Boyer & Associates is pleased to announce that we have a new ERP project manager. Please join us in welcoming Lea (pronounced Lee) Lumley to the Boyer team.
Lumley has 12 years of experience with software implementations and 7 years of experience focused on project management.
“It was a slow, meandering move,” she said of her journey to a career in project management.
Lumley earned a bachelor’s degree in hotel and restaurant management from the University of Wisconsin-Stout. She quickly worked her way up to operations supervisor at the Courtyard by Marriott in Eden Prairie.
“I loved hotel management. I was very good at the customer-facing side of that and I really enjoyed it, but my schedule had to allow for the hotel being open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, which is difficult when you want to start a family,” she said. After a few years in the industry, Lumley and her husband agreed that a career change for her would be better for their future family.
She got her first job in the industry as an administrative assistant in 1994. After three years she moved to a consulting position at what is now Interdyn BMI. There she specialized in association management (iMIS) software.
Lumley got her first glimpse of Dynamics GP — and the Boyer team — in 2001 when she followed her boss to a new startup, Sunergi, Inc. She worked at Sunergi for nearly eight years as both a consultant and project manager for iMIS and Dynamics GP projects.
“It wasn’t that (ERP project management) was this passion of mine,” Lumley said. “It just slowly became natural for me. By nature I’m a very organized person and I like to coordinate things.”
Her detail-oriented personality fit well with project management, and she found herself taking on more of the project management aspect of the company’s implementations.
When her boss sold Sunergi, Lumley switched gears again. This time she worked as a government reporting specialist for Cetera Investment Services, where she helped the company prepare for tax season. Her team was responsible for producing 120,000 1099s every year, reporting to over 40 states and the IRS.
“There’s so much manual processing to make sure that everything is correct,” Lumley said. “Every state has their own agency and every state has different rules.”
Noting how complex taxes can get, Lumley was baffled that “there wasn’t a solid test process in place prior to tax season.” While companies often create a sandbox to test their new software before going live, they rarely do any type of trial run to prepare for tax season.
Using her background as a software consultant, Lumley was instrumental in implementing a mock 1099 run to help Cetera identify data issues months ahead of time. The result was much cleaner data and a smoother tax season.
She stayed at Cetera for 10 years until Jack Boyer approached her with a job offer. While she enjoyed her job, she had also grown accustomed to working from her home office in Becker, Minn. during the pandemic. When she learned that her company was about to bring people back to the office, she decided it was time for a change.
“I could use the skills I enjoy … and still be working from home and that excited me,” she said about the position at Boyer.
She looks forward to meeting Boyer’s clients. Lumley likes getting to know different people on each project and coordinating a successful implementation.
“Seeing all the different phases and all the different players and being able to take that in an organized fashion and in the end have something that will work for the customer … I think that’s exciting,” she said.
Working together closely on an implementation sometimes leads to lifelong friendships. Lumley is still friends with two people she met while working on an iMIS implementation for the University of Minnesota Alumni Association more than 20 years ago.
Projects that involve more players aren’t simply a bigger job to Lumley — They’re an opportunity to coordinate with even more skilled people.
“I like that group dynamic with everyone bringing their expertise and working together,” she said.
And if you’re on a call with her, you can expect her to be on time or even early. Lumley’s parents raised her and her brother to arrive early wherever they went. It quickly turned into a contest to see who would get there first whenever the four met up anywhere.
“You couldn’t be the last one or you’d be late even though you were early too,” she said.
When she’s not at home working, Lumley likes to spend time with her family at the lake.
Lumley and her husband, Charles, met at Becker High School. His sister was one of her best friends, but Lumley and Charles didn’t start dating until after college. Now they’ve been married 26 years and have two adult sons, Zach and Josh.
Whenever possible, Lumley and her family go up Fergus Falls to their own bit of paradise, a camper and pontoon on 5 acres of lakeshore property.
“It’s our go-to place. Every weekend we can we are camping up there. We invested in a pontoon … My favorite payment to make is my pontoon payment,” Lumley said.
When it’s too cold to camp, she likes to read the occasional book or tackle projects around the house.
