Summary

• 9 years of experience in Software Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation, Support & Administration, Business Analysis for Business applications for Manufacturing, Financial and Insurance verticals.
• 4 years of strong experience in Cognos series 7 (Access Manager, Impromptu, PowerPlay client, PowerPlay Transformer, Upfront), designing and building Transformer models, PowerPlay Cubes, developing Impromptu catalogs and reports and implementing security.
• 4 years of strong experience in Cognos ReportNet (Query Studio, Report Studio & Framework Manager), designing and building metadata models, developing ad hoc queries and advance reports using Query Studio and Report Studio.
• 3 years of rich experience in Cognos 8.2/8.3/8.4 (Query Studio, Report Studio, Framework Manager, PowerPlay Transformer, PowerPlay & Analysis Studio), designing models, creating dashboard reports and Analysis Studio reports.
• 4 years of strong experience in Cognos Support and Administration, performing RCA for Cognos issues, administering the Cognos servers, monitoring and tuning the performance, installing the software patches.
• 7 years of experience using Oracle 11.5g/10g/9i/8x/7x, MS SQL Server 2008/2005, MS Access 2000, SQL PLSQL
• About 4 years of team lead experience including onsite-offshore model. An energetic, self-motivated team leader with hands on experience in process design & development skills.

Skill Set

BI Tools Access Manager, Impromptu, IWR, Power Play Enterprise Server, Upfront, Cognos Macro. Cognos Report Net 1.1(Framework Manager, Report Studio, Query Studio), Cognos 8.3/8.4 (Framework Manager, Report Studio, Query Studio, Analysis Studio)
Analytical Tools Cognos Series 7 (PowerPlay Transformer & PowerPlay Client); Cognos 8.2/8.3/8.4 (Transformer, Analysis Studio, PowerPlay), Microsoft SSAS
ETL Tools DataStage 7x, Informatica 8.6, 7.x, SAS, SSISData Modeling Tools ERWin, Power Designer, MS Visio Star-Schema Modelling, Snowflakes , OLTP Modeling, Fact & Dimension tablesDatabases Oracle 11.5g, 10g, 9i, 8x, 7x, MS SQL Server 2008 & 2005, MS Access 7.0/2.0, IBM DB2/AS400, DB2/ Unix, My SQL, Informix
Programming Languages PLSQL/SQL, TSQL, ASP, VBScript, JavaScript, XML / DHTML / HTML

Employment Details

Confidential, Minneapolis, MN July 09 – Till Date
Role: Senior Cognos Consultant
Scope: Confidential is an international, high-performance company, making it affordable, reliable and convenient to send and receive money or make payments. This project is an answer to the new European Union (EU) set of laws whose purpose was to have a modern and fully synchronized framework for an efficient payment process throughout the EU. Banks and money transfer companies like Confidential had until November 2009 to comply with new requirements under the EU’s Payment Services Directive (PSD), which establishes a comprehensive regulatory system for the payments industry in Europe. The PSD was not a business as usual matter. It represented a "sea change" in the way Money Gram will do business and be regulated in Europe.

Responsibilities

• Designed the BI solution for the European unit of Money Gram and provide complete design of the solution (data and reporting) that satisfies reporting needs across all three clusters(Finance, Compliance and Customers) that best balances SLAs, data availability, future state of the data warehouse and reusability.
• Designed and built the Framework Manager Models and Cognos 8.2 Ad Hoc & Report Studio reports.
• Manage projects and packages within Framework manager and apply advance modeling techniques like resolving recursive relationships, creating star schemas groupings and resolving dimensional level ambiguity.
• Created simple (List, Group, repeated and cross tab) reports to complex reports including conditional formatting, drill through reports (Cascading to third granular level), bursting.
• Lead acceptance testing of system development or process improvements to ensure implementation meets with documented specifications.
• Provide directives for the performance tuning for slow running, calculation intensive complex reports.
• Provide technical oversight and subject matter expertise (SME) to developers and database administrators in support of the construction of Facts, Dimension and confidence in data, and other user facing business intelligence applications.
• Provide Suggestions and directions to ETL team for data streaming, data quality issues, ETL scripts and Event trigger for Cognos schedules reports.
• Documented Cognos test plans, test cases, test scripts, test procedures, assumptions and validations, expected results, installation and troubleshooting process in production.

