Hearts Afire

welcome to Hearts of fire the podcast for the team at fireworks Global we're working every day to save and enhance lives through the healing power of human cells and tissue

I am Emmanuel casasola guest host for today and Welcome to our special Veterans Day episode uh and we're here with our very O'Neil Houser how are you doing Neil I'm doing well all right good I'm glad you're here um you know we do these things so people get to know you know our employees and you know first question is really simple who are you and what do you do for the organization well I'm a data analyst and I do all things data and our latest Endeavor is data visualizations we do a lot of analytical we do a lot of pulling data from various different systems and joining data up to to serve different functions for the if if these a the uh Quality Control Department in a variety of different people that just need boobs and gobs of data we produce a lot of data here don't we yes we do and so we've got over like 600 different reports and about 45 different visualizations out there already awesome wow so that that takes a lot of uh you know brain power Manpower and machine power right takes a lot of it's a team effort and it takes a lot of good thinking sometimes you have to think outside the box to solve it because not every solution comes with every piece of software that was bought and paid for so how long have you been with uh BBG I've been here almost eight years eight years wow I bet you've seen a lot of evolution and changes I've seen a lot of changes we we've mostly migrated from a regular pc into virtual machines we we see a lot of high-end technology we've got a lot of high-end software that we use within the company and so it's a pleasure to work with the quality tools yeah and given the nature of our business it's important to get quality data out fast yeah it's not just having data it's having the right data and at the right time right that's correct yeah no that's cool so you know this being our Veterans Day episode I kind of want to touch a little bit on your military background so you were in the Air Force right yes sir I was uh 20 years in the air force uh served about three different major jobs uh one of them was a what they call a BB stacker or an ammo troop and then I got into uh helicopter flight engineering and then I went back into Munitions as a Munitions of Specter and insert over in the Gulf War and then when it came back from the Gulf War I served as a Force recruiter wow with all the Northeast Texas and stuff where I recruited and then my final year and a half I served as a nurse recruiter mostly serving out of Austin and had offices in San Antonio but most of the time I spent in the government vehicle driving if you have a special like a favorite job that you had well in the Air Force well I worked on this very special project uh that we made an Amphitheater with real live aircraft oh that's horrible and put them up on pedestals with lighting and and stuff it was one of the first of its kind to be able to do that we they've always had static displays but we put them up on 30-foot pedestals and wow people could go up and look and see and touch and everything else where was that it was at uh England Air Force Base which is now been turned into a civil airport but it was in Alexandria Louisiana I wow that is really cool it's pretty neat I've got the whole book of step-by-step pictures that we took as we went along but it was all all the famous Flying Tiger aircraft oh that is f-105 so in A7 and so every every build had a story inside of a story yeah I remember being a kid and going to like air shows and stuff like that especially here with you know the airport spaces we had one of my hobbies was building model airplanes and boats and ships and cars and stuff so we used to go to the dime store and get low models put them together and you know either race them or use some firecrackers if they didn't turn out too good that's the firecracker one right yeah the ones that actually ignited and went up in Flames but we had you know we had a good time as kids and I grew up in New Orleans and uh then I came to San Antonio I was stationed here for at least six years is that what brought you to San Antonio with zero station here that was stationed here in Bonita base back in the day okay back in there in separately uh or the late 90s and I'm sorry late 70s okay and then uh then I went to Phoenix area and served over in Phoenix for about five years went to a short state in Korea and then I was assigned at England Air Force Base and then from it's been about five years at England Air Force Base and about seven months over a desert storm over in Saudi Arabia yeah and then when I got back I got my recruiting assignment and went to Greenville Texas Greenville Texas wow this is about 50 miles Northeast of Dallas yeah so I put about 150 people in the Air Force and gave away about 600 scholarships yeah and just made a difference in the community anyone come out in your mind like one that you were like you know just pops in your mind as far as recruits yeah yeah I've had several several good candidates that that uh that put in one of them was a former employee here wow Greg Davis I put him in there for us so that's cool it's been pretty neat so what brought you to BBG then I mean you saw a lot basically it was an opportunity uh to get together with a uh you know a moderate size organization but I had friends and buddies that worked here and they said hey why don't you apply and so I did and of course my expertise was in data database management and and data uh pulling yeah in report building and what I mean I guess what uh attracted you I guess other than just the referral was it what we were doing as an organization or did you have any idea of what we did as an organization I'm not well yeah I knew the blood bank because I I you know gave blood many a time before that at different uh events so uh but I never thought about being an I.T at the time yeah you know but it was a good opportunity because I've always done Consulting work and and been in the data management business and things so it was a good fit for me yeah what's your favorite thing about your job just using the great tools that we have we have really cool tools to be able to pull data from anywhere and reassemble it and make really cool looking reports which one's your favorite tool your personal favorite personal favorites right I use altering switch explain altery because it's kind of it's a company that's been around for 20 30 years or something but they've fine-tuned it to make it a great tool to you know basically assemble queries from different languages and and piece it all together yeah and then I'll put it to wherever you want it to go if you wanted to email you wanted to to uh to build a spreadsheet or you want to put it back into a data set into a database you can do that so the languages don't actually have to be the same this tool kind of merges it all together and then all together and it's it's very fun because it's not like you just do the same thing everything's new and different and stuff and there's always a way to to find a solution for a very complex data issue and sometimes it could be as simple as we got some data that has bad rows extra punctuation that don't need to be there

