Ali Alfaraj

In this position, I am working at several sites and I am providing IT Services to leading Oil & Gas companies in KSA. Clients include: MARAFIQ, SABIC, SASREF, SAMREF, Saudi Aramco, S-Chem, and others.


Key job responsibilities:


• Installing and Configuring Software Applications (OSIsoft PI System) for our clients. This is a complex system that consists of several servers, and it retrieves Real-Time and Historical data from equipment in Oil/Gas/Chemical/Power/Water plants.


• Installing and Configuring Matrikon to retrieve data from PLC and different type data sources (Siemens, SCADA, Yokogawa, Delta, DCS, WonderWare Historian, SQL, etc).

• Providing IT Services for our clients such as: PI Server Migration, Implementing PI Server High Availability, scheduling automated PI Server backups daily using Windows Task Scheduler, troubleshooting errors and bad data, and providing end user support at client site and remotely, backfilling data using CMD commands and PowerShell scripts and automating the process, configuring network/security setting for PI System components, etc.


• Creating complex Excel Reports that integrates with the PI System and cleansing the large amount of data from duplicates and bad data.


• Creating Process Graphics (Dashboards) showing Real-Time and Historical data for equipment in the plant using PI Process Book and PI Vision.

• Working on VMware and setting up Windows Server for testing purposes.

Worked as a reseptionist for about three months at DoubleTree by Hilton Dhahran. In this position I was able to greatly develop my customer service skills.

Key job responsibilities:

• Taking bookings and maintaining the reservations calendar.
• Checking in and checking out guests.
• Collecting payments, issuing bills, and posting charges.
• Responding to complaints and inquiries that guests and visitors have in a professional manner.
• Auditing cash drawers and maintain daily log of overages and shortages.
• Resolving technical problems that guests face (fixing broken key cards, internet, etc).
• Taking calls and transferring them if needed to the correct department.

Had IT training for one month at Albassam. In this position, I got a pretty good feel of how an IT department operates and how to troubleshoot common issues that end users face.

Key responsibilities:

• Providing technical support and troubleshooting for employees.
• Using Active Directory to create new user accounts and reset passwords.
• Collating the IT assets data for all company computers (serial number, brand, model, Windows activation status, etc).
• Working on printers (configuring, downloading/installing drivers, and replacing cartridges).
• Compiling all the IT related requests in a database for tracking and bookkeeping purposes.

Had training for 6 months at Dolf Technologies. Most of the tasks were related to Sales and Recruitment. However, I got to learn about Digital Transformation and worked a little bit on Vuforia Studio, which is a software that is used to develop Augmented Reality apps.

Key responsibilities:

• Posting job openings online (Bayt, Indeed, and LinkedIn), shortlisting CV's, and taking part in interviewing candidates.
• Searching for potential clients that are interested in E-learning content and/or Digital Transformation solutions and services.
• Making Sales calls, following up with potential clients, creating a Sales sheet, and writing business proposals.
• Giving PPT presentations at numerous client sites (clients included Saudi Aramco, Saudi Electricity Company, MiSK, KFUPM, and IAU).

Kellogg’s Voice Enables Coupon Data Analytics (University Graduation Project):

The objective of this project was to program the Amazon Echo device (Alexa) to help the American company Kellogg's with its business. Kellogg's provided us access to their coupon database which we connected to Alexa using an API in an Oracle server. The idea was to make users ask Alexa questions (through a voice-command) about Kellogg’s coupons, and then Alexa would speak out the answers by retrieving them from the database. We formulated and inputted queries in Oracle to retrieve relevant results from the database, and we placed the API links appropriately within a node.js code in Lambda (function within Amazon Web Services). As a result, we successfully made Alexa generate the needed responses from the database which ultimately helped Kellogg’s better streamline their business models.

This was a complex team project consisting of ten students, and I was the one who led the project to success by completing its most crucial parts. I figured out how to connected Alexa to the database and I wrote the majority of the node.js code to make Alexa speak out the answers. This was a big accomplishment, cooperating as a team and completing a project from scratch; we had to do our own research to figure out how to execute a project that even our professor did not have a good feel for.