Environment: Cognos 8.2, Informatica Power Centre 8.6, Oracle 10g/9i, PLSQL developer, MS SQL Server 2008/2005, MS Access 2000, ERWin, Toad, MS Visio.

Confidential., Dec’05 – June 09
Roles: Senior Cognos Developer, Support & Administrator, Business Analyst, Team Lead.
Confidential is the worlds leading manufacturer of construction and mining equipments, diesel and natural gas engines, natural gas turbines and various other earth moving equipments. Confidential delivers products, services and technologies in three principal lines of business: Machinery, Engines and Financial Products

Confidential Nov’08 – April 09
Role: Senior Cognos Developer
Scope: Confidential has reported a significant SOX deficiency in system access. System access controls need to be improved, including: Automated notification when an employee leaves the company, automated check for users with incompatible access according to the segregation of duties. Notification for Access Removal System (NARS) is developed to support SOX compliance. NARS processes notifications and creates work orders for – Terminations & Segregation of duties conflict(s)

Responsibilities

• Design the start schema compliant metadata model using Framework Manager and resolving various relationship traps.
• Customize the Cognos toolbox for CRN and Cognos 8.2/8.3/8.4 and launched the Confidential Logo, facilitating the report authors to use it with every other report.
• Customize and create a new report template for Confidential within CRN and Cognos 8.2/8.3/8.4, thus enhancing the presentation of executive reports.
• Design and build Drill through Reports, Master Detail Reports and Burst Reports and applied techniques such as conditional formatting and report layout enhancement.
• Guide and help business users in implementing the ad hoc queries using the Query Studio.
• Analyze the existing legacy paper based operations, met with the end users and business users in order to define the requirements and specifications.
• Document and transition all Reporting, Scorecard and Dashboard requirements from the end users.
• Create business intelligence development standards and processes.
• Applied Model Query Subject methodology and designed ergonomically 13 different query subjects for 13 different complex reports.
• Migrated all of the CRN reports to the Cognos 8.3 environment.
• Worked on designing and developing normalized OLTP database with referential integrity and constraints. Extensively involved in designed and developed ETL Scripts for Migrating data from Legacy System to SQL Server.
• Worked with ETL team and formulated T-SQL scripts, stored procedures for transfer of data from Informix to SQL Server, defined loading strategies
• Involved with the ETL team in cleansing and uploading the data in presentation module.
• Tested and deployed all deliverables successfully in production. Project deliverables were completed within the time scope and according to the phases in the project plan.

Environment: Cognos ReportNet 1.1, Cognos 8.3, Informix, Data Stage Ascential, MS SQL Server 2005, Oracle 9i, IBM DB2, Windows XP

Confidential Oct’08 – Jan’09
Role: Senior Cognos Developer
Scope: This project was generation 1 of multi generation project plan (MGPP) that focuses on cat insurance’s Executive Team, Accounting Department, Program Managers and Auditor’s post-closing financial data and reporting analytics. The project utilized JD Edwards’s post-closing financial data as the major data source supplemented with other supporting data sources. The aim was to improve the quality and availability of reporting data for business users while driving cultural change to improve operational efficiency and decision-making. By achieving these goals allowed Confidential Insurance to promote profitable growth more effectively while reducing risk exposure and improving employee satisfaction.

