Ron has an incredibly deep background, having started his career in a control room—right on the factory floor—during his college co-op days. It was there that he learned the value of listening to the daily challenges facing the operations team. From his first full time job at a chemical plant, he was responsible for specifying control systems, equipment, and instruments; researching and selecting appropriate vendors; installing that equipment; and optimizing the performance of both the system and the equipment. According to Ron “I’ve had the privilege of being immersed in every aspect of the automation solution—from new installation to advanced control schemes to troubleshooting and now optimization using data.”
In his role today, he possesses both the vision to design systems and the ability to connect with operators and maintenance personnel. He understands how the process runs and listens to the problems and challenges that operators face—especially if they are working with a less than optimally engineered solution. As an advocate of the operator, he considers his job to be getting rid of unnecessary footsteps, so operators can concentrate on more productive things. Because of his experience on the OT side, he constantly looks for opportunities to operate the process and the equipment more consistently while mitigating potential compliance and safety events with the proper controls and information.
Whether getting on the roof or going to the boiler house, Ron is not afraid of digging into key parts of the process to understand where problems may arise. His expertise is in evaluating and then drawing relationships between the massive amounts of disjointed data typically available, in order to drive a tangible value for the business—such as energy, yield, or first pass quality improvements. Whether the customer is interested in improving batch efficiency, releasing a batch faster, equipment effectiveness, reliability, OEE, or some other operational outcome, we will work toward that goal and provide the metrics to monitor our progress.
As a company, we are looking to engage in long term relationships with our customers to deliver results—and we stay to make sure we get those results. We identify the value in collaboration with our customers and then implement systems, technologies, and approaches that create or exceed that value.
