Carlos Diogo Homepage

As of April 2009  and after analysing the current market situation i decided that was time to embrace a new, but at the same time old, challenge which is to finally learn the German language.

My basic understanding of German were during this seven years already in Germany enough since i hardly ever needed it for working as most of my friends either were foreigners or spoke English.

However , in todays market situation basic german was no longer enough as therefore i decided to go back , do intensive german classes and finally learn the language.

After some time spent looking for the right place i have found a quite good school that offer a very good service for the money spent and are extremely frendly.  Situated in the Schwabing area the Tandem school besides extremly competent teachers also offers extra curricular activities specialy interesting for those who are new to the city or country.

I have picked up at the final of the level A2 and decided to do both B1 and B2. This represents over 4 months of daily 9:30 to 13h classes. I honestly think that i did not had so many classes since the highschool.

I expect with this to be able to work and communicate in german because then i will be able to improve on my own.

 Workfow tools are essential to easily model any business process.  Workflow tools avoid document templates and endless email exchanges between the parties of a process. 

After several days of browsing over different tools available on the market i came across the ProcessMaker application. 

Besides being OpenSource which is a big plus it also offer lots of functionalities, a user interface that is quite friendly and additionally quite complete documentation.

From the installation to the configuration and creation of a first test workflow it takes about one hour. The installer creates its own application stack including Apache server and MySql Database server. The configuration is also extremly simple , having the administrator just to create some users and usergroups.

The User interface is very powerful and quite simple to use. However it may not work very well with all browsers. Following the tutorials that come with the product and going through the examples that can be installed very easly we can quickly have a overview of the potential of the application.

For the Business model that i was trying to implement there was just one minor problem. In a work flow a task could only be assigned to a single user instead to a group where all member could eventually take action.  This can be worked arround by creating distribution list emails corresponding to the groups but it is not very clean and may be very complicated when several BP run on the tool with different user groups and roles that are overlapping or not.  

The design team of the project seemed very active and continually improve their product. For instance a solution for the problem i described above was planned for a next release)

Overall this is a platform to keep in mind.

In order to improve the sustainability of the company by the end of the year 2007, we decided to move the focus from the Baratix comparison engine and  offer services on the web marketing area. By then we have had some very profitable mailing campaigns and therefore it was considered to be the logic step. 

If initially the strategy was to offer the services as a complement of a site building or web presence management package soon we realized that building sites was not profitable and we should leave that to other companies. Adclick had positioned it self as a Lead creator and manager using the several channels available . 

The most effective channel was the mailing. Mailing was a simple, fast and cheap way of generating leads. However over time this proved to be tricky and even problematic as often the emails were considered spam and soon our ips and domains were blacklisted , limiting our mail sending capabilities.

This problem caused us to focus more on the other cannels specialy Search Engine Optimization , Adwords optimization and Afilliation networks. By the end of the year 2008 the results were within the aceptable range.

If the results of 2008 were ok for me , the strategy the majority decided to pursue, did not meet my expectations and therefore on the beginning of 2009 i decided to sell my participation on the company.

After almost one year and a half of being part of the implementation and later steering the development of the long term planning solution, probably due to the good results achieved, my quick learning capabilities and my good relation with the business counterpart i was invited to step up and become Solution Architect for the Supply Chain.

As Solution Architect i’m responsible for new business models implementation over the Application landscape. Besides i was asked to improve the existing functionality of the several applications in order to bettre serve business needs.

The SC landscape is basically composed of a Demand forecasting environment based on thh I2 DMAN solution, and inventory optimizer application also from I2,  two Supply planning environments (one with focus on short term operations with weekly cycles and the other with a focus on long term procurement and strategy) and two scheduling and promise applications ( I2 Factory planner for the locations with make to stock products and SAP APO PP/DS for the make to order location) running locally on the factories. Additionally APO DP is also implemented to support the global and regional sales allocation process.

During the period at this role i can distinguish two phases. During the first year the focus was simplification and tuning of the platform to achieve better performance and business satisfaction. Later the focus was downsizing and trimming of the platform to the essential functions in order to cut costs.

The role provide me the chance to extend my understanding of SCM from my original focus on Capacity and Long term planning and become familiar with other processes and business models.

On January 2007 me a three other persons created the start-up Adclick lda. How idea was to implement a price comparison website for the Portuguese retail market.

Price comparison websites where booming in other countries like US , UK and Germany and in Portugal there was still no players.  The time seemed right as online retail stores were being created daily and the stores would have the need a ground to compete with the established big retailers.

Our original focus was the Electronics and Computers market. The reasons was the amount of stores that already existed online that would cause stores to pay for customer, the fact that this were standard products which would reduce the technological effort into mapping the products from the stores  and the fact that these goods were typically the ones that the consumer would buy online.

The first stage was to analyze existing  shop comparison engines in different country and design the core comparison engine.

The sourcing of the data for the comparison was through web-parsers that would retrieve the product information from the stores websites and store it on and defined format. The web-parser technology we used had been previously developed by me for a previous project and offered reliable results. The second phase of the project was the design of the back-office platform that would manage the web-parsers and then work on the data to serve the comparison engine.

My role in the project was deeply involved on the design as the development was made by another member of the team.

The comparison engine was set to productive on October 2007 and by the end of the year the results were bad. We where not been able to either generate traffic to the site and also we were not able to convince the stores to spend money on us.

I joined Qimonda AG It department on January 2006. The company was starting a project to replace the entire supply chain landscape of legacy processes  and applications by a industry standards. The selected platform was I2 SCM solutions and i joined the team responsible for implementing the long term , Sales and Operation supply chain planning solution that would support the monthly VRFC  (volume rolling forecast) process.

