Director of Software Development for RLHC. I manage the design, development, implementation, and testing of software systems used to facilitate business intelligence and e-commerce for Red Lion Hotels, TicketsWest, and Best of Broadway.
July, 2015
Red Lion Hotel Corporation's business intelligence effort was a challenging and complex undertaking. The goal was to consolidate the company's financial and performance data scattered across eight previously unrelated systems into a single enterprise data warehouse, and provide enhanced reporting capabilities. A compressed timeline and the existence of offsite data sources further complicated matters.
Various options were considered, including building the system from the ground up, but we decided on the ProfitSword suite of BI products to jump start the project because it already boasted four of the eight ETL's required. I coordinated the efforts of five different development teams, as well as Red Lion's Revenue Management, FP&A, Accounting, Hospitality Systems, IT, Sales, and Marketing groups to complete the project on time and on budget.
April, 2015
Red Lion needed a "one stop shop" for its franchise owners - an online presence that consolidated messaging, reporting, and access to hospitality applications specific to the person using the application. Several platform options were evaluated but I chose SharePoint Online as the foundation for this app because it allowed the content creators an already familiar interface, had built-in audience targeting, and was reasonably secure. Using CSOM, the portal detects who's logged in and displays general as well as targeted messaging sourced from existing SharePoint lists throughout the site collection. Financial and operational reports specific to the user's location(s) are displayed, as is a dashboard with hospitality apps relevant to the owner's property. Overall this wasn't a huge project, but it was fun to design and solved a key business problem for Red Lion.
June, 2014
This was the latest of many SharePoint migrations I've done, but it was unique in that I moved the company's Intranet presence from an on-premise SharePoint 2007 and 2010 server farm to the more scalable, more functional SharePoint Online (2013) platform inside Office 365. As a result, the company was able to realize all of the benefits that come with Office 365, including OneDrive synchronization of SharePoint document libraries, Yammer social features that foster better workgroup communication on team projects, the Lync messaging platform, tighter integration with the Microsoft Office suite and much more.
To showcase the new features and functionality, I also built an "onboarding" system for the Red Lion's Brand Services group that allowed them to manage a relationship with potential franchise partners, and collaborate with them as that relationship matured until they eventually sign on as a member of the Red Lion chain. As that process progresses, the nature and content of these "onboarding sites" change to highlight features and functionality relevant to that particular place in the project timeline.
The portal was also branded using a 3rd party theme that we then customized slightly, which meant more time could be spent on functional requirements of the project.
September, 2013
I designed and developed an award-winning, enterprise class e-commerce platform including a custom Umbraco-based content management system and the industry's first responsive, shopping cart-based booking engine powering 54 unique web sites. Implementation resulted in an 846% mobile revenue increase, and a 1,731% tablet revenue increase year on year. Desktop conversion rate was doubled. The platform received a Visionary Award from Hospitality Technology Magazine in 2014.
This was a really fun and very rewarding project. It's not often you get to rebuild a system from the ground up and I was called on to rework the data layer, the web services that integrated with the company's central reservation system (Micros' Opera suite), all of the businesss logic, the user interface, and even some of the design work.
March 2013
Another ground-up rewrite of an existing platform. In this case I was responsible for the data layer that pulls artist, event, venue, and promotional content from a remote 3rd party data source and repackages it in a format that can be used by Umbraco CMS. I also had a hand in designing the functional requirements, and some of the UI design work.
December 2012
Red Lion Hotels needed a way to manage a user's identity and the digital assets they are allowed to access. I designed, developed, and deployed an MVC-based web application that simplified the process of requesting and approving accesss to these digital assets. This was an interesting project where, again, I drew upon a number of disciplines to create a data layer (integrated with Active Directory and the company's "Track-It!" helpdesk software), the business logic for the application, and a snappy UI.
"Customer-Facing/In-Room Technology Innovator Award" for groundbreaking rewrite of RedLion.com and 53 individual hotel sites.
2014 SPARK Award recipient in the Electronic & Interactive Communication / Internet Site category for the design and success of the 53 locally inspired individual hotel sites in the Red Lion hotel chain.
Received "Best Husband Ever Award" for 14 consecutive years from the Best Wife Ever.
Director of Software Development for RLHC. I manage the design, development, implementation, and testing of software systems used to facilitate business intelligence and e-commerce for Red Lion Hotels, TicketsWest, and Best of Broadway.
Senior Software Engineer for Red Lion Hotels Corporation. Responsible for design and development of public and private web sites.
Project Manager / Developer for WestCoast Hospitality Corporation. I managed internal project teams and external vendor services required to implement and upgrade internal business systems, and developed .NET applications that integrated with them.
Network Administrator for Cavanaughs Hospitality Corporation. I was responsible for Windows & NetWare installation, administration, security, and backups on a WAN.
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