Michael trained as a Chartered Accountant for four years with Price Waterhouse (now PwC) in Belfast, where he:

• Gained a wide range of experience with multiple clients, while studying for CAI professional exams.

• Started as an assistant, preparing books of account for small businesses and assisting on audits.

• Progressed to audit senior, leading teams on large group company audits, completed to tight deadlines.

• Spent four months seconded to the Management Consultancy Department as a team member on a standard costing system project for a large clothing factory

Michael was the lead financial and administrative officer of a small company (£4M turnover, circa 40 staff) based in Belfast.

The business was involved in the manufacture, sale, and hire of portable buildings, as well as the sale of insulation materials.

Prior to Michael's employment, the company only had basic bookkeeping and a card-based manual system to control its hire business, with no management accounting for its factory.

Using his Computer Science degree, Michael:

• Created a requirements specification for a new financial, logistics, and hire system.

• Tendered the project to a number of local software firms.

After assisting the selected vendor with a systems specification based on Tetra Accounting modules interfaced with a bespoke Informix hire and factory job costing system, Michael implemented and tested the new system.

Michael spent the majority of his career working for Caterpillar (NI) Ltd, previously F.G.Wilson (Engineering) Ltd.

The company was incorporated in 1966 in Belfast and enjoyed rapid growth with three factory locations in Northern Ireland and nine subsidiaries located around the globe, before being acquired in 1995 by Emerson Electric Co. and later by Caterpillar Inc. in 2000.

As part of Caterpillar's Electric Power Division (EPD), Caterpillar (NI) Ltd manufactured and sold generating sets [gensets] up until 2012 with sales of US$ 1 Billion and more than 2,200 employees.

In 2012, the business was downsized by one-third.

Lost production was replaced by three new product lines over the next four years:

• Wheeled Material Handlers.

• Axles assembled for Caterpillar Trucks.

• Portable Gensets sold via the Omni Channel.

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Worked for SHS Group on a four-year transformation project.

SHS is a group of 14 small companies based in the U.K. and Ireland in the Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) sector, each assigned to a specific division for reporting purposes.

Sales and marketing divisions provide services to brand owners, such as product planning, logistics and running marketing campaigns and trade promotions via multiple sales channels.

Product divisions include wholly owned manufacturing entities that sell their products through the aforementioned Sales and Marketing companies within the Group.

The project involved strategic planning and process mapping to develop the Group’s SAP ERP system, Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) and Planning, forecasting, and reporting tools.

This led to the implementation of:

• • SAP Revenue Management.

  • SAP Integrated Business Planning.

  • SAP BW and Analytics Cloud.

Michael has a broad range of business and financial consulting experience, working with both B2B and B2C businesses.

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