Portfolio & Case Studies

The Challenge

Walking into that facility for the first time felt like stepping into a pressure cooker about to explode. One in four employees wouldn't make it to their one-year anniversary. The turnover wasn't just a statistic—it was a symptom of something deeply broken. People didn't trust management. Management didn't trust people. And everyone was just going through the motions, waiting for the next crisis.

But the cultural problems were only half the story. The operational fundamentals were a mess. I'd watch material handlers spend half their shift walking to the far end of the warehouse to grab pallets that should have been stored right next to the assembly lines. Equipment that kicked up dust sat inches away from clean processes that required pristine conditions. Hundreds of totes scattered randomly across the floor like someone had given up on organization entirely.

The scheduling system was a joke—Excel spreadsheets disconnected from what was actually happening on the floor. Workers spent more time hunting for their next task than doing actual work. Meanwhile, supervisors obsessed over hourly target boards and meaningless metrics while machines sat broken and tooling wore down to the point of uselessness.

This wasn't a facility that needed incremental improvement. It needed a complete reset.

The Approach

Starting With What You Can See

I started with the basics—the kind of manufacturing fundamentals that shouldn't require a study to understand. If you're using pallets every single day because that's how raw materials arrive and how finished goods leave, why would you store them at the opposite end of the building? The answer was simple: nobody had ever questioned it.

So we moved things. Pallets went next to the assembly lines. Contaminating processes got separated from clean operations. Those hundreds of totes got organized into color-coded zones with actual designated spaces. It sounds simple because it was simple. The complexity was in getting people to believe that simple changes could matter.

Then came scheduling. We ditched the Excel chaos and brought in integrated software that actually reflected what was happening on the shop floor. I trained new coordinators who understood that the schedule should drive the work—not the other way around. No more wandering around looking for tasks. No more hourly target boards that everyone gamed. Instead, we focused on weekly averages and asked a better question: "What's broken and how do we fix it?"

Supervisors stopped being data collectors and started being problem solvers. That machine keeps breaking down? Let's fix it. Those wheels are shot? Replace them. The tooling is garbage? Get better tooling. Suddenly we were addressing the real bottlenecks instead of tracking metrics that made everyone feel busy but accomplished nothing.

Rebuilding Trust, One Conversation at a Time

Here's the uncomfortable truth about modern American manufacturing: we've created this mythology that plant managers should delegate everything to middle management. But when you're paying supervisors $80,000 to $90,000 a year, you're often getting people who are marginally better leads, not seasoned technical experts who can develop operators on specialty equipment. Especially when job security is a joke and nobody expects to stay anywhere long enough to become an expert.

So I rejected that model entirely. I spent time on the floor, learning different roles, understanding the pain points firsthand. When an operator had a problem, I didn't send them to their supervisor—I worked through it with them. This wasn't about micromanaging. It was about building credibility and competence through proximity.

The attendance system was one of the hardest sells. The old point system was purely punitive—rack up enough points and you're fired, regardless of the circumstances. It created this perverse environment where good employees with sick kids lived in constant fear of losing their jobs, while management convinced themselves this was necessary discipline.

I eliminated it. Completely. We kept the three-day no-call-no-show rule as a hard line, but everything else became trust-based. Need to use personal time for an emergency? Go ahead. Need to call off but don't have paid time? You won't get paid, but you won't get punished either. The incentive to show up is built-in: you need the money. But we weren't going to destroy careers over life's inevitable complications.

The pushback was immediate: "People will abuse it! Everyone will just stop showing up!" Except they didn't. A few bad apples tried to game the system, but they were already bad apples—they made other mistakes too, and they either left on their own or were removed for legitimate reasons. What we got instead was a workforce that felt respected, and respect turned out to be a hell of a lot more effective than fear.

Breaking Through the Language Barrier

Indiana isn't California or New York. We don't have armies of bilingual professionals. But we do have a significant Spanish-speaking workforce—people who want to work, show up every day, and do a damn good job. Most facilities around here use them for basic manual labor: loading machines, moving material, nothing that requires communication beyond hand signals.

