Experience

 

Below is an overview of projects in which I've participated. For each project, I've added a few links which provide more info.

Partena Professional, one of the leading Belgian social secretariats supports businesses by taking care of their payroll management. Partena Professional used a number of custom built mainframe applications to support their buniness processes. However, these applications became insufficient to fulfill all requirements and to be able to compete with competitors.

Hence, Partena Professional launched a program to make the transition from legacy tools to modernized and optimized applications. The program team consists of multiple scrum teams using the SAFe framework. As a member of one of the scrum teams, I pick up both the role as business / functional analyst and the scrum master role. My tasks as a business / functional analyst include the analysis and testing of different integrations and applications:

  • Salesforce integration with legacy: Switch data mastership for employee data to Salesforce and manage the data flows to legacy appliations
  • Bank payments: An application that enables automatic SEPA bank payments for business leaders and payroll employees
  • Affiliation tool: A tool that allows accountants to affiliate new clients to Partena Professional
  • Vouchers: An application that manages the ordering of meal vouchers, eco-vouchers...

Next to this, my tasks as a scrum master are to:

  • Facilitate scrum events
  • Uphold the scrum framework
  • Remove impediments for the scrum team

Partena Professional

The EIT - European Institute of Innovation & Technology - is an independent body of the European Union which brings together leading higher education institutions, research labs and companies to boost innovation and entrepreneurship across Europe. Together with multiple European companies, Colruyt Group participates in one of the innovation projects to stimulate the reduction of the environmental footprint of products.

The goal of this project is to create an online application which supports companies in achieving an environmental foodprint reduction. To do this, the application allows different companies in the product life cyle to add their data and to calculate the environmental footprint of a product as well as to simulate the impact when introducing certain changes in their organization.

Due to the innovative character of this project, the focus is on getting a minimum viable product ready in a short period of time. To achieve this, we use an agile / scrum project approach in which my tasks as a product owner and analyst are to:

  • Manage the product backlog
  • Analyse requirements and create user stories
  • Define the datamodel, user interface, ...
  • Provide demos & training to business
  • Manage user acceptance testing

Colruyt Group EIT

As Colruyt Group, the largest retail group in Belgium, offers hundreds of thousands different products to consumers spread across different store concepts, they want to manage all product master data in an efficient way, especially in a fast changing environment with ever increasing legislation and consumer requirements. Therefore the PIM - Product Information Management - programme was created in order to be able to provide reliable product information to the different business operating units within Colruyt Group.

The programme consists out of the following tracks:

  • Organization & governance: Modifying existing processes within the organisation and setting up a centralized service center for product management
  • Tools: Implementing new applications to obtain product information from suppliers and manage product master data
  • Services: Setting up online and batch application services to provide product information to consumers such as shop floor applications, websites, ...

As a functional analyst within this programme, I mainly participated in the tools and services tracks in which my main tasks were to:

  • Analyse and describe system requirements in deliverables such as context and scope diagrams, use cases, logical data models, state diagrams, user interface designs, non-functional requirements, ...
  • Enable integrations between the new PIM application and legacy systems by creating integration requirements
  • Migrate data from legacy systems to the new PIM application and improve data quality
  • Create online and batch service specifications to be able to offer product information to consumers
  • Support the testing team during system testing, system integration testing, ... and manage user acceptance testing
  • Create training material, provide training and offer support to business

Colruyt Group GS1 GDSN Stibo Step

Fine Food Meat, the largest meat-processing company in Belgium and a member of Colruyt Group, cuts, processes and packages poultry, beef, veal and pork and also takes care of salads and vegetarian products. Previously, Fine Food Meat used a number of custom built applications to support their business needs.

However, as the company has a steady grow, these applications became insufficient to fulfill the requirements in terms of traceability, procurement, warehouse management, costing & invoicing, ... That's why Fine Food Meat decided to make the transition to an industry specific MES - Manufacturing Exection System - for both its existing plant as well as a newly constructed plant. As this application had to be configured from scratch, multiple analysts participated in the implementation project. My focus was on costing, production workflows, master data and business intelligence. This included:

  • Analysing business & system requirements, for example for internal operations and outside services
  • Configuring the MES solution to support business processes and to optimize the usability
  • Defining master data such as bill of materials, cutting plans, cost centers, ... for different processes
  • Setting up a costing system to determine the direct cost of products as well as stock value, sales price, ...
  • Create costing reports such as production efficiency for converging and diverging production
  • Create and execute test cases in HP ALM for system testing, regression testing, ...
  • Increase knowledge of coaches and key users through trainings and provide operational support

Colruyt Group CSB Systems

Before implementing a new software solution, you want to make sure the application is configured or developed as expected. As a functional analyst in various projects and as a member of the Center of Excellence for Testing in Colruyt Group, I participated in structured testing & quality assurance activities in which we followed the V-model as a methodology and used HP ALM as a test management tool. These activities included:

  • Creation of master test plans, system test plans, ... at an early stage in the project
  • Provide training in HP ALM and offer support to test specialists, test leads, ...
  • Creation and execution of test cases during system testing, system integration testing, user acceptance testing, ...
  • Follow up on defects and create testing status reports
  • Optimize the methodology for system and system integration testing, user acceptance testing, ...