proper case in an uppercase and lowercase and so if you want to clean it up is a couple of clicks and a couple of check boxes wow yeah and so sometimes some data doesn't join up equally when you got mixed case and certain things in another system you got proper case so in order to fix it you have to make both sides equal yeah so that they can join on certain things so does your mind have to work in a specific type of way like when you talk to somebody and they're like they're like I need a report and you're you're having to like decipher what it is that they need you have to pull the answer side of them because it's hard it's hard to read minds but but typically you know what I do with people when I consult with them is basically saying what is it you're trying to solve what is it with this data you specifically need to solve whatever business problem you're trying to solve and that's usually I tackle that you know you're trying to you know you might not know all the particular fields that you might need but you know I can help you with that what I need to know is what you think it should look like as the end product yeah how do you think serving in the Air Force has you know kind of prepared you I guess for what you do on a day-to-day basis it's it's given me the discipline to understand working with different types of people and different skill sets and available balance uh under different austere conditions under combat conditions and everything else which we can if you can do that you can do just about anything yeah you know but the idea is usually you didn't have a whole lot to work with and you just made stuff happen you improvised and job done so it needed to be resourceful and then work with different people and then under under a certain amount of pressure which here we may think it's pressure you've dealt with pressure in a much different climate it's it's you know it's one of them where people all have a common sense of urgency and this is urgency a regular job is very different yeah so it's it's fun and it's exciting but more importantly we we really love helping the community with saving lives and and helping with helping each other as we're like one big family in every Department we we got friends all over the complex stuff yeah what do you think something about your job that would surprise just the day-to-day BBG employee um we basically have a large amount of requests that come in and we have to basically say okay well if it's really important that's going to save somebody's life we'll take that one to the top yeah but if it's something nice to have it's just put in a routine bucket yeah so but the when we we pride ourselves in trying to turn on a quality product as quickly as we can yeah but some of those are a little bit more complex and you don't always have the bits and pieces that you need at first you have to go acquire it make up or put some kind of interface in place to make all the mechanisms happen was there one uh situation where you really and that report actually really made a big difference in the way we operated we have one that I built but hold on about seven years now the inventory and operations report that's when it looks like I've got a report that tells me how many times somebody's looked at something and that's the way that that's the one that's the most used wow it is it's you know everybody calls it up at the beginning of the day saying what's on hand how hard do we have to work to catch up and it tells us the levels what's being shipped out quantities being imported yeah what's being exported so it's a jam packed but it it wasn't written in five minutes it took a long time to build and there's several thousand lines of code behind it to make it work it's not nothing simple on that report it it just looks simple because it fits on one piece of paper yeah so you know just around that the the air force uh you know what was your rank when you left the airport Master Sergeant Master starting so where I'm moved to is a large retirement community and we have about 150 veterans wow and you know we've probably got about 60 Air Force guys up there yeah we all have fun together we playing in a big golf tournament in a couple of weeks so that's a pretty neat that's cool where's the golf days at airport sand no no no we have a we have our own coffee yeah you're a golf person nice so it's it's right in the center of Sam are you a big golfer oh yeah yeah I've been playing for since I was nine years old so wow playing a long time and I played throughout my Air Force career played a lot of golf so nice that's a good way to get out and enjoy the weather right it should be beautiful it's fantastic but or I guess more business decisions can get done around the golf course than it does just sit around the dining facility or so well I you know I want to thank you for your service but you know not only to you know BBG but your service in general and uh I I want to say to all the veterans at powerbridge Global thank you for your service but uh is there anything else that you want to kind of you know comment on or say about your experience here at BBG no it's it's wonderful working with wonderful people it's it's really neat to be able to to get some stuff done and see many of our phlebotomists that work really hard every time we do the employee blood drive I go and chat with them yeah and let them know I'm at the guy at the other yeah you know putting the data together to give them their their credits and stuff so I want to make sure that you know that everybody gets whatever they were entitled to get yeah you make sure that it gets through properly and gets processed Timely awesome well thanks Neil and uh this concludes this episode of Arts of fire thanks for listening oh thank you

executive producers of Hearts of fire are Heather Hughes and Jay pagenski your directors David King with technical assistance from Matt Flores our logo was designed by Roberto Esquivel our host is Adrian Mendoza if you have an idea for hearts of Fire please feel free to email us hearts of fire at bioridge global.org