JOHN GRASSL

 

120 Water St. Apt. 4006                                                                                                   Phone: (781) 864-7027

North Andover, MA 01845

 

 

SUMMARY

 

I am an experienced Business Analyst whose interests and expertise are centered around the following:

 

• Excel (advanced formulas, pivot tables/charts, dashboards, VBA macros)
• SQL
• Shell scripting
• Data Analysis & Reporting
• ETL/Data Warehousing
• Process Improvement
• Troubleshooting
• Training

 

My mission is to support my teammates & customers and to constantly seek to use my analytical and programming skills to improve otherwise complex, time-consuming processes. I am known for hitting the ground running and learning quickly. I've always been the goto person when it comes to troubleshooting data processing issues.

 

 

PROJECTS & ACCOMPLISHMENTS

 

My day-today work as a Business Analyst usually involved the creation of sales reports/dashboards and product/price lists, all of which had to be customized to the specifications of the internal and external customers. The raw data resided in SAP, but the final reports themselves required extensive reformatting, lookups and other procedures in Excel to make them fully "customer-facing". I was also called upon to resolve pricing and payment disputes, utilizing my in-depth knowledge of the 500+ distinct SAP contracts in effect at any given time.

 

As an Application Engineer I was often in direct communication with customers to gather requirements for the warehousing of their data and to train them on the use of our product. I was also tasked with the creation of scripts to pull index data from the customer reports for online document storage & retrieval (ETL). Finally I used my web development skills (HTML/XML/CSS/JSP) and database skills (Sybase/SQL) to configure both the front and back ends of the online document storage and retrieval system.

 

The following list of projects focuses not on my day-to-day tasks but rather on special "Process Improvement" projects to which I was assigned. The following projects all adhered to Lean and/or Agile methodologies:

 

• Creation of a Microsoft Access "Contract Checklist" user form (via VBA and SQL) to capture as many as 350 distinct data points from the user. Upon completion of the form the data is written to the Access database and a PDF version of the form is generated. Previous to this Access form the user had to fill out a Word version of the form by hand; a tedious, time-consuming process. The Access version saved time and effort and also resulted in greater accuracy and uniformity. The stored form data was then used to create custom Access workload reports, customer reports, etc. This process reduced what had been three hour's manual work into about 30-60 minutes, depending on the scale of the contract in question.
  
  
• Creation  of a "Net Pricing Report" template via Microsoft Excel, utilizing advanced formulas and VBA macros. The challenge in this instance was that the SAP system in question had no fully complete and accurate "Net Pricing Report". The data necessary to create such a report existed (for the most part) in various tables in SAP, but there was no existing report that leveraged this data. This limitation required the Reporting Analysts to manually create product & pricing reports. Gathering the necessary data via the SAP SE16N tables was a little tedious but fairly straightforward. The challenge was in combining that data into one coherent and uniform report; utilizing Excel formulas and macros. This manual process could take upwards of three hours per report, which was simply not an option, given the number of report requests. I came up with an Excel file that takes care of all the formatting/formulas/lookups/etc. automatically, reducing the report creation time from three hours to about 15 minutes.
  
  
• Creation of a workload balance macro and accompanying territory map via Excel. This application aids the user in quickly ascertaining the workload of each of the team members. An Excel macro transforms the raw workload data into an easy to follow pivot table. From there the user reassigns the workload as they see fit by territory/modality. This reassignment is automatically reflected in an interactive color-coded U.S. map, also created in Excel. This innovation reduced what had been half a day's manual work into a largely automated process that can be completed in mere minutes.
  
  
• Creation of a web site "Publish" application (via a KornShell (KSH) script) that automatically uploads updated versions of web documents from the user's desktop to the web server, saving backup copies of the previous versions of the documents, compressing and storing them in a "Backup" directory.
  
  
• Creation of a combination shell script/VBA macro that automates the creation of software release documentation. The shell script queries the relevant Sybase tables, the output being generated as an XML file. The Excel macro then parses the XML file and automatically fills out the multi-page release document. Prior to this innovation the creation of release documentation by the team's Application Engineers was a tedious and time-consuming process that on a major release could take up to a full eight hour day to complete. The automated process reduced that time to literally about a minute, leaving the AE far more time to concentrate on other aspects of the release.