This week, Richard Brummer, Senior Manager of Quality Assurance will be retiring after 12.5 years with PAR. This is the second part in a series where PAR staff share their memories and well wishes on Richard’s retirement.

Did you miss Part 1? Click here.

For months, every time I walked into Richard’s office, my eyes were drawn to something strange, and I couldn’t fathom why he had it. Perched beside his monitor is a section of a tree trunk about a foot and a half in length and about six inches in diameter. Glued to this piece of wood is an assortment of brightly-colored plastic bugs. For a long time, I just thought that he really liked the outdoors and it was his alternative to a painting of a tree. I asked about it after a while, and Richard explained that one of his many responsibilities is to find errors and inconsistencies in our digital products during development. Any issue he and the team finds is logged in a central place that is used to communicate with the programmers. Issues are called ‘bugs’ in the programming world. Those bugs are recorded in a log. A bug log. This whole time, he’s had a bug log in his office.

-Amy Kovacs, Research Assistant

 

Richard Brummer brought a bottle of champagne to every meeting during the development of PARiConnect. Here, he opens that bottle in the PAR parking lot on January 2, 2013, the day of the PARiConnect launch.

For the past 12 years, Richard has been passionately committed to ensuring that all PAR products contain no errors or quality problems when they are published. And he has done an exceptional job leading this effort and achieving his objective more than 99% of the time. He has developed innovative processes and procedures to evaluate and test product quality, and has trained others to be able to meet the same standards.

Richard also led the effort to design and develop PARiConnect and ensure that it was completed and launched in early 2013. He has continued to be a very strong champion for the ongoing development and evolution of the PARiConnect platform and experience, and has spent endless hours teaching our Customers and others about it. PARiConnect would not be the same without all of the major contributions he has made to it.

-R. Bob Smith, III, PhD, Chairman and CEO

 

Richard has made so many valuable contributions to PAR over the years, particularly his tireless work to help build PARiConnect into a powerful and user-friendly platform. He also worked on a daily basis to ensure that every product published by PAR was error free. But what I’ll remember most is his commitment to doing things the right way. He has always been consistent and steadfast in his beliefs. He fought on behalf of our customers and did a great job of keeping our Customer Support department informed. For that and many other reasons, we’ll miss him dearly. Thanks for everything, Richard!

-Daniel McFadden, Manager of Customer Support

 

Richard has always inspired me to think differently about things. His Innovation Academy was an amazing course that made us really question protocol and view things in a different light. Not only did it help us, but it helped our Customers and made PAR an even better company. I’ll miss Richard’s honesty and wit as well as his almost daily visits to our department (often with treats from his wife). I hope that he truly enjoys his retirement as it is well deserved. He will be missed greatly.

-Teri Lyon, Senior Technical Support Specialist

 

Richard and the accounting staff during a company celebration.

I will miss Richard’s impromptu visits. He is one of the few employees who prefers face to face meetings and walks through the south building regularly. He is very personable and I enjoy his visits and his good nature and sense of humor. I’ll also miss Sandi’s baking. Oh, and he has been extremely helpful with our fixed asset inventories!

-Karen Clifford, Senior Accountant

Did you miss Part 1? Click here. Come back tomorrow for Part 3.