<a href="https://www.post-gazette.com/local/city/2014/07/31/Bayer-pulling-plug-on-sign-atop-Mount-Washington/stories/201407310282" target="_blank">Prominent hilltop sign to say Bayer no more</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;<font color="#6f6f6f">Pittsburgh Post Gazette</font>

Prominent hilltop sign to say Bayer no more - Pittsburgh Post Gazette

Duquesne University

Senior Solutions Consultant at Mirakl

Black Diamond Equipment Rental, LLC

Information Technology

Mirakl

Senior Functional Consultant

•	Offer Product Expertise: Develop and maintain a deep understanding of Mirakl’s Platform, use cases, and services, as well as the best practices and how these provide value to our customers. Utilize this knowledge as a trusted advisor to support and guide our customers in making the right configuration and integration choices.
•	Deliver Value & Satisfaction: Kick-off new engagements by understanding the customer strategy, highlighting challenges and risks, validating project scope, and aligning core Mirakl Marketplace capabilities in order to establish the best strategic solution. Strong focus on balancing time-to-market, quality and priorities to ensure successful deliveries.
•	Collaborate & Deliver Constant Innovation: Work with different internal teams such as Product to provide valuable feedback and bring ideas to constantly evolve our product, the Sales teams to confirm the scope and use cases of the project, as well as Support teams and Account Managers to help transfer knowledge gained during the project phase. Enable and provide guidance to trusted partners and system integrators outside of Mirakl to ensure joint success on shared projects.
•	Have Technical Aptitude: Serve as a Mirakl functional expert able to understand and speak to current web technologies such as RESTful API’s, data-interchange formats, and common solution architectural patterns. Conduct enablement sessions on Mirakl’s products via remote webinars or in-person to ensure adoption across targeted audiences. Develop a deep understanding of each client’s eCommerce ecosystem and provide expertise on how to best integrate with Mirakl.

Senior Solutions Consultant

DICK'S Sporting Goods

Platform Operations Manager

•	Deliver strategic projects and revenue driving products using the appropriate agile/waterfall project management methodology.
•	Utilize Agile methodologies to help team members self-organize and enable their ability to make fast dynamic changes. 
•	Collaborate and share information cross-functionally to improve workflow processes and operational efficiencies.
•	Host Daily scrums and weekly grooming/planning sessions to organize and ensure implementation progress.
•	Lead the collaborative, dynamic planning process – prioritizing the work that needs to be done against the capacity and capability of the team.
•	Work with subject matter experts and business stakeholders to define the roadmap for any given product and translate this into user stories or RFPs.
•	Engage external vendors and internal product stakeholders to move the project forward by managing risk.
•	Coordinate with Enterprise Architects and Directors to ensure that the architectural and operational standards are followed.
•	Escalate and work to resolve issues that serve as roadblocks or place project objectives at risk.
•	Construct End to End documentation for all project plans – Full Life Cycle.
•	Build and Design System flow diagrams for backend systems / solutions.
•	Establish positive working relationships with development team members. 
•	Provide supervision of assigned staff including recommending selections, providing development and training and evaluating performance.
•	Actively participate in the Information Systems Manager community, sharing and re-applying skills and knowledge and bringing in best practice.

Delivery Manager: Customer Loyalty

•	Serve as subject matter expert (SME) and power user for ecommerce tools to run a multi-billion dollar Omni-channel business.
•	Evaluate requests for features and enhancements to ecommerce tools, understanding overall impact to business, by way of platform, people and process.
•	Stay current on DSG and third-party vendor roadmaps and latest technologies to ensure site and products are compliant with upgrade paths and are supported across all storefronts.
•	Provide support, partnership and training to ecommerce business, product management and IT Application Development teams to analyze, investigate and configure ecommerce tools.

Sr. Systems Analyst: eCommerce Tools

•	Implementation of Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) guidelines across all web platforms.
•	Establish full self-taught understanding of WCAG 2.0 compliance strategies.
•	Analysis of IBM Web sphere Commerce platform utilizing third-party tools.
•	Work with third-party vendor to implement and customize third-party examining tool.
•	Create process documentation and step-by-step procedure documents.
•	Partner with cross-functional teams to adhere to and meet WCAG Accessibility, A and AA guidelines.

