First Telecom, Exchange Tower, One Harbour Exchange, LONDON. E14 9GB

Job Title : Billing Manager

Starting as a contractor and later taken on as a full time employee I was responsible for all development and operational issues of the billing function within First Telecom. Heading a department of 4 developers and 2 UK operational staff, I was also responsible for the development of the systems for the offices in Frankfurt and Paris. First Telecom billed 5000 corporate and 190,000 residential customers using software developed in house, we also did 3rd party billing.The system was developed to take in Call Detail Record feeds from any source ,including Wordcom (Arbor TIMS and CSB), Sprint, Telstra, Global one as well as direct feeds from the mediation devices from Erikson-AXE NT-DMS and Pacific Gateway Exchange switches. These feeds were rated to verify carriers invoices and to produce the costs for the customers the bills were produced in house and posted to the accounts package. The UK office used Pegasus Accounts and low level file access and ODBC drivers were developed to update other account systems in Frankfurt and Paris. First Telecom initially was a “switchless reseller” and implemented an Erikson AXE switch. This involved several issues from the billing department including the migration of the system to use Microsoft SQL server as the amount of traffic grew. The Billing platform handled up to 17 million records in any one billing period.

A Director of the UK Fox User Group I also presented seminars and produced articles for the Fox User Group magazine.
Personally a registered beta test site for Visual Foxpro / FoxPro and a registered developer. ( Beta tested FoxPro 1.0, 2.0 and 2.5 for DOS/Windows and Visual Foxpro)

Southams, Market Place Oundle, Peterborough.

Designed / wrote and implemented an Auction Management system written in VISUAL FOXPRO. This system was written entirely from scratch and involved designing and implementing class libraries to manipulate toolbar/forms and multiple instance of forms. Still being improved and used today 20 years later!

Conversion of system written in Foxpro DOS to run under windows.

All written in Foxpro 2.6 and Networked.

• Commission Tracking (ICE, Payments & Clawbacks) Involves importing from mainframe files and other PC based systems the information required to calculate commission to be paid to dealers and also manages clawback when contracts fail.
  Cash Entry Front-end The mainframe system could not handle the number of cheque entries required to be entered by the company, this resulted in a system being developed to allow the entry of these transactions on a Networked PC system with a daily batch file being produced for updating the mainframe. This system was already written when I joined the company but was unmaintainable due to the loss of source code and also required extensive modifications.
• Fraud Write-offs The company had a serious fraud problem and this created over 16000 transactions totalling more than £10.5 million. Feeds were taken from the ICL mainframes, manipulated to reverse the fraudulent transactions and then posted back to the mainframes. This saved the company the entry of the 16000 transactions (about 40 weeks work).
• Claims Paid Used to find cash payments made by amount/ customer name/ date/ invoice number/ batch id or voucher number. Contains 750,000 records and locates required data within 0.27 second over the network. Previously each enquiry would take a minimum of 30 minutes to locate, some transaction never being recovered.
• Direct Debit Mandate Changes Vodac recently split into two companies which involved the changing of 170,000 direct debit mandates. This involved manipulating feeds from mainframe files and using foxpro to produce the information for 15000 banks and building societies informing them of the required alterations. A failure rate of 15-20% was expected on these changes but 3.73% was actually achieved this compared a “normal” monthly failure rate of between 3.5-4%. The alternative would have been to issue all customers with a new Vodacall mandate to fill in and return, process the returned mandate and then inform the customers bank/building society. This could not have been performed within the required time scales and would have resulted in complete failure of payments for at least one month.
• PIN There is a future requirement within the company to eliminate possible fraud by issuing new customers with a PIN number and requesting them to call into an automatic system and register their mobile telephone. This involved : The issuing of PIN numbers and passing these numbers onto microgen for subsequent printing with new contracts. Passing these Pin Numbers to a system written in the Managed Service Fleximgr programming environment (VODATA) which also controls the customers calling in and registering their mobile telephones. The processing of the status of contracts to indicate whether they have been registered within a pre determined time scale to allow chase letters or eventual barring.
• Systems written to manage Sony and Familyfone Promotions.

National Wedding Photographic Services, High Street, Epping.

Representative Appointment Scheduling System A system was developed to allow appointments to be made for representatives by operators making calls to perspective clients. The system took into consideration the starting location of the rep and any previous appointments that had been arranged. This was an unusual system and was written by carefully planning each route using the postcode system. Written in Foxpro 2.6 Networked for windows.

Developed Training Plan System to run under FoxPro 2.6 for windows Involves the maintenance of 15 databases which are subsequently used to produce reports to show costs, loss of potential business and lost man days due to staff attending training courses.
Major Enhancements & New Reports To Complaints Management System
While at Pearl I was also used for FoxPro technical advice as the product was new to many people.

Service Partners Limited, 44 West Street, Oundle, Peterborough

Extensive modifications to a service call management system including changes to allow multi-user operation.

National Rivers Authority , Kingfisher House, Orton Goldhay, Peterborough

Designed /developed a Job Costing System to run under FoxPro 2.5 The system was designed to conform to new government regulations, and installed in all of the regional offices. Also involved the processing of a mainframe download file and passing this, via foxpro, to a 3rd party General Ledger

Lehman Brothers International, 1 Broadgate, London. EC2A Designed /developed the following in FoxPro2 running on a 1200 workstation network with 75 servers running Novell

A system to reduce the number of downloads from BLEND, a REUTERS mainframe trading system, halving the costs and saving the company £360,000 per annum.
An equities trading floor portfolio management system
A Euroclear Cashbook system.
A system to manage budgets, courses and personnel information for both internal and external training courses within the company
Major modifications to Dividend Claims & Corporate Action Systems to implement mainframe feeds & report faxing.
Major enhancements to increase ‘speed, functionality and modifications to correctly  implement network techniques for Cost of Carry, Profit and loss and Cashbook systems.

Sequel Systems Ltd. Burton Road, Finedon, Northants

Designed and Developed a PC based Accounting package aimed at the middle sized businesses, and to compete with other packages such as PEGASUS. The product was written in FOXPRO2 and will run stand alone or on any NETBIOS compatible network.
Sequel has now been bought by Pegasus Software and has been launched as their leading accounting package (known as Opera).
Modules Designed and Developed : Sales Ledger, Purchase Ledger, Nominal Ledger, Invoicing & Stock Control
Established SEQUEL to be recognised by Fox Software as One of their leading development sites in the U.K.
Established SEQUEL as one of the very few initial beta test sites for any new products released by Fox Software.
SEQUEL has been installed in over 25000 sites world-wide.
Developed a General Ledger for Zenith Data Systems

Pegasus Software Ltd., Montagu Street, Kettering.

Position :Team Leader

When I joined Pegasus in 1985, they already had on the market a stand alone accounting package and the initial 5 modules of the network package. I was initially involved in writing their network version of the Payroll module. While at Pegasus, I also did extensive modifications on all of their other modules. Other projects I was involved with at Pegasus included: System Builder. An application generator with specific links into all of the Pegasus modules. System builder itself was written by System C in Maidstone and is now sold as SYCERO. I personally wrote all of the links into Pegasus. OAP. The new accounting package which was being written at Pegasus used a 4GL called Intuitive Solutions and involved the writing of special accounting tools written in C++. I was the Team Leader for this project.

Thomas Cook, Thorpe Wood, Peterborough

Position : Analyst Programmer.

The team I worked with at Thomas Cook were responsible for writing a Foreign Money Banking System on DEC PDP11’s using BASIC+. The product was bilingual and was successfully installed in the FM dealing room at Berkeley Street, London as well as sites in Paris, Nice and Marseilles.