Responsibilities

• Responsible for designing and building transformer model and creating a financial data cube to allow for ad-hoc report creation and analysis on forecasting, budgeting, and actual financial data.
• Created reports and dashboards that replaced Confidential Insurance’s management profitability report and Hot-sheets.
• Layout the structures of the reports which includes consolidated high level summary reports to the detailed report. Implemented complex types of prompts and conditional formatting.
• Migrated all of the existing CRN packages and reports to Cognos 8.3.
• Involved in the design phase of logical and physical data model using ERWin.
• Extensively involved with ETL team in Recovery process for capturing the incremental changes in the source systems for updating in the staging area and data warehouse respectively.
• Performed the unit testing to the workflows, worklets, and mappings individually and collectively in order to determine the accuracy of the data to the minutest detail.
• Involved in user acceptance testing helping out business users to perform exhaustive testing and also assisting business users in creating the business cube views to analyze financial data.
• Designed and documented all of the support processes before handing out to the support team. Used AQA methodology in transitioning the project to the support team.

Environment: Cognos ReportNet 1.1, Cognos 8.3, Data Stage Ascential, SQL Server 2005, MS Access 2000, IBM DB2, Java script, Windows XP

Confidential Jul’08 – Nov’08
Role: Senior Cognos Designer / Team Lead 
Scope: The Confidential process is initiated when a NPI (New Product Introduction) or non-NPI idea is captured. Confidential expressed the necessity of analysis of data involved in Confidential process. And so did the Confidential application came into existence leveraging Cognos capabilities.

Responsibilities

• Worked as a metadata modeller and developed Framework Manager Model. Adhered to the Cognos best practices and developed the model into three layers (Metadata, Business and Presentation Layer).
• Exploit in-depth knowledge of corporate data structures and reporting environments to construct reports for day-to-day operational requirements.
• Created SAS datasets using PC-SAS 9.1. Used Proc Compare to identify changes in SAS datasets.
• Provided support and helped business user community in understanding the Cognos reports and the workflow.
• Ensured that all documentation and Process compliance initiatives are executed and completed within the project timeline.
• Worked as a Cognos technical lead while supervising other Cognos developers with their deliverables throughout the lifecycle of the project. Conducted gap analysis and impact assessments for system migration based project.
• Involved in planning and estimating magnitude of enhancement within various phases of CPPD reporting.
• Defined, designed and implemented new reporting solutions for complex Enterprise requirements. Created documents (Functional / Technical Specifications) required for the Reports.

Environment: Cognos ReportNet 1.1, Cognos 8.3, SAS 9.1, Data Stage Ascential, Oracle 10G, Windows XP

Confidential Oct’07 – Jun’08
Role: Senior Cognos Developer / Team Lead
Scope: Confidential North American Dealers were experiencing problems with the current implementation in regards to performance and accuracy of the data reflected in Cognos Reports and Cube due to hierarchy issues. The cube and reports already existed on Cognos 7 environment but low performance and a weak architect. The main objective of this project is to provide Dealers significantly improved Cognos Reports and Cube with regards to Performance, Security and hierarchy.

Responsibilities

• Created complex report studio reports to account the dealer’s re-distribution data (Implemented prompts and java script).
• Involved extensively with the technical product development team to understand business needs and objectives and to effectively plan solution and development activities.
• Worked with customer and business analyst to define reporting requirements, transformed them into functional specifications & gauged them against standard business content & determined the required BI front end design.
• Involved in analyzing sales data and interfacing SAS with MS Office applications such as Access/Excel.
• Managed ongoing changes to SAS Programs based on user requirement changes.
• Developed SAS program to extract data from various sources such as DB2, Oracle, SQL Server & Flat files
• Modelled, built and published the cube in Cognos 8.3/8.4 environment with the drill through capability to a report studio report.
• Worked closely with Cognos SDK team and provided significant help in various areas in order to reach a solution on time.
• Worked closely with the ETL team and helped in structuring the presentation area from where the Cognos would draw the data.
• Involved in Project Management Office to provide detail input on development project plan and to facilitate for project execution.
• Produced functional/technical specification for Cat dealer Cube and other business processes.
• Self-trained and provided extended support on Cognos SDK along with the cube, Report Studio and ad hoc query reports.

