Stephen Flach's Career in Information Technology


While attending Washington University in St. Louis, I worked summers at Barnes Hospital designing electrical instrumentation for the Medical School research staff. After graduating with an MS in Electrical Engineering, I worked for Monsanto Agricultural Products, Research Division in St. Louis, doing designing data collection systems for laboratory instrumentation. This involved everything from chromatography, NMR, Mass Spectrometer, instruments to plant growth chambers, farm equipment and "grass height meters". After managing the Network group and computer facilities group, I moved on to California.

I took a position as Manager of Computing Services for Affymax Research Institute. Affymax was a startup to commercialize the genechip created at Stanford. The idea was to use the genechip at Affymax to screen drug leads and have a subsidiary, Affymetrix create a laboratory instrument based upon the chip. Affymax was bought by Glaxo and I was then working for a 50,000 person company rather than a 200 person company, so I moved on to Applied Materials.

At Applied I started in the Global PC and Office Automation group and took on the desktop deployment part of the SAP implementation project. Applied was moving from ASK ManMan to SAP. After that I moved to the Etch Product Division of Applied to manage IT for the Etch Division. The Director of the Global PC department had moved on to Actel Semiconductor and asked me to join him there, so I moved on to Actel, a manufacturer of Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA).

At Actel I managed the Information Technology part of IS, the Business Systems Analysis was the other part. I joined Actel in the middle of a project to install JD Edwards as the ERP system running on an IBM AS/400. After that there were the usual problems of the late 90's, Y2K, e-mail migration to Exchange, network improvement, immersing data security and data sharing. FPGA design and manufacture combines chip design with software design, because you need to furnish software to program the FPGA. So I was supporting both the chip design group and the software design groups. It was a mixed Windows, Solaris, HP-UX environment. I installed a EMC Symetrix Storage Area Network using fiber channel to share data among the chip and software designers. After that things settled down and became routine. A new opportunity arose to work for Caliper Technologies, a microfluidic startup, so I moved on.

At Caliper I was the IT Director for the Business Systems and Information Technology sections. Caliper developed a chip with very small channels in it to perform chemical analysis and separations on nanoliter sized samples. This was commercialized by HP (later Agilent) as the BioAnalyzer 2100. Caliper developed the technology for use in high throughput screening (HTS). This is used by pharmaceutical companies to screen drug leads and determine which ones look promising for further development. About 3 million leads need to be screened to find a profitable drug, so doing this screening with very small amounts of compound is a tremendous benefit. I installed a Manufacturing Execution System (MES) to track the manufacture of microfluidic chips and monitor quality and yield. Caliper purchased Zymark in Hopkinton, MA and renamed the new entity Caliper Life Sciences. As Zymark already had a fully functioning finance, sales, marketing and manufacturing site in Hopkinton, it was decided to concentrate the G&A functions in Hopkinton. Not wanting to move there, I accepted an offer from the former COO of Caliper to join him at Nanosys.

Nanosys was another startup founded to commercialize nanotechnology, particularly inorganic nanotech, nanowires and quantum dots. Being a startup, I created a "virtual" IT department using consultants, vendors, and contractors to staff the IT functions only when they are needed. The first project was to replace Quickbooks with a more robust ERP system. Oracle Financials 11i was the choice and it was implemented in 3 months. There was a lot of R&D being done, so most purchasing was for chemicals and equipment, so we implemented Oracle iProcurement to let everyone create PO Requisitions on line. Project Accounting was implemented to track numerous government and partner contracts and track expenses. After that, the major thrust was to improve data security because the Intellectual Property (IP, also known as patents and trade secrets) was a valuable part of Nanosys' assets. Firewalls, data protection and backup were all strengthened. Oracle Manufacturing was implemented to prepare for product manufacturing as Nanosys proceeded to create nanotech products. Unfortunatley, the economic downturn and the propensity of product development to take longer than expected caused a shortage of cash and the company downsized. As the company shrank, there was less need for a Director of IT, and very little new was being done in IT, so I left Nanosys.

Currently I am looking for a position where I can apply my experience gained in large companies and in startups to develop an efficient IT department that offers good customer service and advances the needs of the business.