Hi!
Welcome to my personal website!
This website is changing - into what I am not yet sure, but one of it's purposes will be to act as my testbed for any web based applications I may be working on at the time.
Another use will probably be a place where I can 'let off steam' and vent my feelings on such subjects as may be currently upermost in my mind.
Whatever use I may put it to is of no consequence at the moment - the website it replaces has outlived its usefulness and purpose, is 'old hat' as far as technology is concerned and has therfore had to be retired.
So, my apologies that, for now, many of the links at the top and on the right will not work. As I get something onto those pages they will gradually become 'live'. I may even include some functionality for the reader to leave some comments (as I'm sure not everyone will agree with my personal opinions!).
Stuart Stansfield
I was born (many years ago) in Halifax, West Yorkshire, England where I spent the majority of my life.
After leaving Halfax Technical High School I trained as a design draughtsman in mechanical engineering, and later digressed within the same company (Sagar-Richards Ltd., Luddendenfoot, Halifax) with such duties as Project Engineer, Work Study and Methods engineering, Foundry Superintendent etc.
Through a series of coincidences and twists of fate I became involved with computers (more specifically with computer programming). Programming Burrough's L-series Visual Record Computers in Assembler code was a far cry from my training / experience but I took to it like a duck to water. This eventually led to me joining a small company just starting up (the Calderdale Computer Company) as Systems Manager.
More twists of fate closed the company so it was back into Engineering as Work Study Manager for a company called Warman International Limited in Todmorden, Lancashire. The company made pumps, and was part of the Warman group of companies with head office in Sydney, Australia, and manufacturing plants and sales offices spread throughout the world.
After using my computer experience combined with engineering knowledge, we succesfully automated the time elements of the work study process. A little later, after completing a method study project in the payroll department, I was given that section to manage also!
The company, at that time, was installing a new ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) computer system running on Data General hardware. Due to the inability of the chosen system to cope with the complexity of our payroll system I set to and created our very own payroll system - from build up to gross, through gross to net to final payment. All this single handedly! Written in 'Basic' and running on a multi-user 'Zeus' micro computer.
The then manager of the main ERP computer system left the company and, as I had proved to have some computer experience, I was 'chosen' to take over.
Having now got my hands on a 'big' computer, it was time to integrate the payroll into the main ERP system. This involved re-writing the payroll sytem in Cobol and merging it seamlessly into the existing ERP system. Of course this also involved making changes to the core ERP system so we parted company with the supplier and took over the complete maintenance of the system 'in-house'.
All ticked along quite happily until early in 1997 when the group reviewed all its various computer systems to ensure they would survive the change of millenium into the year 2000. It was found that 2 companies in the group had 'suspect' year 2000 compliance and so the search for replacement systems commenced. Under the heading of G.S.S. (Global System Strategy) it was planned that the whole group should run on one computer system which would be based at the head office in Sydney, Australia.
Representatives of each company formed a steering committee and several ERP offerings were reviewed in Sydney before finally choosing SAP (a German ERP system) as the way forward. Hardware was bought and installed in the head office building and a project team (of which I was a member) assembled in Sydney for the 15 month project. The system went 'live' in Australia (including the several satellite offices around Australia) in January 1999, and whilst leaving most of the team to cope with implementation queries etc., I returned to England as Project Manager of the installation in the European offices. This project was completed by September 1999 and was running on the hardware installed half way round the world in head office.
The next stage of the GSS plan was to move on to the South American plant, however, before this could be started the company was taken over by the Weir Group who are based in Glasgow.
Understandably, the GSS project was put on hold whilst the new owners reviewed the position of the new group. A new chief executive was appointed and eventually it was decreed that running companies in different parts of the world on a central computer sytem was not what was needed and that even our existing arrangement with the UK running on Australian hardware was to change.
So began a further project to 'split' the UK and Australian operations and duplicate the computer hardware in the UK to run autonomously. So it was back to Australia for a while to prepare for the split, buying new hardware for the UK operation and performing the actual split over a weekend. The actual changeover itself was quite a big planning operation which took advantage of the time difference of the two countries to give extra time for the operation. We performed a backup on the Autralian system on Friday night, flew the tapes to the UK and then restored the tapes to the UK machine and tested ready for a start on Monday morning. Quite a weekend!
The further phases of the project (deploying SAP in the other manufacturing plants around the world) was put on indefinite hold by our new owners so life was concerned with maintaining and enhancing the present localised system. Nothing too spectacular here and, in my opinion, a very short sighted view from our new owners. So, when the chance came to take early retirement I grabbed it. (Would have preferred redundancy actually but not lucky enough to have the opportunity.)
I now live in the South East corner of Spain in the Province of Almería where there is around 320 days of sunshine each year. I think we would have preferred to live in or around Sydney, Australia as it is, perhaps, one of the nicest places in the world. However, the remoteness would have meant being even further away from our family, so we opted for a closer location.
Esendí
Esendí is the name of our house in Spain. If pronounced in Spanish (noting the accent on the í) it is the equivalent of "S 'n D" - for Stuart and Denise (my wife). We didn't realise until much later that it is also and anagram of Denise so it worked out quite well really.
We had been using 'snd' for some time in the UK before we moved to Spain so it seemed quite appropriate to carry it on, but this time with a Spanish twist.
Hope to see you all later.....
Stu January 2011