Résumé: Richard J Willis

OVERVIEW and INTEREST

I'm retired and am seeking opportunities to give back to my community through volunteer work, employing the technical, interpersonal and managerial skills I honed over fifty years. I'm an experienced leader and quick learner with the proven ability to…

☑ grasp and solve complex problems,
☑ optimize human and technical resources to support an organization's planning and/or operations,
☑ communicate difficult concepts effectively and entertainingly, and
☑ manage teams with diverse backgrounds, skills and assignments.

VOLUNTEER HISTORY

❤ Meals 4 Kids: Three times a week I deliver meals in east Multnomah County to feed families who are at or below the poverty line. (Since 2018)
❤ Open Hearts Open Minds (OHOM): I facilitate rehabilitative engagement with a remarkable group of inmates, some in prison for life. (Since 2015) I'm a member of OHOM's Board of Directors and am dedicated to improving the prospects of inmates newly released from prison.
❤ Kathy Marchant LLC: I provide administrative and technical support to this protégé of Marshall Rosenberg who has taught compassionate communication in dozens of corporations and government agencies in Oregon, and to hundreds of private individuals in the greater Portland area. (20 years+ so far)
❤ Meals on Wheels: I drove scheduled and on-call routes to deliver meals to disabled and shut-in clients in Washington County. (7 years)
❤ All Classical Portland (89.9 FM in Portland): I did phone and reception work for one of the few independent classical music radio stations left in this country. (7 years)
❤ Oregon Long Term Care Ombudsman (OLTC): I advocated for residents' rights in three care facilities in Multnomah County. (3 years)
❤ Court Appointed Special Advocate (CASA): I was appointed by Multnomah County Family Court judges to monitor, evaluate and report on the protection and care of severely abused or abandoned children. (15 years)
❤ The Community Project for At-Risk Youth: I mentored several at-risk teenage boys and girls, was a board member and eventually chairman. (8 years) 30 years later, some of those "youth" are working with me on projects.

PROFESSION

2003 to 2013 Providence Health and Services Portland, OR

Senior Financial Systems Analyst

☉ Created unique financial analysis tools for executives. These were graphically intense query engines capable of remotely accessing data and presenting finished charts on the fly.
☉ On a daily basis, performed ad hoc queries of financial and labor databases that provided special insight to executives, managers and Regional Finance staff.
☉ Provided data management and reporting assistance to administrators in seven hospitals, two medical groups, a medical insurance subsidiary and auxiliary elements.
☉ Created many data automation tools for Finance staff and hospital administrators to speed auditing and trap errors.
☉ Automated the task of reconciling 300,000+ transactions every two weeks—a job that took an accountant a week to do, now is performed error-free by automation within a minute.
☉ Provided technical support to the Providence Oregon payroll operation, ensuring that 15,000+ employees were paid correctly through over 50 compensation programs, 15 union contracts and hundreds of rule exceptions.
☉ Within Oregon Regional Finance, served as the first-line technical resource for the Payroll, Flexible Spending Accounts, Cash Management, Miscellaneous Accounts Receivable and Research Accounting departments.
☉ Served as secondary technical resource for Accounting, Accounts Payable, Financial Planning and Contracts & Reimbursement.

1987 to 2003 Decision Graphics, LLC Portland, OR

Principal

Founded this decision support consulting firm to develop custom finance and marketing decision support products, creating applications using Microsoft Visual Basic, MS Office and VBA (was engaged by Microsoft to demonstrate my custom, interactive macro-driven Excel applications to Microsoft national account customers), MS Access, SQL Server, Crystal Reports, HTML, Java, MS Project, statistical analysis programs and other specialized software applications.

1987 to 2003 Avasys, LLC Portland, OR

Consultant

Co-founded with Joseph Healy this information technology firm to provide extraordinary technical and executive support to companies needing to develop effective IT strategies, to leverage emerging technologies to their competitive advantage, or to develop custom executive decision-support and reporting environments.

A sampling of Decision Graphics and/or AvaSys services delivered:

✯ Apple Computer—Created several market and sales analysis tools for marketing managers which consolidated data from several sources and created a polished executive status report on the fly.
✯ Apple Computer—Designed and developed a graphic financial analysis and reporting tool for computer resellers which did a complete analysis of each reseller’s financial performance and allowed for 13 dimensions of comparison to the population of Apple resellers.
✯ NIKE Inc.—Developed a strategy for consolidation of the Nike corporate product image capture, control and distribution system. This strategy was presented to the corporate leadership council and was approved unanimously.
✯ NIKE Inc.—Proposed, designed, developed and implemented a corporate budget system employing legacy database and general ledger translators. Trained over 300 managers in its use. (While this was intended as a temporary stopgap solution to a corporate-wide shortcoming, four years later it was still the only working solution.)
✯ M Financial Group—Developed a system to automate the presentation of multi-dimensional performance analysis of provider companies’ offerings to a variety of corporate insurance clients.
✯ PacifiCorp—In cooperation with energy experts, I designed and developed the database program FinAnswer that facilitates the auditing of energy consumption at commercial and industrial sites and calculates potential energy savings, translates those savings into cost reductions according to state tariffs, and creates legal and supporting documents for PacifiCorp lending programs.
✯ Sunbeam Corp.—Designed and created an interactive financial analysis tool to facilitate a complicated product line sale to a major retail chain.
✯ Tektronix—Designed, developed and implemented an enterprise financial data consolidator which queried the corporation's financial database for the latest data on 37 worldwide subsidiaries, did real-time currency conversion and generated daily performance reports for the president of the company.
✯ Tetra Pak—Designed, developed and implemented production scheduling systems which facilitate optimization of workflow in the Vancouver facility of this worldwide fluids packaging manufacturer. Also designed and developed parts inventory management databases that forecast inventory demand and alert management to optimal order times and quantities.

1983 to 1989 Floating Point Systems Beaverton, OR

Physical Systems Engineering Manager

Managed a service group of electrical, mechanical and software engineers, designers and technicians in an engineering matrix organization.

1981 to 1983 Eaton Corporation Beaverton, OR

Mechanical Engineer

Designed industrial heating and cooling system controls.

1979 to 1981 Instromedix, Inc. Beaverton, OR

Mechanical Engineer

Designed sensors and enclosures for heart pacemaker monitors.

1971 to 1979 Richard D. Irwin, Inc. Homewood, IL

Sales Representative

Represented this prestigious business textbook publisher to university faculty throughout the Pacific Northwest.

1968 to 1971 US Army Ft. Lewis, WA / Quang Tri, Vietnam

Combat Engineer Officer, Bronze Star recipient

1966 to 1968 Ford Motor Company Detroit, MI

Engineer-in-Training

EDUCATION

Master of Business Administration (MBA), Portland State University

Bachelor of Science, Mechanical Engineering (BSME), University of Detroit

CERTIFICATION

Professional Engineer—Oregon registration: PE15053