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Paul Tomko's Detailed Work HistoryIn my detailed work history below, I highlight some of the products, tools and software that I have worked with in the past, and point out some of my spectacular achievements at each employer. Waldner and CompanyOak Brook, IllinoisMay 1989 through April 1994 Research Analyst
My first technical position was as a Research Analyst for Waldner and Company, a futures trading company
in Oak Brook, Illinois which has since been acquired. I had just completed my freshman year as an Electrical Engineering and
Computer Engineering student at the University of Oklahoma and interviewed with Waldner and Company for
a summer internship position. Although the president and vice president of the company were very much interested
in me, the person for whom I would directly work was not interested in me at all. He felt I had insufficient experience
and that I would not be able to accomplish anything in a summer internship. Fortunately, he was overruled by the executives,
and in short order, his grudge against me turned into delight, as my performance exceeded all expectations. Tong Yang Futures AmericaChicago, IllinoisApril 1994 through June 1996 Computer Systems Supervisor
The same supervisor who originally had not wanted to hire me at Waldner and Company is the one who offered me the
opportunity to designd and build a new Futures Trading Company for Tong Yong Securities, a division of one of the largest
companies in Korea. Although I had previously only worked as a programmer, I knew I had or could obtain the knowledge and skill
needed to build the system. Sybase Professional ServicesChicago, IllinoisJune 1996 through November 1997 Consultant After training, I spent a month or so in the Chicago office, doing System Administration on their Sun server, installing Sybase and Web-SQL, which was a product which allowed the incorporation of SQL code into Perl scripts to display results of SQL queries on web pages. I also helped out the other Junior Consultants in their Powerbuilder coding assignments. Additionally, I took the first test for Sybase Transact-SQL to become a certified Sybase professional. Tong Yang Futures America kept calling and begging me to come fix their system, which had failed a few weeks after I left. They had not hired a replacement until after I left, so there had been no opportunity for transition. I insisted that they contact my supervisor at Sybase if they wanted me to come fix their problem. Finally, the contract was worked out, and I went back to Tong Yang Futures for what was supposed to be a four hour engagement. Within about 15 minutes, I had fixed their problem, and explained to their new System Administrator how to deal with the problem in the future. My first Sybase related client was with Mosby Coropartion, a publishing company in St. Louis. My job was to write a program in COBOL with embedded SQL to populate a Sybase database from their current IMS system. I had had a small amount of exposure to COBOL in college, but had not used it in the marketplace. Over the weekend, I studied a COBOL book, and by the time I was on site, had learned enough to complete the program and automate the daily transfer within a two week window. My next assignment was with Zurich Insurance company in Schaumburg, Illinois. It seemed clear that they were not sure what they wanted me there for, or for that matter what they wanted the other two Sybase consultants for. Although I was there for probably about a month, the most exciting things I did were to assist in the creation of a Powerpoint presentation on datawarehousing, and to assist a programmer with loading blob data into a Powerbuilder application. My next assignment was with a division of G.E. Capital which was building a commercial real estate web site. I worked with a small team there, using the above mentioned Web-SQL and Perl to retrieve property information from the Sybase database and display it on the web. One of my success stories there was the dynamic building of an RTF file that could be downloaded on the client end which would contain detailed information and high resolution pictures of the property. A consultant from another company that had been brought in to do this work had failed to complete the project after two weeks of effort, but I was able to get it working within a few hours together with the other members of my team. About this time, I was promoted from Junior Consultant to Consultant, and transferred my knowledge on this project to one of my colleagues that had started at the same time as me, but was still a Junior Consultant. I moved on to CNA insurance. At CNA, I was responsible for setting up replication between an OLTP and a Datawarehouse, backing up of servers, and was in charge of interfacing with a Pyramid Technologies Nursing Consulting application which used Sybase as a backend. There were a number of issues between CNA, the application, and Sybase. While I was involved with the project I helped to bring down the number of issues from about 20 to only 3, all of which were issues owned by Pyramid. I was pulled off of this project to work on a high profile project at Anheuser Busch in St. Louis. Anheuser Busch needed an onsite Sybase consultant to act as onsite vendor support for the 7 breweries around the country, comprising over 50 servers, with bi-directional replication. The servers interfaced with Programmable Logic Control devices to track information such as humidity, temperature, pressure, and many other variables. In addition to servers or replication occassionally going down, there were also issues with data not getting from the PLCs to the replicated locations. These turned out to be with the software which was polling the PLCs. One of my successes while at Anheuser Busch was the bringing on of an entirely new brewing line which required the installation of several new Sybase servers, replication servers, and creation of all of the replication definitions and subscriptions. After a few months, I turned over this client to another consultant from the Dallas office, as St. Louis had been moved to their territory. My