Andy Smothers

Technology Manager for 6 Amazon Facilities in SE LA including 1.6M sq foot Amazon fulfillment center in Carencro, LA (LFT1) - 4.2M sq foot Automated Robotics Facility (BTR1) - and 4 delivery station locations spread across the Baton Rouge, New Orleans and Northshore locations.

- Manage team of 24 IT professionals including engineers, project leads, technicians and equipment coordinators.
- Hired during build of site two weeks before site launch.

-Provided positive leadership in the midst of building roof collapse, fires, floods, hurricane damage and lack of IT personnel and still delivered the site on time and on target.
- Implemented dozens of best practice ITIL policies, processes & standards to improve delivery timelines, efficiency of operations, change management and team productivity.
- Volunteered for Amazon Interview Pod & Debrief processes and have completed 227 interviews with 89%+ inclination rate to date.

- Chosen to become an Amazon Bar Raiser candidate which is the top 1% of all Amazonians in terms of selection, hiring & integrity standards.
- Ran lead on Project RISE (Super Regional Project) covering 850+ associates with 100% completion rate to provide personnel tracking and career growth actions for evaluating performance & benchmark for measurable, sustainable and meaningful career goals, aspirations & certifications.
- Ran lead on Project Capstone (Global Project) covering all North America AMZN centers to provide baseline quality control, self-assessment, auditing and adhesion to best practice IT standards along with gap analysis & remediation activities. Goal was to ensure uniformity and conformity for all facilities in terms of IT standards.
- Provided mentoring & IT leadership tutelage to teams of IT engineers, associates and technicians to assist with career growth, career certifications, promotional documentation and work guidance.
- Worked hand in hand with Sr. Ops teams to ensure proper levels of IT inventory, coverage, staffing & solutions were in place to readily support all technical operational requirements for all site facilities on 24/7 basis.

• Responsible for leadership, oversight and operational management of entire IT department for ~$3B financial institution (26 branches and 2 Datacenters) located in Louisiana.
• Designed & built world-class Service Desk, NOC & SOC environments.
• Chair of Ops & Tech and Business Continuity / DR Committees.
• Primary responsibilities include mentoring IT personnel, refining business policies, defining direction/roadmap and goals of IT services, implementation of best practice ITIL principles, alignment of IT to Corporate goals, devising engineering & infrastructure improvements & streamlining overall operational efficiency.
• Created annual budget and developed comprehensive plan to accomplish company objectives while staying within budget.
• Worked closely with organizational leadership, including board of directors, to strategically affect direction of operations.
• Migrated from reactive to proactive IT Support/Helpdesk environment by implementation of new Helpdesk & NOC monitoring and alerting systems which drastically improved end-user experience & reduced outages by 300% month to month.
• Established performance goals for department and provided methods for reaching milestones.
• Managed team of 14 IT professionals with 3 direct reports.

• Developed network engineering and IT departmental standards including formalized policies for customer engagements, standardized assessment and IP topology baselines, pre-sales documentation procurement, team planning, configuration uniformity, deployment signoff procedures, and world-class UAT/QC guidelines.
• Designed, sold & deployed over 40 Enterprise Datacenter network solutions for large educational, government, aerospace, defense & cruise ship companies.
• Substantially increased revenue by 500% (per annum) & improved competency, certifications & overall performance of entire IT team.
• Developed and implemented performance improvement strategies and plans to promote continuous improvement
• Managed team of 7 network & telecom engineers 24/7

• Lead IT Engineering Manager for $20B financial company.
• Established strict standards of network configuration uniformity, design & engineering policies and procedures leading to a drastic improvement of enterprise stability, departmental competency and reputation for excellence.
• Designed and implemented from concept to finish the combined Cisco Nexus data center architecture, which is the standard platform for all IP transport communications for 450 branch locations & 5 data center facilities supporting ~10K users.
• Network was comprised of over five thousand components leveraging numerous routing protocols spanning over 20,000 IP address assignments.
• Reduced Telecom Expense Management spend by 50% (~$25M annually) through the implementation of inventory auditing, automating ordering and disconnect procedures with proper approvals and streamlining monthly reporting and OPEX spend analysis.
• Managed team of 27 direct reports with IT size of 175 personnel.

• Responsible for IT planning, budgetary tasks, road-map designs & reporting directly to Executive management personnel on departmental status requirements.
• Managed the daily responsibilities of 27 network engineers, all aspects of architecture engineering design & business operations.
• Reduced site outages from approximately 42 outages per month to less than 2 by implementation of tested fail-over router configurations, uniformity of procedures & enhanced accountability within department.
• Reduced expense on Cisco Smartnet process by $385k per annum by developing an in-house spare part depot with preconfigured, ready-to-deploy Cisco equipment.