The solution was based on a global model of the company supply chain and a linear solver to plan and optimize the supply over 18months, having as inputs the demand and capacity forecast, product information and parameters and a set of guidelines (objectives)

This objectives are extremely important and define the business model of the company.  Also, due to the nature of the linear solver (objectives are optimized sequentially) the selection and correctly tuning of them has major impact of the final plan. As example , if we would set ‘minimize stock’ as top priority , most likely nothing would be produced because usually there is no demand for low quality products that are co-products of the high grade stock and always cause stock.

This understanding of the solver/model/objective behaviour was my task on the project team. While the rest of the team was focuses on the final model,  i was simulating with a smaller model and testing different setups.  it was a hands on training as no coaching was provided.  Looking at unexpected results and finding what was the cause for it was my daily work , to which my strong analytical capacities were extremely helpful.

Furthermore, and in order to help my analysis i created the backbone of the reporting and analysis platform. The end user was always very important for me and  i trained the end users on technics and processes to analyse the results  that i had developed.

During the project, as i was the person that best understood the behavior of the solver and could predict the results, i laso became the bridge between the business community and the technical team, translating the business expectations into design changes/adjustments.

Our project was a success and that contrasted with the other projects of the program, and the difference was not the technical part that was very similar within the program. The reason was the close contact that i had established with the business users that allowed us to make the small adjustments that made a big difference,  a solid analysis platform and technical  that allowed the users to quickly understand the cause of unexpected results.

This great results i achieved, together with the trust relation i developed with the business community led me to my next challenge.

After the success of the development of a prototype for a global capacity optimization tool i was given the role of Project Manager for the implementation of the professionally developed application based on the prototype i developed.

The application was to be developed and rolled out on 5 location (4 factories across the globe and a central deployment on the headquarters) over a period of 12 months. I was responsible for compiling the final requirements , define time lines,  create the technical solution, test plan and discuss it with the vendor. Budget definition and  control were also part of my functions.

The budget for this project was around 500k/euros and the solutions and the project was delivered on time on on budget.  Although i was then working from the business side i designed most of the technical solution and even developed the reporting platform that would centralize the data from several locations.

On the business side i was also the responsible for the long waited alignment between sites on modeling strategies and conventions. On the beginning of the project one of the biggest problems was that although data from the sites was available , each site had its own format and way of model a certain manufacturing operation. For the central planners that was a nightmare. This project solved this issue and allowed greater visibility over the sites performance.

On the second year as project manager i was integrated on the Supply Chain projects group and took care of smaller projects. Within this projects i recall the Diebank Implementation , System Integration of a Silicon Foundry, Reporting Portal,  Engineering Rolling Forecast etc

The last three months on this position i was part of the team that would implement a location production planning and scheduling called Factory Planners. The team was based in Porto and i was responsible for the capacity modeling and data sourcing.

On January 2003 i took a new challenge. I travelled to Munich, Germany and started an internship supporting the Global Planning department on IT related issues.  Part of my role was supporting existing legacy tools on VB, Excel and Access that were used for both Production Planning and Capacity Planning.

However my main role was to develop a central capacity planning tool that would allow the central departments to create scenarios on product allocation and  investment over the several semi-competing sites in order to find the optimum setup for the Supply Chain model.

The basic struture of the application was a mathematical model of the supply chain , including the diferent locations and broken down to the baswic production steps. The development of this tool gave me great insight both on production modeling and simulation skills as well a great knowledge on short and long term planning methods.

The application was completed with success and it served as a prototype for a new global capacity optimization tool.

On January 2002 started my final project to complete my degree. The project was called Enterprise Information Portal and was done over an 6 months internship at Infineon Technologies SA, a semi-conductor backend located in teh are of Vila do Conde , Portugal.

The project consisted in replacing their old intranet platform by a dynamic platform that would allow news postings, document archiving, dynamic information over departments and groups, personal advertisements, weather and cultural information etc.

The project consisted of several phases from requirement gathering , specification , database modeling , implementation , test , release and documentation.

The technological platforms used were an Oracle database and IIS. The coding was done using ASP. My past experience with web-applications and PHP was easily translated to this project and my learning of VBscript was quite fast.

Besides maximizing my habilities and understanding of webapplication this project also introduced me to a new area , web crawling and content parsing.

In 2002 there were no such things as feeds. If you needed to include some information from another website you would need to fetch it and parse it to the format you needed. This was the case for the news, weather and cultural content of the intranet portal.

Several crawlers and parsers were designed in VB and were triggeres by a cron job on the server.  The crawlers would collect the webpage html code , and the parser would select and  retrieve the data out of the html page. The data was then stored on the database and presented in the portal.

The project was a success and was graded 17.5/20.  My internship was extended for another six months and i kept working on web-application targeting content management.

The last two years of my degree were focused on Telecommunications and Electronics.  Advanced electronics, Chip design , Digital filters , Networks , Telecommunications theory, Mobile Communications, Artificial intelligence were some of the main subjects.

Over these two years my productivity was more on hardware and low level programming, having created an intrusion alarm, parking garage controller  and a  speed radar.

On the last semester i probably had then the subject that brought me back to software creation , and introduced me my favorite platform , the internet.  The subject was focused on the principles of internet, introduced the HTML language and to the end introduced also the JAVA language. The subject had a small project component and for that i developed and web-statistics portal based on PHP.  I remember i was very proud with the result and i was awarded with the excellent grade.

This was the awakening of my software creator vein that would influence the choice of my final project.