Environment: Cognos ReportNet 1.1, Cognos 8.3, Cognos 8.3 SDK, SAS 9.1, Data Stage Ascential, Oracle 10g, Windows XP

Confidential July’07 – Jan ’08
Role: Senior BI Developer / Team Lead
Scope: Confidential’s Cost tracking was mainly divided into annual ongoing and (OTO) One time only projects. Design the complex reports to track Confidential’s material costs (DMCR) globally and analyze the purchase orders. The primary purpose of this project was to leverage Cognos functionalities and calibre and provide reports which can forecast for direct material costs and global material costs tracking.

Responsibilities

• Assess the current reports and model of cost tracking and liaised with the business users to determine the future architecture and reporting needs.
• Responsible migrating for the reports from Cognos 7.4 to Cognos 8.3 and also design and build the new reports meeting business necessity.
• Designed report studio reports that can account on cost change impact by product group and provide data for maintenance of GMCT project.
• Cost change summary reports included both buyer’s and supplier’s data. Involved in assisting business users in analyzing and matching in millions to DMCR and also business units.
• Integrating different relational databases for Business analysis. Developed ETL architecture, logical flows and implantation plans.
• Provided better information on early product forecasts then work closely with site facilities.
• Helped DBA and ETL teams to distinguish the need to create look-up tables in order to identify product codes from other alpha/numeric strings.
• Lead an offshore teams, development and support. Bridged the gap between the support and development team and ensured the proper methodology and strategies for transitioning throughout the project.
• Liaising with business users to understand the business formulae and implement them in Cognos using filters and prompts.

Environment: Cognos 7.4 (Access Manager, PowerPlay Transformer, PowerPlay Client, Upfront, Impromptu, PPES, Report Administrator), Cognos 8.4, Data Stage Ascential, IBM DB2, Windows XP

Confidential Jan’07 – Sep’07
Role: Cognos Lead / Team Lead
Scope: This project was to facilitate both; Confidential employers and external dealers where they can get to the shopping cart report and the daily reports to get the updated information. Dealers were supposed to have the ability to view shopping carts that have been ordered, emailed, emptied and expired. The cube was also built for the sake of analysis of ordered parts data. The data involved all parts of world – APD, EAME, LACD and NACD.

Responsibilities

• Designed and developed models by mapping business need using PowerPlay Transformer and created multi-dimensional OLAP cubes to analyze the inventory and part’s orders.
• Created complex drill through reports (Cascading to third granular level) to draw the data for shopping carts that have ordered/emailed/expired.
• Provided strategic solutions for the dealers and facilitated to view the reports in all possible easy modes, helping to concentrate on analyzing, Slicing and dicing the data.
• Designed disaster recovery strategy and setup new European server in Geneva ensuring the data consistency throughout the world.
• Applied data level security within the cube. As well controlled the user level security from Access Manager.
• As this application was deploying another application’s security (DPORS), it has to have the folder level security which was controlled from the upfront.
• Worked closely with ETL team ensuring the business process runs smoothly every start of the month.
• Provided extended support and helped customers in analysis of data. Helped customers in creating business cube views to meet their daily repetitive business requirements.
• Writing Scripts using SAS to generate Global datasets from Local datasets.
• Merged and concatenated SAS datasets in order to unite various data sets at the enterprise level.
• Provided low budgeted and optimal solution for the existing infrastructure.

Environment: Cognos 7.4 (Access Manager, PowerPlay Transformer, PowerPlay Client, Upfront, Impromptu, PPES, Report Administrator), SAS 9.1, Data Stage Ascential, IBM DB2, Windows XP

Confidential Oct’06 – Dec’06
Role: Solution Architect / Team Lead
Scope: Confidential customers required auditing for series 7 for 40 different applications. The necessity and demand to know the usage of the cubes and reports over the upfront gave birth to the Usage reporting cubes solution. This cube would provide the extensive analysis as of who accessed what cube or report on what time. Confidential customers would make use of this data in various ways and sometimes come back with a clean house request.

