Steven Lomax , Bolton, United Kingdom

Steven Lomax – Additional career and project work information – December 2019

My CV is basically in three parts. For the most recent roles, please see page 3.

The first part details my career as a computer service engineer with Burroughs/Unisys and later as North Of England area supervisor and covers the period from 1980 until 2007 when I was offered an early retirement package by Unisys. There were six of us in the UK who did my job at that time and the Company wanted to lose two of them, so I volunteered. That role was titled Service Delivery Associate; sort of halfway between Field Engineering Group Leader and Customer Service Manager.

The role consisted of performing as a regular break/fix engineer on equipment mostly for the financial sector (ATMs, line printers, laser printers, counter-top terminals etc) carrying out first line field engineer support and administering other support to a group of around 20 field engineers, scheduling training courses as and when required and carrying out performance reviews. When I left Unisys I was Dell-certified on Desktops, Portables (laptops) and Servers. I was a member of our group’s 7x24 rota for Dell customers. Some of these contracts were quite demanding; for example some customers had 1hr response and 4hr fix cover 24hrs a day and 7 days a week.

In addition to the field work I would spend one week in four manning the telephone support desk in our Glasgow office. This role involved screening service calls placed by customers in order to reduce the workload on the engineers, and also to offer technical telephone support as required to engineers within the whole of the region.

The second part covers the period between March 2007 and November 2015. After accepting the early retirement package, during this period I changed career completely. I had already passed the first part of my LGV (Large Goods Vehicle) training and started work as an agency driver in April 2007. Later on I achieved the LGV C+E licence (articulated vehicles) and also the Category D licence for coaches and buses. I went to work for a couple of companies as a coach driver. Why did I make such a vast departure from my original career? Because driving large vehicles was something I had always fancied doing. And now I could.

And so to the third part. In November 2015 I decided to return to my original field of work when my CV was seen on the CV Library site by a procurement manager and I was offered work on my first contract. All the Unisys detail above is legacy stuff; now we start to get to the more modern, present-day kit.

That first contract was an upgrade project for Moss Brothers, the menswear retail chain. It involved upgrading the PCs from Windows XP to Windows 7 in all their shops nationwide. This was done by swapping out the existing PC core and using additional DVD software with a script to finalise the build. This work was carried out after 1800hrs and a typical store with four tills would take about 3 hours. It also involved a fair degree of travel. On one night I was in Cambridge, the next I would be in Cardiff.

My second project was for Tesco Retail in 2016. Although relatively simple in principle this was a huge undertaking and again had to be done outside the stores peak business hours; we would usually get to the store and start at about 1900hrs. The work involved replacing every hand-held barcode scanner in the shop with later versions to facilitate the implementation of Tesco Pay, an application similar to Apple Pay, in which the customer would download a QR code on to their smartphone and use this to pay for their shopping. The original barcode scanners could not read two-dimensional QR codes, hence the need for the upgrade. Not quite that simple though; each checkout position had to be modified with a special bracket to carry the scanner. Certain hardware mods had to be done to the physical checkout furniture itself. Drilling holes, fitting brackets, cutting down parts of the checkout guard to get the new stuff to fit. We had to carry large stocks of every single bracket used (eight different ones) along with stocks of other parts (cables, stands, scanners etc) which made up the various different configurations of till. These parts had to be carefully stock checked and maintained with replenishment from a central storage area. A typical mid-sized store would have up to 30 tills. And we did five stores a week, sometimes six. Each new scanner unit had to be configured and tested, and a software package called iAuditor was used by us to collect the site audit results on completion, complete with photographs of every single new installation. The audit was then compiled and the report exported to the necessary departments as soon as possible after the upgrade. (iAuditor is a mobile audit application which runs on a mobile phone or tablet).

In August 2017 I joined Concept IT Technology as a technical project support engineer. My first project with Concept was for Barclays Bank PLC. Again, it wasn’t too complicated. It involved disabling a device within their ATMs and took literally seconds to do, but of course these sites were spread all over England and Wales and having gained access to the site we had to gain further access to the mechanism actually inside the ATM safe. Quite a bit of diplomacy and flexibility required here then…

The device which needed to be disabled is called an ASD. Anti-skimming device. Basically this device detects if the card reader has been tampered with but Barclays had identified some sort of snag in the software so the devices had to be temporarily disabled. It was a simple matter of disconnecting the device and tying the cable back. Again, iAuditor was used to collate the information. But these sites were nationwide. Sometimes 500-600 miles a day.

