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About Us

Screen shot of FoxPro program written by Rick.

RICK SHERIDAN
Owner
Years of experience using or supporting ERP 25
Years of experience in manufacturing 25

Manufacturing Experience

​Rick began his manufacturing career working at Scheu Steel in early 1976.  His duties included making drawings for an optical profile cutter, operating the optical profile cutter, shearing, operating cranes, operating saws, operating straight line burning cutters, driving bobtail trucks on delivery routes, pulling materials and some route scheduling.  Rick went to work as an apprentice machinist in late 1976.  He learned to use edge finders, indicators, do setups and how to use the machinery handbook to look up various items such as feeds and speeds.  In 1978 he went to Alaska to work for the YACC and upon his return in 1979, went to work for a company making threading dies for various pipe / bolt threading machines including Rigid, Collins, Mercury Auto Magic, Toledo and Oster.  While working there he learned to make fixtures for these and what the various threading geometry represented in terms of functionality.  He used micrometers, optical comparators, calipers, thread gauges and surface roughness gauges. He was hired to go to Texas and make parts for the Mercury Auto Magic threader, pipe bender and abrasive saw lines while the company was transitioning from California to Mexico.  Materials machined were varied and included cast iron, cast aluminum, M2, A2, and cold rolled steel.  The deal ultimately fell through in 1981 and the company moved back to California where it was purchased by Arrowsmith.  Rick was shop supervisor at this point and was tasked with the manufacture of the existing items and the support and manufacture of the Arrowsmith developed ArrowCut forging saw.  The saw was displayed at the 1982 Westec show.  Rick took the shop from a predominantly high-speed steel shop to one that used advanced tooling materials where ever cost effective which significantly reduced cycle time.  Rick went to work for Pacific Hardware in 1984 as a punch press setup and die repair person.  At various times at that job he setup and ran milling machines, head spinners, pop riveters, semi tubular riveters, lathes, punch presses, shears, manual brakes, four slides, surface grinders, drill presses, CNC mills, Wire EDMs and sometimes drove the forklift and operated the crane.  He used various software programs including AutoCAD light, Drafix, CADKey, Vector, Gibbs CAM, FeatureCAM and NC Link.  He designed and built standard, compound, progressive and four slide tooling.  He also wrote custom programs for the various CNC machines to simplify setup.  For example, a routine to find the center of the two die posts by testing multiple times to ensure consistency and then rotating the machine co-ordinates to match.  He redesigned many of the existing dies to ensure better life and less wear on the machines by staggering, putting shear angles on punches, adding reduced clearance to small areas to ensure slug retention and better in die backing to ensure proper alignment.  He worked his way up to owner / manager prior to it being sold in 2003.

ERP Experience

​Rick wrote his own order entry / payroll program while working as a manager for Pacific Hardware.  He later purchased Vista by Epicor to gain the full ERP functionality he needed.  He became the local user group leader for Vista software and customized many of the reports and screens using Crystal and Visual FoxPro.  He later was M1's first customer.  The owner of M1 at the time, Geoff Groves offered him full fare to Australia for the first user conference in honor of this.  During his stint as a user, he posted many helpful items to the user forum, including information about converting custom Vista Crystal reports to M1 reports.  Upon sale of the business, he went to work for Bowen and Groves selling M1 software.  His technical ability and understanding not only of the business side, but the software side as well, led him to become the US Support Manager for the software.  While support manager his duties at different time included:
Creating many of the manuals used for training and conferences
Proofing all manuals used at the conferences for content and accuracy
Creating E-mail blasts using M1 software related to patches and organizational updates.
Importing leads from various sources (NTMA for example), creating e-mail blasts and KPIs to ensure that follow up calls were made out of M1.
Insuring that KB pages were created and posted to the user group on a regular basis
Ensuring that reports uploaded by users for sharing were safe
Re-enabling the automatic user feedback system so all closed calls were available to customers for feedback.
Creating KPIs to ensure that all calls were responded to in a timely fashion and were followed up on periodically when it wasn’t possible to close them.
Creating internal and external training videos.  The external videos were made available for download to customers.
Creating and providing download access to flow charts for various areas of the software.
Creating the conference agendas for M1 and later the M1 division.
Assigning instructors for the conferences.
Assigning implementers to new sales and periodically checking on progress.
Training new support and implementation employees in house and on site.
Approving all SQL update statements prior to them being run on customer databases.
Reviewing and approving all customization quotes prepared by support to ensure feasibility and pricing were correct.
Participating in development meetings.
Monthly meetings with accounting to go over various accounting issues and either providing next steps or following up on accounts with issues.
Created and maintained the import that kept contract status current.
Assisted in setting up M1 server for sales to have customers try before they buy.
Assisted with internal WebGear issues and assisted with troubleshooting operational WebGear issues for customers.
Setting up weekly on-line classes.
Resolving implementation issues.
Assisting with and sometimes completing problem or complex implementations.
Assisting with problem calls.

In early 2014, Rick returned to sales as the aftermarket sales rep.  His achievements included:
Weekly demos of optional modules for the software.
Recording demos for all optional modules which were used by the sales and support teams.
Checking in on all customers at least twice a year.
On sites to assist with customer use of the software.
Assisting with creation of the M1 user groups.
Assisting with the Bob Sproull presentations to the Minnesota and Michigan user groups.
Assisted with or did the version 9 presentations to the user group.
Arranged for the development manager to attend user group meetings.
Sent out newsletters every month letting customers know about upcoming events, demos etc.
Won competition for most people referred to the user conference.
Scoped and quoted customizations.
Quoted optional modules and additional M1 users.Contacted all off-maintenance customers to negotiate reinstatement.

In late 2015 he decided that his knowledge would be better suited to assisting the many ERP customers who needed someone that understood both the technical and business aspects of ERP.  He continues with his education related to all aspects of ERP.  In 2014 he became certified in querying SQL server.  In 2015 he became certified in Administering SQL Server.  In 2016, he became certified in Crystal Reports.  In 2017 he will be completing his studies on Windows Forms applications, which are the basis for many of the current batch of ERP programs he is currently supporting.  He won't be able to achieve certification in this as Microsoft discontinued the certification process for it several years ago.

​Certifications
Querying Microsoft SQL Server 2012
Administering Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Databases
​Crystal Reports

OUR MISSION

TO IMPROVE YOUR BUSINESS' PERFORMANCE

Progressive die to make .060 continuous hinge with a .120 pin designed and built by Rick.

Tim Roach

Support Technician

Years of Experience 7

Tim Roach began involving himself in computers early on by doing part-time work troubleshooting computer issues and building custom gaming systems and small business servers, eventually building a Linux based server while learning how to administer it.  Tim started his office career as the scheduler for ready mix trucks at Cemex where he created automated Excel sheets (using Visual Basic for Applications) to greatly decrease the amount of time it took to schedule all daily deliveries for the Southern California area.  Tim then moved into the printing industry and did purchasing and inventory management at a printing supply company.  While performing the purchasing duties, he developed and maintained a web-based ordering system for the sales team to utilize, utilizing MySQL and PHP/Javascript to build the web application.  Tim eventually was able to parlay that experience into a position as an implementation consultant and later a sales engineer with ECi M1.  In early 2017, Tim decided to join ERP SQL Pro as it allowed him to put his focus back into hands-on technical work, while also offering a break from major travel to be closer to his family.

Certifications

Crystal Reports