Howard K. Dammond bio

Evolving Technologies Corporation, Brooklyn, NY

VBA/Excel Automation Specialist | 08/2006 – Present

Project consulting and Visual Basic for Applications coding to automate the preprocessing of data in visual analytics solutions, often referred to as "Executive Dashboards."

Design user interfaces, code automation modules for data aggregation;
develop/run test validation routines to support quality assurance
and user acceptance testing. Work Sample...
- Design, code, validate automated Excel-based “Polaroid” prototypes before rendering logic in Flash-based output.

American Red Cross, Westchester County Chapter, NY

Excel Specialist | 08/2006 – 02/2007

Support CEO and Director of Financial Development in compilation and preparation of
Excel and PowerPoint presentation materials for Board, Staff, Management Group and other meetings.

Budgets
Create standardized Excel budget templates for Department Heads in the Disaster Response, Disaster Services, Health and Safety, Financial Development, Human Resources and Volunteer Services Departments. Design, develop and code an Excel VBA automated application to generate a consolidated 'all departments' budget rollup including dynamic revenue and expense pie charts. Work Sample...
- Using standardized templates with data entry limited to fewer than 20 'unprotected' cells, each department head enters or updates departmental numbers and emails a single spreadsheet to the Director of Financial Development. By detaching each new spreadsheet to a dedicated folder, this officer can incorporate any revised numbers into this budget consolidation
Standards
Provide design, development and Excel VBA coding to automate the [National] Red Cross Standards Initiative Scorecard. Work Sample...
- The tedium of filling out questionnaires for more than 50 categories of Red Cross Standards was simplified by using linked option buttons and conditional formatting in Excel to colorize 'yes' as green, 'no' as red, 'N/A' as gray. Re-engineering this entirely manual system into an Excel context also allows for machine-scored totals to auto-update as the data entry proceeds.
  
  This animation begins with no buttons clicked and simulates an interactive data entry session, ending with a change in Standard 5b from 'no' (red) to 'N/A' (gray).
  
  Each questionnaire is a single worksheet tab of the Standards Automation workbook. As the questionnaires are completed, the automation includes a user-friendly process to compile the auto-scored results into a Executive Summary as below.
Accounting Reconciliation
Provide design, development and Excel VBA coding to automate the Westchester Chapter Monthly Clothing Bins Accounting Reconciliation by location and bin count.
Work Sample...
- Each month a revised Excel spreadsheet log of Clothing Bins locations and bin count per location was tedious to hand compare for changes. This VBA application computes a billable census of clothing bins by current location and count.
  
  On-site verification of the county-wide physical inventory of bins added, moved or dropped became logistically much simpler to accomplish by engineering the spreadsheet of clothing bin locations to cross-reference the driving directions provided by Google Maps.

Halsey Street Incorporated, Summit NJ

Rapid Applications Developer | 09/2005 – 06/2006

Developed and built user-friendly automated VBA Excel application that tracks student attendance for compliance with the No Child Left Behind Act.

Generates monthly and cumulative NCLB reports to determine the reimbursement allotment for New Jersey Charter Schools based on Average Daily Attendance. Work Sample...
- Produces monthly detail reports by teacher for audit trail verification of NCLB reports.

JP Morgan Chase & Co., New York, NY

Senior Excel VBA Developer | 07/1999 – 05/2005

Transactor Comps (TRComps) is an Oracle database-driven client-server application which tracks both JPMorgan-led and market deals. It enables users to compare syndicated loan, high yield bond, credit default swap and secondary loan pricing information & to perform relative value calculations as needed.

I was hired to develop Deal Sheets. Designed, developed and coded comprehensive
deal sheet reporting engine to generate reports for multiple industry groups for both leveraged and investment grade deals. Work Sample...
- A deal sheet is a multi-page, template-driven Excel report involving serious complexity (300-400 datapoints per deal) which summarizes transactions among multiple financial institutions to structure a syndicated multi-billion dollar loan package. The image below is not from a form populated by Excel; it is a screenshot of an actual Excel worksheet (datapoints changed to protect client confidentiality).
Provided the Excel VBA and Postscript coding/logic to the team which created a PDF Assembler reusable component to generate a user selected package of deal sheets in read-only PDF format, with a bookmarks hierarchy organized by deal structure.
Provided Excel VBA and XML coding to the team which created a background, asynchronous Email notification alert utility using SMTP to automatically send a deal summary image, Excel attachment and Blackberry formatted text Email to both the Deal Team and the Capital Markets Group when deal parameters were changed/updated in the Oracle database.
Extended advanced printing functionality beyond Excel fit to page; generally analyzed and provided functionality extensions as needed beyond the usual limitations built into Excel.
Debugged and polished existing code base for sales reports and added new features.
Established and implemented visual standards for (TRComps) Excel reports.
Mentored colleagues in advanced VBA, Excel and research techniques.

Chase Manhattan Bank, New York, NY

Senior Excel Consultant Desktop Y2K Remediation Team | 04/1999 – 06/1999

Diagnosed and repaired unsuspected software vulnerabilities in existing critical automated spreadsheet structures on which the bank relied heavily. Developed / validated new logic to replace fatally flawed 2 digit year data behind formula-driven date lookup tables. Integrated replacement logic structures into data stream of custom Excel software.

Pepsi-Cola Corporation, Somers, NY

Excel Report Programmer | 01/1998 – 11/1998

Designed and developed user interface and production programming of Excel templates and executive dashboards

Can and Bottle Lines Efficiency Score Card
When the manager responsible for this tool provided its requirements -- to rank productivity of
all North American Can and Bottling Plant locations by production line efficiency -- to Pepsi’s Information Technology department, he was told that it could not be done. I developed a proprietary back-end processing tool and scorecard template, using Excel VBA. This tool takes data from every Pepsi can and bottling plant in North America. It then interprets that data in terms of plant efficiency and produces a single-page color-coded ranking from best-to-worst among the production numbers of all plants. This mission-critical report, which heretofore could not be generated at all, is now automatically compiled 13 times per year at the push of a button. Work Sample...
- Still in use today, these scorecards are distributed to every plant after every period. Rankings among these green, yellow and red formatted columns are variable by performance for each period and provide competitive incentives for each plant manager to "get to the green". The image below is a screenshot of an actual Excel worksheet (datapoints changed to protect client confidentiality).
Warehouse Analysis Dashboard
Pepsi-Cola senior logistics management required a reliable, interactive, user-friendly computer tool to track the impact of headquarters-led improvement initiatives in its warehouse productivity efforts. Across six months of close collaboration with the Manager of Logistics Programs, I developed an Essbase-enabled power tool to empower this headquarters team. Work Sample...
- This tool synthesizes detailed productivity, labor cost and overtime information on each of 340 locations. From these derived results, the dashboard then produces two-year trend graphs on 6 productivity indicators (versus volume) and computes multiple indices to plan, prior year performance and cost per unit. The image below is a screenshot of an actual Excel worksheet (datapoints changed to protect client confidentiality).

Witco Corporation, Greenwich, CT

Office Automation Developer 06/1997 – 12/1997

Designed and automated spreadsheet and database logic to facilitate analysis of mainframe-derived data in Excel and Access.

Integrated pricing book for Witco Performance Chemicals Division (2,500 products).

Witco Worldwide employee database (devised unique global headcount code to query business unit, department and country for summary reports from 40 countries).

Howard K. Dammond