Problem: the NPD and process development teams were using an antiquated project management style which was evidently, measurably ineffective, relying on a simple Excel spreadsheet to only track action items - no clear goals & objectives, order of operations, stage-gates, milestones, nor a commercialization checklist of any sort. The system relied heavily on tribal knowledge and was becoming to come apart at the seams due to employee turnover, succession planning, and more.

Solution & Key Success: designed and implemented a formal project management system that maintained an entrepreneurial style of development necessary for frequent scope changes driven by changing business and customer needs

Implemented a hybrid Waterfall & Lean project management methodology, formalizing a loose but objective stage-gate outline but completing frequent sprints and reducing waste

Formalized a commercialization checklist

Incorporated very basic MS Project drafting system for assigning tasks via MS Teams Planner, able to set task dependencies and establish a commercialization checklist

Reduced amount of unnecessary follow-up via automated notifications in MS Teams; savings product management (project management) hundreds of hours

Problem: The largest of 3 business groups had pitched a project ten years prior, and again one year prior, unsuccessfully. The project was a vertical product integration going from our bread-and-butter resin product line to a downstream emulsion product using the resin.

Key Business Success: Seeing the updated project pitch I noticed a critical error in estimations, artificially suppressing the profitability estimations. With a deeper dive and a carefully modeled and simulated product line projection, not only were we able to successfully extend our manufacturing capabilities into aqueous resin emulsions but also filled a critical need for a key customer by eliminating a single-source contract manufacturer in their supply chain - allowing both the customer and us to improve margins.

Built new, more sophisticated and transparent model for ROI estimation, including risk assessment

Created the project roadmap

Led business justification and pitched project to executive team, including CEO.

Led 2-year commercialization project from ideation through scale-up trials.

After leaving the company shortly before commercialization I later learned the product line was extremely successful and profitable.

Problem: Product specifications we being drafted and approved under a painfully slow and highly inaccurate process, leading to immense internal confusion, several customer complaints, and even customer claims.

Solution & Key Success: Radically improved the product specification drafting accuracy, revision, and version control process while concurrently reducing transcription errors in customer-facing documentation by creating a portfolio approval system with a collection of linked documents.

Reduced costly transcription errors by 80%

Improved approval speeds by 50% by implementing an automated DocuSign approval workflow

The successful system led to it now being looked at for incorporation into the global product development, process development, and quality teams - including across other company divisions

Saving multiple teams hundreds of hours per year and reduced customer complaints (FITs) substantially

Successfully led the solicitation, technology transfer, approval, and negotiation of a supply agreement with a contract manufacturer for a key produce vs. outsource opportunity

Saved company hundreds of thousands of dollars per year in direct cost to manufacture

More importantly, substantial marginal opportunity gained on a sold-out equipment line contributed to adding millions of dollars to the bottom line and expanded our customer base

Problem: The business, including the executive team, were struggling with profitability for the past few years. Most plants were sold-out, running 24/7. KPIs were traditionally tracked only at gross margin percent. This antiquated perspective meant being blind to low sales price (per unit) products with higher cycle times taking the place of higher sales price, lower margin %, and/or shorter cycle time products being overlooked despite being immensely more profitable.

Solution & Key Success: Successfully convinced the business to change perspective of margin % KPI basis to margin throughput ($ per hour) and marginal opportunity tradeoff analysis for sold-out production lines.

One kick-off example was substantially increasing pricing for a long-term (10+ year) tier 1 customer and product line. The customer ultimately accepted the price increases of +50% and the business is ongoing today, 6 years later.

I drove the project for evaluating our entire product portfolio and finding nominal/high margin, low sales price, long cycle time products and performing a tradeoff analysis for marginal opportunity cost.

Finally, despite a misunderstanding thinking that we could not fetch price increases (pre-COVID) to core parts of our business, I implemented a baseline target pricing and margin throughput target with recommended price increases. Coupled with a competitive landscape assessment with known production line scales and estimated comparable costs to produce, the majority of customers accepted the price increases.

Not only do successful price increases drop straight to the bottom line, but when operating a sold-out plant it brings substantial marginal opportunity for any customers that do not accept the increases - allowing for new business development & growth, and reducing strain on the plants and supply chain. Many intangible benefits are also realized as a result.

Problem: The company had already purchased land in the Gulf region to take advantage of geographic benefits near to petrochemical production, rail access, and shipping ports. What businesses (of 3) and product lines should we expand? 2 years of plant design work with loose objectives yielded quotes of $600 million to build. Business plans furnished from the business manager had no scope of percentage chance of success, conditional equipment capability/infrastructure costing options, dynamic capacity constraints, nor any optimization. Each business plan was taking 2+ days to manually do assessments.