Responsibilities

• Design the solution architect to assess the current state architecture and understand the required architecture changes and develop a recommended solution that best manages the impact to the multiple information systems and technology platforms
• Provided a strategic solution drawing the data from the Cognos Web logs over the server to the web based cube with an intermediate Visual Basic processing.
• Created Usage Reporting with SAS output to Excel for Management
• Creating SAS dataset from tables in Database using SAS/Access. Retrieved the Sales data from flat files, oracle database and converted to SAS data sets for Analysis using SAS/STAT procedures.
• Extensively involved with the competency team of VB and coded the program that would processes and merge all of the logs to the MS Access database.
• Using the Access database as the data sources designed the transformer model with multiple dimensions which includes, CWSIDs, category (Agency worker, Contractor or Cat employer) date and time.
• Provided first level Support to the business users and helped them understand the functionality of the cubes.
• Guided the business user community with all possible combinations of slicing and dicing to analyse the data.
• Adhered to AQA (Application Quality Analysis) methodology adapted by Confidential. Also drafted easy to understand document for this process and provided hands on training to the offshore team.
• Created a cube to impromptu report drill through to facilitate detailed level data for the Confidential employers.

Environment: Cognos 7.4 (Access Manager, PowerPlay Transformer, PowerPlay Client, Upfront, Impromptu, PPES, Report Administrator), Visual basic 6, MS Access, SAS 9.1, Data Stage Ascential, IBM DB2, Windows XP

Confidential Dec’05 – Oct’06
Role: Cognos Developer / Cognos Support Lead
Scope: Confidential would run numerous projects that would involve huge teams such as Financial Reps, Black Belts, Master Black belts, Project Sponsor, Business Manager. And these projects would run for various Groups-divisions-Business Units- Sub Business units. The data would multiply on daily basis and crystal reports were not a good answer for reporting this big data and moreover the analysis question was a growing concern. The purpose of the project was to provide a business solution leveraging BI technology to enable a dramatic improvement in the ability and performance of the reporting structure. The project involved 3 different transformer models and cubes responsible for Financial Reporting System, Portfolio Cubes and Project Execution Cubes.
Responsibilities

• Created functional/technical specification for Cat dealer Cube and developed a Cube.
• Created three different models with appropriate data level security and built 4 different cubes.
• Created cube to Impromptu report drill through in order to provide more detail level of data.
• Facilitated the business user community in creating cube views and trained on slicing and dicing of data which would help them understand and analyze the data.
• Worked closely on Project Management Office to provide detail input on development project plan and to facilitate for project execution.
• Tuning the Performance of Cubes that deals with historical data by tweaking the Cube parameters and eliminating any redundant elements being retrieved.
• Implemented optimization techniques for Cube performance by decreasing Cube build times and increasing runtime cube access.
• Developed scripts to automate the cube build and update process.

Environment: Cognos 7.4 (Access Manager, PowerPlay Transformer, PowerPlay Client, Upfront, Impromptu, PPES, Report Administrator), Data Stage Ascential, IBM DB2

Role: Cognos Support & Administrator Jan’ 08 – June 09

• Assess the current Cognos architecture and understand the required architecture changes and develop a recommended solution that best manages the impact to the multiple information systems and technology platforms. Provided a strategic solution for the series 7 infrastructure and improved the production server’s performance.
• Managed day-to-day operational aspects of the project and scope. Provide information to business clients regarding technology directions and translate technology opportunities into integration solutions.
• Perform day-to-day support activities & work with development project teams to understand business requirements, models and reports design. Transition the same knowledge to the team for full support.
• Assess the organization’s current system and build the process accordingly satisfying different facilities and platforms. Streamlined Confidential’s backup process and strengthened the maintenance of applications. Introduced and developed simple process (Application Hosting Process) to complex process (Usage Reporting Process).
• Analyze the existing Impromptu reports, cubes and cube views and provide tactical solutions to business customers and provide enhancements if required.
• Troubleshooting and providing RCA for broken or not working metadata models, transformer models, IWR, CRN or Cognos 8x reports and cube views.
• Installing software patches or upgrades the software version as and when the business demands.

