| |
Associate Spotlight: Brian Hessel
By Robert Sklar, Director of Client Services, Mahwah, NJ
Brian Hessel is a Senior Technical Consultant with RSG. He joined the Mahwah office in August 2004. Brian is the primary technical resource on several accounts. In this role, he is responsible for all data consolidation and verification, custom report creation, and Sigma EncoreSM configuration. He is also a valuable team member and a resource for large or complex accounts.
Brian works closely with the client services staff in order to fully understand the scope of each account. Because of his thorough understanding of each account, he can offer the most efficient solution possible. “Every problem is different,” Brian explains. “We have to remain flexible in our approach to find a solution to a problem or to provide custom functionality that the client wants.”
“Brian is 100 percent dedicated, committed, and disciplined to his job, and he serves his clients with the same dedication,” writes Sherry Kranzler, Director of Technical Operations of RSG-Mahwah. “He is a leader in his ideas on how to approach the tasks at hand as well as a resource for his co-workers.”
Brian mostly uses PL/SQL and Java in his day-to-day activities. He uses PL/SQL for tasks specific to data, such as data extracts. Each field on a carrier’s data file is mapped to a data item in the RSG database using SQL. PL/SQL is also used to create data items based upon other data items in the database, such as Report Lag or Policy Period. Brian uses Java to build custom Sigma EncoreSM functionality and for real-time data validation. “A Sigma EncoreSM user presses a button,” Brian explains, “and at that moment the system decides whether to accept or reject that user’s change. User access, row-level security, and validation rules all collide in order to ensure the integrity of that specific change. Taking a requested task from conception to functional system component is one of the rewarding aspects of this job.”
Very early on in his career with RSG, Brian became active on several RSG committees. He is Mahwah’s branch representative on RSG Operations’ Change Management committee. Brian also works with steering committees for data consolidation, technical resource, and global reporting.
Prior to joining RSG, Brian was a data analyst with Towers Perrin. He designed and executed system test plans for in-house applications. Before that, Brian was a software test engineer with IBM. Working with DB2 and MS Cluster Server, he performed failover testing on consolidated application servers. Brian holds a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin at Eau Claire.
Brian will tell you he is “from the land of snow and dairy, the Badger state.” Whether back home in Wisconsin or in New York’s Hudson Valley, he can be found outdoors. He enjoys hunting, fishing (he builds his own fishing tackle), target shooting, and archery. When unarmed, he stays on the trail and calls it hiking. When not in the woods, Brian enjoys tinkering with his cars. He calls it “performance upgrade.” We are very thankful to have Brian upgrading our performance as well.
|
