Steven C. Buttgereit Resumé -- Party America

Party America
Alameda, CA

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Director of Information Technology, Enterprise Applications
2005 – 2007

Led the applications group for this second largest party supplies retailer. Guided the company on technology matters as it grew from 66 stores to over 200 stores and 70 franchisees through acquisition and natural expansions. Held this position until company acquired by largest competitor.

Significant Contributions:

  • Enhanced systems stability and group responsiveness by introducing a robust change management process, bug tracking and SCM tools.

  • Replaced inefficient help desk processes and multiple support ticket tracking systems with a consolidated, cross-functional support system and integrated support processes across functional groups.

  • Created a program of using regular support data reviews to pro-actively identify application enhancement opportunities and to address system usability issues.

  • Increased I.T. department's responsiveness to the business by establishing agile inspired scoping and requirements collection processes.

  • Mentored an initially very junior team of 3 business analysts and developers into capable and independent operators. Encouraged business outcome sensitivity and focus on reusable components.

  • Expanded the I.T. department's services by enhancing core inventory and point of sale applications to support franchisee operations.

  • Re-engineered point of sale pricing & promotion Oracle PL/SQL batch updates to safely run in parallel and avoid maintenance window overruns.

  • Managed enterprise application vendor relationships and outsourced DBA and support services.

  • Drove Oracle OLTP processing improvements by instituting a methodical performance monitoring regimen. Developed scripts to proactively identify optimization targets within PL/SQL code and various system configurations using data from the running production instances.

“I was very involved in the hiring of Steve for our company and one of our best IT hires for sure. [...] He joined us in a time of rapid growth and was such a great addition to our IT team and our corporate office, as Steve was liked by everyone and was always available to help each of us. My best recommendation is to say that I would rehire Steve given the opportunity.”

– Marty Allen, CEO, Party America.

 

“Steven is very organized and strategic at leading his team, as his team member I felt very efficient and productive [...] He is trustworthy, fun to work with and a lot to learn from. He's passionate about keeping up with new technology and that makes people around him want to do the same.”

– Sun Park, Application Developer, Party America.