) – October, 2002 to Present
Major hauler of grocery products to the largest grocery chains in the New York
metropolitan area, as well as the East Coast.  Personnel, trailer and tractor,
vendors, stores, warehouse, trip routing, insurance tracking, accident tracking,
fuel mileage reporting, personal injuries, safety tracking and reporting, driver
incentive programs, etc. My boss and I are the only programmers; we have at least
50 internal clients.  All coding is done in Access VBA and SQL Server.  Within
the past 5 years, have processed over 1300 requests, some for completely new
systems.  Used system that I developed in 1997 to track requests.

State of New Jersey – January, 2001 to February, 2002
Within eight months, wrote at least six new ACCESS 2000 applications, which are
used every day by at least 40 people.  Trained the programming staff in ACCESS
and VBA.  Received at three letters of commendation. 

M&M Mars – October, 2001 to January, 2002
Re-designed a sales reporting and tracking system using Access 97 and EXCEL 97. 
The process received data from the mainframe, entered it into an ACCESS database,
and generated EXCEL spreadsheet reports.  The system also gave the user the
ability to track actual vs. forecast amounts.

Merck – September, 2000 to January, 2001
Re-developed, from scratch, a system to document and perform the calculations
for every aspect of heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) systems. 
Went from EXCEL to ACCESS.  Accomplished this in a period of 3 months; the
development of the predecessor system had gone on for almost 2 years and was no
where near completion.

Honeywell – July, 2000 to January, 2001
A Training Tracker system, from scratch, was developed in MS ACCESS.  This
system not only tracked current items, but also tracked history.  It was able to
tell the client where a person was, and had been, what projects they were working
on and had worked on, what training they have received, were getting and were
scheduled to get.    

NY Transit Authority - Project Tracking - 1999
This database was written by someone else.  It needed to be updated and
republished.  Several reports needed to be changed and the database needed to be
updated from ACCESS 2.0 to ACCESS 97.  The biggest problem was that there was
data at each user site that was not part of the database.  This data had to be
re-processed, exactly once.  I added a mechanism that would be displayed just
once.  After the process was completed, the user would never see it again.  Also,
if the user was a new user, and so responded, they would never see the screen in
the first place.

NY Transit Authority - Document Database - 1999
This database was designed in the process to gathering many pieces of
documentation for many projects, many systems, many reports and many pieces of
code.  Perhaps its most powerful feature was its search facility, where the user
could enter one word - the name of a report, or the name of a person, or a
particular word.  The system interrogated each field in the database, and any
record that contained that word was retrieved.  It was very well received, and
led to the next project, where I was asked to revise an already existing
database.

Merrill Lynch - Problem Tracking and User Requests - 1997   
This database was designed to track user problems and/or requests.  At the time,
I was maintaining a system where I had several people making several requests per
day.  Some of the requests were easy, and some could take a few days to complete.
 I did not want to misplace any of them, and I wanted to be able to document what
I had worked on, for who, and when.  It was also invaluable in responding to
queries such as “Do you remember last year when we did such and such?”  The
database gained such acceptance (it was not my main project) that it was used as
a model for a general problem tracking database. 

AT&T - Testing Database - Cell Phone Sales - 1995
This database was designed to track problem reports, filed in conjunction with
testing that was being done on a new cell phone sales system being designed to
sell AT&T products and service.  The database was still in use when I left, and
was used by all the various organizations that were testing the system.
Some Success Stories for Ron Weston

Multi-Tape Process for VM
MVS systems have always had the ability to create and process multiple tapes; VM
did not.  So I created a process using batch routines (REXX and EXEC2) and PL/1
to process multiple tapes in VM.  I entered the tapes numbers, in order, and
pressed the button.  The process mounted the tapes, processed each tape,
delivered the proper data segment to the proper machine, re-started programs if a
step failed, and produced a summary status report at the end.

RAMIS Formatted Screen Manager (FSM)
FSM was a syntax driven product.  The user provided a definition source file and
RAMIS created the screen.  The only problem was, we had several screens that
needed to be modified, for which we had no source file.  Developed a program to
create a SYNTAX source, based on the final compiled screen.  It was like taking
binary code and creating an assembly language program.

Code Comparison
Was working with several COBOL programs containing thousands of lines of code. 
One listing might be 300 pages or more, and there were hundreds of listings.  The
off the shelf comparison tool was proving useless because it kept telling us that
there were too many differences.  So I wrote my own.  It was used by everyone in
the department, ran very fast, and was very accurate.  At this point, I have
re-written it in five different programming languages (COBOL, PL/1, REXX, EXEC2
and VB)

Three Cents To The Dollar
The group we were working in was scheduled to move into a new directorate, but
the director told us that she wouldn’t take us unless we could prove that we
spent 7 cents (or less) for every dollar that we made.  Using data that I always
keep and maintain, I was not only able to prove it, but I demonstrated within
hours that we actually only spent three cents for every dollar of revenue!

Speeding Up the Process
I was called into a group to help out.  They ran a monthly cycle, and it seemed
that they would just get finished with one month, when it was time to begin the
next month.  And if they ran the same report ten times, they usually got ten
different results.  Within a few months, I had streamlined the system so that
when the data arrived, shortly after midnight, on the first day of the month, a
batch job would kick off, process the data and create all the monthly reports so
that we had them when we came in the next morning.  We now had the entire month
to look at the data, increase sales, go after new business, analyze data, instead
of spending all our time trying to get the reports to run and tie out.  I
essentially took a one-month process and reduced it to 30 minutes.

Heating Ventilation Air Conditioning (HVAC) System
A company’s engineering staff had an old HVAC system using an EXCEL spreadsheet.
 It was a mess, and the consultant who was supposed to convert it to an Access
database had been working on it for three years.  Within three months, I created
a database from scratch, and met every single one of their requirements.

Responding in a Single Day
Received a request from the central office for about ten different statistics. 
The request came in on a Tuesday and they wanted it by Friday (but they already
knew that that was unrealistic).  Because of the data I keep and the way I keep
it (in Access), I gave them what they had asked for by the next morning.  We were
the only office (there were 180 offices) that got them what they wanted by the
deadline, and we were told that our data was perfect --- just what they wanted.

Conclusion
If you give me a tool, I will use it.  If you give me a problem, I will solve
it.  If you give me a job, I will get it done.  That is who I am.  That is what I
do.