At the end of August 2017 I started work on a Windows upgrade project for the Bank of Ireland. This was administered and organised by Diebold-Nixdorf. It involved swapping out the PC core in Post Office ATMs and finalising the build on site with a script and two DVDs. Diebold organised a training course in Milton Keynes which I attended. The project schedule required us to do nine ATMs a week; two sites a day and one on Friday. Friday afternoon was reserved for the return of the week’s used kit and the collection of nine new cores to be used the next week. All of this kit had to be kept at home for the week. Relatively straightforward but attention had to paid to security issues such as the disposal of the hard disk units from the old cores. These were removed from the PC and destroyed on site. All of these details were documented and photographed using iAuditor and the audit exported to Diebold within the same working day.

February 2018 saw the start of my biggest project to date.; the LBG SSW upgrade project. This was a Windows upgrade for Lloyds Banking Group, again administered by Diebold-Nixdorf. The requirement was that every ATM in the LBG estate would be upgraded to Windows 7 Pro before the end of November; some 4500 units in total, mostly NCR 58 and 66 series ATMs. The pilot for this project started in February; I was chosen to be one of the engineers carrying out this pilot scheme. Being the first examples of their kind in the UK, these 16 sites were very much a learning curve both for us and for LBG. The work consisted of a script-based upgrade using two DVDs and initially this work would occupy the whole of the working day. There would be a volume pilot later in the year (which I was also part of) and then provided all was in order, the main rollout would start in June.

During the ‘firebreak’ for the LBG project, I took part in the TSB IDM (IDM = Immediate Deposit Machine – used by customers to deposit cash and cheques) upgrade project for TSB. You may recall the press and TV coverage of TSBs system upgrade in March this year…not everything went as well as they had planned and some systems were down for a few days, but the IDM upgrades went OK. It was a script-based upgrade using USB flash drive software and this project also required the replacement of the customer keyboard (or EPP – Encrypted Pin Pad) and the existing hard drive. Again, special attention had to paid to the security of the removed items; the hard drives were destroyed on site and the EPPs were taken to a secure destruction facility in Liverpool.

May 2018 – Volume pilot of LBG SSW project (SSW is what LBG call their ATMs. It stands for ‘Self Service Workstation’).

June 2018 – Start of main rollout of SSW project. Each engineer had a schedule for five sites a week. All documented and photographed using iAuditor. On some sites with multiple ATMs we were required to run two upgrades in parallel. On any given day there could be up to 70 sites being upgraded simultaneously. This huge project was completed (on schedule) on the 26th November. On several occasions during the project I was tasked with the live training of new engineers; basically they would attend site with myself at the required start time (usually 0830) and we would go through the whole upgrade from start to finish, including all the iAuditor work.

I like to think that I looked after the engineers in my care; I made my myself available to them as a first-line support contact for the duration of the project because prior to working on this project some of them had never seen an NCR ATM before.

February – April 2019-Project ‘Doddle’ for Wm. Morrison Ltd. Installing ‘Doddle’ parcel return system in selected supermarkets nationwide.

August 2019 – Site audit work for WMA Ltd. Auditing IT installations in refurbished Co-Op stores and carrying out site WiFi surveys.

September 2019 – Windows upgrade project for Cennox Ltd. Upgrading ‘YourCash’ ATMs in shops, supermarkets, casinos etc. Again, nationwide.

I am out of contract now as of 23rd November. I operate my own limited company; Vemax IT Solutions Ltd, registered at Companies House, reg. number ** ** ** **. I am also registered for VAT, number 308611618. I have a fully business-insured vehicle and also the necessary public liability and indemnity insurance.

You may notice that there are some gaps between the various projects. I still work part-time as a coach driver for a local company and this employment was used to fill the gaps…..and still is.

Best Regards
Steven Lomax
Vemax IT Solutions Ltd.
Bolton
07932-606624