Lead Systems Analyst: eCommerce ADA

•	Act as Environments Team Manager
•	Oversee WCS Admin team, ecommerce DBA team and assigned consultant resources.
•	Primary responsibility focuses on standing up dickssportinggoods.com on internally hosted ecommerce infrastructure platform.
•	Lead IBM Urban Code Deploy Proof of Concept project.
•	Lead IBM Urban Code Deploy Environment Implementation.
•	Establish and maintain an ideal “Golden Environment” configuration.
•	Provide support, guidance and leadership for all ecommerce environment related issues.
•	Environment setup, configuration and performance tuning.
•	Own all data coming out of and going into the ecommerce organization.

Systems Analyst: eCommerce Environments

•	Primary responsibility focuses on maintaining and enhancing the current e-commerce system environment.
•	Assist in issue resolution, integration testing, defining business and system requirements, and develop functional system specifications.
•	Create cross-functional partnerships with business units and IT partners to close gaps between the solution design and business processes.  
•	Work with IT, Business Sponsor team members, and appropriate third parties to resolve issues, including after-hours incident management and resolution.
•	Support 100+ business users in documenting, prioritizing and facilitating break/fix situations and issue resolution including incidents, errors and problem investigations.
•	Responsible for creation and maintenance of accurate project status information that is communicated to the business sponsor(s) on regular scheduled intervals
•	Planning and execution for Systems training and support as needed. 
•	Manage and develop a systems and integration test strategy that accurately meets business use cases. 
•	Work with business sponsor to determine business requirements for new and enhanced system requests.
•	Identify gaps between solution design and application capabilities, determine alternatives and negotiate solutions. 
•	Create and own functional specifications for new and/or enhanced system development.
•	Hold functional specification review sessions with cross-functional team members (Business sponsors, IT, other Business Analysts, QA engineers, operations, and training group) for review of solution design, functionality and integration.
•	Define and document system flows and data integration flows across multiple applications.
•	Ensure appropriate documentation of project deliverables, system support and ITS processes are distributed to affected parties and maintained as necessary.
•	Identify and recommend opportunities for increased and more efficient use of application solutions to meet business needs more efficiently.

Systems Analyst: eCommerce Production Delivery

Responsible for the overall management of technical implementations for new customers.
Determine technical requirements, scope of project, establish project priorities and monitor overall Implementation life cycle.
Develop and utilize detailed work plans, schedules, resource plans and processes to achieve a successful implementation.
Provide complete, accurate and timely updates to new customers and Millennium Pharmacy Systems cross functional teams.
Ensure the customer’s technical requirements are clearly understood and contracted commitments are delivered at or under budget, on time and with the highest quality and customer satisfaction. 
Manage special projects which involve evaluating new technologies to improve enterprise infrastructure.

Millennium Pharmacy Systems

Implementation Specialist

Project management support for Novell to Active Directory Migration.
Provided extensive analysis of IT infrastructures and developed solutions to improve efficiency.
Introduced and integrated new technologies into the existing data center environment.
Responsible for all aspects of acquiring, installing and administering system hardware and software.
Supported over 200+ servers running a variety of Operating Systems.
Maintained backups utilizing Sync sort software.

SRA Platinum Solutions, SRA International, Inc

Systems Analyst

Troubleshot and resolved issues for over 1,000 concurrent users utilizing Citrix remote computing environments. Included internal and external user base.
Provided project management support for small to medium projects, including project scope development, task and deliverable planning, project plan tracking and updates and project closure.
Built, configured and maintained user accounts, global groups, and GPOs for internal and external client Active Directory objects.
Customized, configured and installed Windows 2000, 2003, 2008 server operating systems based on client requirements.
Provided detailed documentation and inventory sheets for all server builds.
Provided 24x7 support and routine maintenance for Windows servers.
Specialized in Citrix and Microsoft Terminal Server remote computing technologies.
Maintained system backup and restore functions utilizing Backup Exec and Arca Appliances.
Evaluated, tested and deployed new 3rd Party technical solutions.  Made recommendations based on performance and usability.
Mentored and trained all entry-level support staff.

Management Science Associates

Systems Administrator

Provided hardware and software helpdesk support.
Maintained Corporate Web site. 
Installed and diagnosed issues with specialized financial services software.
Provided general system and network administration.

Jim Vlasach