Mark started his career in 1982 as a System 38 programmer. In 1990 he joined SSA as a technical consultant and went on to become a Technical Project Manager. On leaving the company in ‘94 he went to Timberland clothing as a European IT support technician. In 1995 he joined Pacific International working with BPCS on customer modifications for clients on Version 4.0 and 5.1 in the U.K and Europe.

At this point he decided to start his own contracting company, MTR consulting, and immediately secured a contract with Dentsply International in 1998. At the end of the contract he moved to Tyco Healthcare and since this time has supplied consulting services for Jotun Paints, BOC Edwards, Huhtamaki (UK) Ltd, Glaxo Smith Kline and Johnson & Johnson. He is currently supporting Hexcel Composites via SBG Ltd, one of Small Blues sister companies.

Martin started as a trainee COBOL programmer at Refuge Assurance in 1981. He moved to Allied Bakeries where he joined the database design team, then to Ilford Photo as an analyst programmer. From 1986 Martin worked on Ilford’s implementation of BPCS, which was multi-company, multi-currency and multi-language – he primarily worked with the UK company and then with the companies in Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland.

In 1995 Martin left Ilford to become a contractor, and spent the next 5 years at Multipart (a vehicle spares and logistics company), implementing a heavily modified BPCS Version 5. In 2000 he went back to Ilford as a contractor for 2 years, now working on BPCS Version 6 (including CEA), and then spent another 6 years as a contractor at Multipart working on several major BPCS projects. Since February 2008 he has worked on Jotun Paint’s BPCS Version 6 for SBG Ltd.

For most of the past 20 years he has been responsible for the whole life-cycle of projects, from project management, analysis, design and specification through programming and testing to implementation. He has also has extensive experience of supporting existing systems and problem-solving.

Genyphyr started her career as the IT director for a small manufacturing firm in 1994, and quickly moved on to work at IBM Rochester in 1996 as a software engineer developing IBM’s newly acquired Backup Recovery and Media Services (BRMS) product helping to rewrite it from RPG into C and C++. Genyphyr tested and coded BRMS, participated in OS400 design reviews, helped write the IBM Redbook on BRMS and worked directly with several large clients such as Shell Oil Canada in the lab to resolve product issues.

Genyphyr was recruited to SSA in 1997 in response to poor customer satisfaction over the V6 releases of BPCS. She worked on re-writing documentation, improving testing processes, re-programming the Client/Server software. She spearheaded the implementation of SQL performance improvements. She held internal education for developers on best practices in RPG, C and SQL development. She moved into the role of senior systems architect working on the overall technical future and design of BPCS.

Genyphyr designed many technical enhancements to BPCS, AS/SET and the SYS product between 2001 and 2009. She is a co-author of the IBM Redbook on eBPCS (V6.1.00) as well as many end user manuals. She specialises in design work, creative solutions to complex problems, diagnosing operating system issues, software integrations between 3rd party products and BPCS, data integrity, multi-language implementations, database tuning, system performance, programming, security and general technical debugging and trouble shooting. Since leaving SSA in early 2009, she has worked as an independent consultant.

Jo is an Oxford graduate with a Ph.D. in chemistry.

She was responsible for BPCS Best Practice at Ciba and spent 9 years at SSA as Manufacturing Consultant.

Jo is now acclaimed as one of the best BPCS trainer/consultants around and teaches the OU course “Business operations– delivering Value”.