HP ALM

Customer Communication & Experiences, the largest communication agency in Belgium and a member of Colruyt Group, relies on its ERP system to support the business processes, for example for the creation of sales orders, procurement of outside services, time registration on the shop floor, invoicing, ... For this company, the management of the application lifecycle was crucial. CCX could rely on me to:

  • Analyse business & system requirements
  • Configure the ERP system to support business processes and optimise the usability
  • Manage application upgrades, create and execute test scenarios to avoid regression
  • Offer 3rd line support to business and creating a support system through helpdesk, key users, ...
  • Create training material and provide training to business

Colruyt Group Cerm

When implementing a new application, most of the time an integration with one or several systems is required. This certainly was the case in most projects in which I've participated in the past. Some examples:

  • Integration between the existing ERP system and Salesforce as a new CRM application
    As Symeta not only offers products & services to business operating units within Colruyt Group but also to customers outside of Colruyt Group, they wanted to improve the CRM to be able to better manage leads, accounts and opportunities. To meet the business requirements, Salesforce was introduced which had to be integrated with the existing ERP system, CERM.
  • Integration between the legacy systems and a new PIM application
    Colruyt Group decided to make the switch from legacy systems to a new PIM application, STEP. However, as the existing mainframe modules could not be decommissioned, an integration was required.
  • Integration between the existing ERP system and a new web-2-print application
    One of Symeta's customers requested a W2P module in which they can create sales orders from a set of predefined products in the catalogue. To enable planning and invoicing of these orders, an integration with the existing ERP system, CERM, was required.
  • Integration between Salesforce a a MDM system and legacy applications
    Within Partena Professional, the decision was made to obtain employer data from an external data supplier and to mange this data within Salesforce / to switch data mastership from legacy to Salesforce. However, as several legacy applications still relied on this data to perform certain processes, an integration was set up between Salesforce as an MDM system and several legacy applications.

Setting up these integrations involved a number of steps such as:

  • Analysing business, system and integration requirements
  • Creating a datamodel for different applications and determining data lineage
  • Creating integration & service specifications including data transformation rules
  • Creating and executing test scenarios and test cases for system integration testing
  • Data selection and migration

Colruyt Group Symeta Cerm Stibo Step

Symeta is a state of the art printing company which specializes in digital and variable data printing as well as mailing. As a member of Colruyt Group, they provide direct mailing solutions for all operating units within this group. When creating direct mailing campaigns on a regular base, Belgian postal service Bpost offers the possibility to reduce costs when complying to their sorting system. By introducing Bpost MailID v2, Symeta was able to adapt to the sorting requirements for direct mailing drops. This comes in two variations:

  • MailID: A way to identify each letter with a unique barcode. The barcode itself holds no routing or sorting information; its only purpose is to identify the mail piece in a unique way.
  • Round & sequence: A way to pre-sort the deposit in a specific order, based on addressee location. A sequence reference is printed on the envelope in addition to the mailID barcode.

As Colruyt Group is sending out tens of millions of letters each year, being able to make use of the cost reduction which Bpost offers meant the ROI of this project was quite huge.

As a functional analyst within this project, my main task was to:

  • Get a better overview of the application landscape by creating context & scope diagrams
  • Determine integration requirements by analysing the request and response specifications
  • Create test scenarios and test cases to verify if the system and non-functional requirements were met

Symeta Bpost mail ID

During several projects in industries such as printing & mailing, design & marketing, application development, meat processing, ... I was occupied with the requirements analysis, design & testing of reporting about indicators for operations, quality management, costing, ... By setting up the necessary reports, the company was able to monitor the performance of the processes. Below are some examples of reports I've created in the past for various industries:

  • Quality management: Scrap ratio, cost of non-quality, customer satisfaction, ...
  • Design & marketing: Estimated cost vs actual cost for each department such as design, copywriting, photo studio, video, web, ...
  • Printing & mailing: Takt time, throughput, overall equipment effectiveness, delivery on time in full, ...
  • Meat processing: Production efficiency for both converging and diverging production processes

The key aspect in generating these reports was determining the indicators which actually mattered and for which data was easily available. Next to that, I also made sure the data was graspable by representing the data in a visual way and comparing it to predefined targets. Finally, these reports offered the possibility to drill down on data so more details could be obtained.

Colruyt Group Symeta

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