final client with Sybase was Beloit Corporation, a manufacturer of printing presses and other related products. My project was to design a stored procedure to pull in an information file of current products, compare it to what was currently in the database and bring the database in line with the information file, archiving information about any updates or deletes performed. In addition to this main project, I assisted with database administration tasks, wrote several other stored procedures and triggers, and assisted in development of one of their Powerbuilder programs. About this time I was contacted by Grant Thornton, which wanted me to come and be a consultant for them to work on Sybase products. I was pretty happy with Sybase and indicated that I would not quit to become an employee of another company, but that I would consider a contract position. I had realized that the work I had done for Tong Yang Futures and for Sybase was the same or better work as was done by people making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. They accepted the proposal and I formed a corporation. Tomko Consulting, IncorporatedDel City, OklahomaNovember 1997 to present Founder and Principal Consultant My first contract was with Case Corporation in Racine, Wisconsin, now CNH Global N.V. My interview with the executive management went well, and they were impressed with my past accomplishments, however, the direct supervisor was not impressed with my background as I had not had a great deal of datawarehousing experience, nor had I had a great deal of experience in writing stored procedures. However, after giving me an overview of the system, I immediately picked up on some ways to improve their system. They were loading their datawarehouse nightly from the Geac Smartstream financial application. This load was being done via Sybase's OMNI Server, a product which allows cross server queries, and also via BCP, which is the bulk copying out of data from the OLTP server and truncating and reloading the table on the data warehouse side. The nightly update process which began at 10 P.M. was taking well into the afternoon, such that people in the London and Paris offices could not even run any reports against the datawarehouse here in the United States. I immediately began putting together a plan for using replication server to replace both OMNI Server and the BCP process. Replication would allow the changes on the OLTP side to be moved over on a transactional basis so that only things that changed during the day would come across, instead of whole tables as was currentlty being done. In addition, I made a large number of modifications and additions to the existing stored procedures used to transform the data on the datawarehouse side. By the time all of my changes were in place, the data warehouse elapsed load time was around 3 hours. I worked on several upgrade projects at Case in which they upgraded both the Sybase servers and the Geac Smartstream application, which involved making changes to the datawarehouse for changes in Geac workflow and additional columns. After their Datawarehouse Team Lead left, I acted as the team lead, managing all of the datawarehouse projects and distributing work to the other team members. Another project involved the creation of another Data Warehouse in Australia. Basically, all of the functionality, stored procedures, triggers, and so forth existing in the American and European Datawarehouses had to be recreated, tested and implemented in Australia. There was also the addition of bidirectional replication synchronizing both the OLTP and datawarehouse servers on all three continents. There was also a project to verify thatthe datawarehouse was Y2K compliant. All preliminary testing showed that the datawarehouse was Y2K compliant if it was fed proper data from the OLTP application. As January 1, 2000 came and went, there were no issues in the datawarehouse. Another project was the updating of the datawarehouse for conversion to Euro currency. There were a large number of changes that occurred in Geac for this transition and the transactions had to be updated in the data warehouse as well. For this project, I actually travelled to Paris to supervise the transition on the cutover date and for a week thereafter to check for anomolies. My final project with Case Corporation was the integration of New Holland data into the datawarehouses. As new finance centers were brought onto the Geac Smartstream application, corresponding changes had to be made on the datawarehouse. Also, New Holland reporting requirements necessitated the addition of new tables in the datawarehouse. My next contract was with Transunion credit reporting agency in Chicago, Illinois. The Senior Sybase DBA at Transunion was going on maternity leave and they needed someone to fill in during her absence. While she was out, I took over her duties of monitoring backups, creating new backup jobs and assisting application developers with query construction and problem resolution. Additionally, during this time, the junior DBA and I upgraded to Sybase Adaptive Server 12.5. After September 11, there was not much call for contract work, and I began searching out full time work. I turned control of Tomko Consulting, Incorporated over to my wife, and I now function only as financial officer, occassionally interfacing with our accountant, sending out paychecks, distributing W-2s and so forth. Tomko Consulting Incorporated currently has two full time consultants at Lucent and one part time consultant at Bit 7. Advanced Financial SolutionsOklahoma City, OklahomaJuly 2002 to September 2005 Technical Analyst One of the programmers I had supervised at Tong Yang Futures America worked as a Workflow Developer at Advanced Financial Solutions in Oklahoma City. If not for this contact, it is uncertain how long I might have gone without a job. As I write this, I consider it a travesty not just personally, but from a business point of view, looking back at my accomplishments in the market, to think that a person with my talents would be allowed to go without work for any period of time. But there were a lot of people without