Mike Cook

Position: Director of Major Events

Biography:

Mike has over 30 years in the construction industry working with Raitz Construction in Ohio for 6 years, building custom homes before moving to Arizona and going to work for EJM Development. Mike started with Schuck and Sons in 1980 as an estimator and quickly became the Chief Estimator. In 1984 he created the first of the electronic bids used at Schuck. He also created the first network for Schuck in 1987 using a Novell network and Timberline Precision Estimating. In 1992 Mike was moved from estimating to head up the newly created IT department. Schuck went live with Axapta 3.0 in March of 2006. He organized and chaired the Southwest Region Axapta Users Group in 2006 and was elected to the AXUG Board of Advisors in 2007.

We went live with Axapta March 2006. We are a large Construction Company located in Glendale, AZ with subsidiaries in Salt Lake City and Phoenix. In 2003 we had gross revenues of 97 million and in 2007 we had gross revenues of 179 million. With that much growth we quickly out grew our old software. We looked around at other software and chose Axapta because of it's versatility. We have our own carpenters, lumber yard, door shop, truss plant, glu lam beam plant and stucco company doing both retail and wholesale and doing 'in house' payroll each week. With all of that, we needed a software that could hang with us. It was a committee decision headed by me to go with Axapta. In March of 2005 we had just built the house for ABC's Extreme Makeover and Microsoft asked us to to be their poster child for an ERP Extreme Makeover. As we were going live, our local Microsoft office asked if I would be interested in getting the ball rolling for an AXUG chapter in Arizona. I agreed and the rest is history.

I believe the board, above all else, has to believe in what they are working for. That person must adopt the Mission and Vision of the organization and I whole heartedly agree with the principles of the organization. Each board member must have their own vision as to what the organization should be achieving so that he/she can contribute to the direction of the organization, but be able to promote those ideas of the organization even if they don't coincide with that individual's ideas. In layman terms 'TEAM PLAYER'. I want to see the organization be a huge success and I want to be a part of that success. I see AXUG as an important tool of the Axapta software and for the life of me cannot understand why anyone would put out as much money as Axapta costs and not spend the small amount it costs to join AXUG.