Environment: Cognos 7.4 (Access Manager, PowerPlay Transformer, PowerPlay Client, Upfront, Impromptu, PPES) Cognos ReportNet, Cognos 8.2/8.3/8.4 Data Stage Ascential, IBM DB2, MS Access, SQL Server, Oracle, Unix,

Confidential Mar’03 – Dec’05
Role: Cognos Consultant

Confidential offers extensive experience in providing specialist management and engineering services to business and individual projects. I was working as team and handle perform the metadata modelling within Framework Manager and creating simple to complex reports to meet business user requirements. I was assigned on three different projects, each involving over 15 to 20 reports with model and packages.

Responsibilities

• Worked as Metadata Modeller & handled the creation of business views, managed packages and projects, set Framework Manager Security and published packages to Content Store.
• Worked extensively with relationships and cardinality, designed and structured business views for report authors in Framework Manager.
• Efficiently resolved dimensional level ambiguity using start schemas grouping & worked extensively with data warehousing team forming star schemas for dimensional modelling.
• Served as Report Manager & led a team of 9 Report Authors involved in tuning up performance of the reports.
• Used Ad Hoc Query Studio to generate simple reports using filters & prompts. Simple reports involved different types of reports from list report to Pie chart report and also top 10 analysis report with different perspectives.
• Involved in meeting with business users for the incremental upgrades & enhancements for developed projects.
• Coordinated with the DBA & ETL team to improve performance on reporting & learned the whole life cycle of end-to-end solution.
• Involved in UAT and system testing for all the upgrades and migration.

Environment: Cognos 7.4 (Access Manager, PowerPlay Transformer, PowerPlay Client, Upfront, Impromptu, PPES, Report Administrator), Data Stage Ascential, IBM DB2

Confidential. Jan’01 – Feb’03
Role: Oracle Developer/ System Administrator

Responsibilities

• Played a major role in designing the Oracle database and creating complex queries involving triggers, procedures and functions.
• Efficiently worked on all kinds of joins and resolved self-join loops with in the complex queries.
• Actively involved with DBAs during the upgrading Oracle database, Oracle applications. Worked with DBAs in performance tuning Oracle Database servers.
• Capably handled architecting & deploying new changes to the branch’s IT infrastructure (Servers and network).
• Played a major role in writing performance tuned VB Scripts as a VB developer for the front-end purpose.
• Constantly interacted with the users in the implementation process; provided support & troubleshooting of various applications.
• Pivotal in creating and modifying databases and database object as per application requests. Interacted with the users in the implementation process; Support and troubleshooting of applications.
• Actively involved ion maintaining and populating test databases, handling performance tuning of database and SQL access (DB2 Explain, Runstats).
• Efficiently created and scheduled the utilities such as Reorg, Runstats, and Image copy in production regions.
• Managed the storage allocations utilizing SMS and STOGROUPS & rendered IBM & BMC Utility support including Copy, Reorg, Load, Runstats and Modify jobs.
• Provided 24/7 call support, identified the bottleneck issues and recommended new hardware and software licenses accordingly.
• Served as the escalation point within the team for technical and operational issues, questions and concerns.

Environment: Oracle 8i/9i, Oracle DBA, Windows 2000

Education / Certification

• Master of Science (Business Information Technology)
• Cognos – i) Version 7x - PowerPlay and Access Manager ii) CRN- Product User, Authoring Professional, Modelling Professional, Administration Professional
• Oracle - i) 9i DBA Fundamentals I & II Certified, ii) 8i (SQL & SQL/PLSQL) OCP Certified
• 6 Sigma Green Belt Certified
• 2007 & 2008 Star performance award by Satyam