Solution & Key Success: Built a “mini-ERP” Excel workbook.

Incorporated all necessary conditional equipment cost adders based on business plan product lines requiring the equipment.

Output of business plan equipment utilization percentages based on the business plan input; required a master product line table, by production train, including batch size, cycle time, and even anticipate cleaning regime interruptions.

Time series key raw material price range estimates, including conditional pipeline vs. rail supply based on infrastructure options selected; required a master product data table BOM (bill of materials, product formulas) of all product lines.

Time-series key raw material price range estimates were fitting to appropriate distributions for use in simulation, yielding valuable output probability distributions.

Incorporated conditional inter-plant region intermediate product supply cost adders (freight & packaging when needing to make intermediates in a different plant)

Key deliverable output of PBP & ROI estimates.

This project yielded unfavorable results with PBP of 30+ years except under the scenario of expanding only one of the 3 businesses (out of 3) but brought clarity and perspective to the global executive team.

6 years later, this plant is currently under construction under the only favorable option identified above; only 1 of 3 businesses being expanded. A testament to the accuracy of the model.

Year 2 of my career, I was asked to lead the capital project from design through construction for a technology transfer

BASF, agrochemical active intermediate

13 step synthesis/unit operations (batch reactors, distillation, centrifugation, drying)

New 4-story structure, 2 new reactors, refurbished 9 others

Refurbishment of 80 storage tanks for raw materials and intermediate process holding steps

8 years after leaving the company (after successful commissioning), humbled to learn that the business was very successful and brought tremendous profits to the company

Under coaching from exceptionally talented engineering director, I led the boots-on-the-ground design and construction management efforts while my manager was working on another business-critical project in Texas.

Starting from grass we built the plant with new PLC controls, hot oil systems, vacuum systems, batch reactors, flaking equipment line, and ancillary utility systems expansions.

Not only was this plant built remarkably quickly, but it included tremendous, focused value-engineering efforts that still led to a nearly flawless production start-up.

The plant is operating at full capacity to this day.

This plant had a confirmed payback period (PBP) of 6 months. One of my fondest career memories, leading construction crews, mentoring junior engineers, and more.

Problem: Antiquated sample request submission and fulfillment system, severely behind competition capability. Customers and sales team had no transparency into request statuses. Logging required manual entry which resulted in many transcription errors and missing or incomplete entries - unable to accurately analyze any data. Relied on tribal knowledge from one 14-year employee.

Solution & Key Success: Overhauled and automated the sample request and logging system with a custom VBA-scripted dashboard and SharePoint logging system that included automated email notifications to customers and stakeholders, conditional submission permissions, dynamic hyperlinking of tracking numbers to carrier websites, packing slip and invoice creation, a product master list with pertinent information such as holds and quarantines, and much more

Problem: Financial reporting was being performed by the business manager and would take 10 hours per week to run several SAP reports to be manually collated and input into PowerPoint presentations for the executive team. This led to many transcription and grouping errors unless someone carefully reviewed for tens of hours, each month.

Solution & Key Success: Automated SAP reporting templates and transcription reports into MS Excel. Further built the Excel workbook with pre-determined, static data tables & formulas for grouping. Formatting for dropping into PowerPoint was consistently retained month to month and quarter to quarter.

Reduced hours worked by the business manager by 40 hours per month

Accuracy and consistency tremendously improved

Accolades received from the CEO and executive team for fixing this frustrating issue of 10+ years

Problem:

Solution & Key Success: Relating primarily to fatty acids which are subject to price-sensitivity via dynamic market conditions. Fatty acids were a core raw material for several products in multiple production plants globally and contained varying carbon chains of value to each product. I developed a total product-line raw material ‘master batcher’ simulator and optimizer for the purchasing and manufacturing teams to minimize cost and improve quality by way of extracting the key components of each raw material stream. This was essential to improving both purchasing short and long-term planning

Problem: Free Trade Agreement requests from customers for supplied products was a lengthy, manual process. Product management spent 100+ hours per year filling them out. Further, there was a substantial amount of delay in providing them due to requests typically coming through customer service. Customers would be frustrated with the delays.

Solution & Key Success: Filled company gap of missing foreign trade expert for free trade agreements (FTA) by reclassifying all performance chemicals Americas products and creating a sophisticated Excel dashboard and database to securely pull company-sensitive information in through simplified conditional free trade agreement forms filled out by customer services reps. Various FTA templates could be selected but the only pertinent information required by the form filler was the company item number and where the product originated - all other information was conditionally pulled through via elaborate formulas and database requests, saving product managers hundreds of hours per years