ERP, CRM & Business Automation

After Intel, my career turned toward business automation — which really meant learning how companies operate, as opposed to how their org chart says they do.

My first project in that direction was a consulting and retail group of around 500 people, where I joined a three-person team charged with replacing the entire system running the company's day-to-day operations: procurement and sales, order management, financial and tax accounting, payroll and HR administration, management accounting, warehouse and inventory, planning, CRM, and document workflow with approvals. We began by interviewing every department to build a complete BPMN map of the company's processes, then took that map back to management to decide what should be optimised or dropped before anything was rebuilt. The hard part was never the code — it was the cutover: moving processes across in stages, keeping data synchronised between the old and new systems while both ran live, and adjusting processes as they migrated. The company finished on the new system, with reworked processes, without ever pausing operations.

Afterwards I built a small team of my own and moved further toward analysis and architecture: client negotiations, mapping existing processes, designing the system architecture, specifying the work, and running delivery. That is how I ended up with an unusually wide sample of business domains — small flower retailers, independent travel agencies, national-scale tour operators, large chains of auto-repair shops. Every one of them had its own idea of what was obvious, and no two matched.