work, many of which were more talented than me. Perhaps the greater travesty is that there were people less talented than me that still did have well paying jobs. I did not re-enter the marketplace at the bottom of the ladder, but I was only about one step up. The entry position at Advanced Financial Solutions was as an installer. I entered as a Workflow Developer, who is responsible for configuring the companies software to the specifications of customers and handing over the results to the installer. The title of this position later changed to Technical Analyst, absorbing another position, formerly known as Solutions Architect, which was repsonsible for collecting information about the clients and determining the best configurations of software and hardware to suit the customer's needs. The Technical Analyst was now responsible for both this and the Workflow Developer roles. I was recognized for having superior technical skills, and was put into special projects. One such project involved working with a brand new custom statement printing program which was not yet even out of engineering. I was the first person not in the engineering organization to install this program. In fact, I was more efficient at installation than engineering, as I at one point had approximately 20 different banks on my plate for installation of this product, and I was asked by engineering to come and assist them with some installations. I agreed to help them, but once on site, I found out that there were four engineers there working on only about 10 banks. Still, I assisted them with their installations while still managing to keep ahead of schedule on my 20 banks. After this tremendous success, I was given the opportunity participate in a challenging and potientially high profile project in medical banking. The project would be an internet accessed ASP which would take claim information from healthcare providers, payment information from insurance companies, and payments from banks and do a three way reconciliation, uploading the results into the healthcare providers patient information system. Complicating this was the fact that most insurance companies pay via paper, and every insurance company had their own format, and sometims had multiple formats depending on where the claim was processed. This required the use of OCR to read the data, understand it's meaning and translate the results into ANSI x.12 standard Electronic Data Interchange files. My role in this was initially to be operations manager for the system, and as such I wrote all of the operations manuals, policies and procedures to conform with HIPAA and EHNAC (Electronic Healthcare Network Accreditation Committee) requirements. I also made recommendations on hardware, including a disaster recovery site. I became the owner of the OCR system and attended classes to learn how to create the forms and applications used by Anydoc software to pull data off of the Explanations of Benefits forms. As usual, I was a star pupil in the classes, and was the first one done with the exams, even finishing before the Professional Services employees from Anydoc who were auditing the class. I even finished an extra credit exam which the teacher had said that anyone who figured out how to do it would automatically pass. I have now been accredited in OCR for Anydoc forms and their AnyApp EOB product. I have also been involved with another Advanced Financial Solutions product called e-Stor. This is an ASP which allows banks to send us their check images, and we maintaint the archive, backups, disaster recovery sites and take care of all maintenance. The banks can do research over the internet on the images in the archive, and their internet banking customers can view the images and online statements for their accounts. A host of other services are also available connected to this product. I was brought in to assist with hardware selection, analyzing security risks, network needs, readiness of products to be used in an internet environment, writing conversion programs, and setting up and supporting banks on the service. I wrote documentation for backup and recovery and growth plans encompassing hardware, software, network bandwidth and personel. Recently I was assigned the task of completing the Statement of Work for a high profile client. Advanced Financial Solutions was purchased by Metavante in June of 2004, and this account is the first reference customer from Metavante. I was selected to determine the requirements and specific needs of the client, and will be responsible for putting together the proper peices of hardware and software for their environment, as well as interfacing with engineering for any custom requirements they may have. Oklahoma Property NetworkDel City, OklahomaJune 2004 to present Partner In 2004, I teamed up with a long-time friend and coworker to form a real estate investment and property management company called Oklahoma Property Network. Our vision for the company is to provide reasonably priced quality housing. Our occupancy rate rate has been very high, and our cash flow has been positive. We have 8 units currently and are anxious to purchase more. We are also seeking investors to help us grow our business in the area of multifamily housing. Critical TechnologiesEdmond, OklahomaSeptember 2005 to present Product Manager During my last few months at Advanced Financial Solutions, I was in negotiationsfor employment at Critical Technologies. Several of the people I had worked with at Advanced Financial Solutions were redeveloping the technology for automating healthcare payment processing which AFS had given up on. I was the only person in Oklahoma and only one of 20 or so people in the world with the knowledged to develop the templates to OCR information off of Explanation of Benefits forms. I took a position as a Product Manager for the OCR Technologies. I worked with Critical Technologies largest client, and was given responsibility for firstline support for the client. I also developed OCR templates and directed the efforts of another individual whom we had trained in the OCR technology.
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