I already spoke English, Portuguese, and Italian. I added Spanish. Not perfectly, not fluently at first, but enough to actually talk with people. To ask questions. To hear what they were seeing that I was missing. And what I learned changed everything.

These weren't just manual laborers waiting to be told what to do. They were observant, creative problem-solvers who had never been asked for input because nobody could communicate with them effectively. Once we could talk, operators became trainers. Trainers became leads. The talent was always there—we'd just locked it away behind a language barrier that nobody bothered to address.

The Risk Nobody Talks About

I spent time on the floor every day. Not walking through with an entourage, but actually talking with people. Asking about their weekends. Asking about their kids. When someone asked, "How do I get promoted?" I gave them a real answer with concrete steps, not corporate speak.

This creates risk. Real risk. You get close to employees, and eventually someone will try to take your words out of context. Someone will weaponize a conversation with HR. It happens. And because executives hate these uncomfortable situations, the standard advice has become: don't get too close, don't build real relationships, maintain professional distance.

But that advice is exactly why most turnarounds fail. You can't build a high-performing team from behind a desk. You can't earn trust without being vulnerable. The middle management class struggles precisely because they don't get paid enough to accept this kind of personal risk. But at the plant manager level, if you're not willing to accept it, you're not going to succeed.

So yes, I sat in some uncomfortable HR meetings. Yes, I had to defend myself a few times. And it was worth every minute, because the alternative is a sterile leadership style that produces sterile results.

Building the Tools We Needed

There's a separate case study about the software I built, but it deserves mention here because technology was the force multiplier that made everything else sustainable. I leveraged my IT background to create custom tools that closed the gap between data and decisions.

We went from paper-based tracking to digital systems. I built MES interfaces that operators could actually use—not enterprise software designed by people who've never set foot in a plant. We put tablets on chop saws that recalculated optimal cutting sequences in real-time after every cut, minimizing waste and maximizing yield.

The automation eliminated the paper-pushing that had consumed so much time and attention. Suddenly, managers could manage instead of collating spreadsheets. The technology didn't replace the cultural work—it amplified it by giving people the tools they needed to focus on what actually mattered.

The Results

• 92% reduction in turnover - from 30% to 3% annually, with virtually zero unwanted attrition among skilled operators
• 99.9% on-time delivery rate - eliminated six weeks of backlogged orders, reduced late shipments to less than $10,000 in annual customer credits
• Zero punitive policies - replaced with flexible scheduling and trust-based systems that strengthened rather than eroded morale
• Measurable productivity gains - across all departments through cultural transformation and operational discipline
• Sustained improvements - changes remained in place after transition to new role, demonstrating cultural permanence
• Self-stabilizing workforce - built on trust and reciprocity rather than threat of punishment

The Challenge

Imagine watching someone spend an hour building an optimization in Excel, only to have it become completely invalid the moment a single part gets scrapped on the shop floor. That was our reality. We had 40 different part sizes to cut across multiple chop saws, and while there were formulas in the spreadsheets, they couldn't handle the fundamental constraint of our process: once you start a size, you have to finish it. No back-and-forth with totes. No dynamic adjustments.

The result? Material waste consistently ran 8-12% above theoretical minimums—not because our people weren't trying, but because the tools they had were fundamentally inadequate. Every time something went wrong—a measurement error, a bad cut, even trimming 100mm off the front of a bar—the entire optimization became fiction. Operators would fall back on mental math, trying to figure out the best sequence from the remaining 20 sizes, and the waste just kept accumulating.

Beyond the chop saws, we had disconnected systems everywhere. The slitting department cut laminate rolls using standalone inventory tools that had no connection to the wrap line schedules. Quality checks happened on paper forms that got filed away and never analyzed. Tooling tracking was essentially "ask around and hope someone remembers where that die went." Production scheduling required pulling data from the ERP into Excel, manually massaging it, and uploading it back—a process that took over an hour per optimization and required a full-time position just to keep up.

We weren't just wasting material. We were wasting human potential, burying people in administrative overhead when they could have been solving actual production problems.

The Solution

Starting Where It Hurt Most: Cut Optimization

I built the MES platform on ASP.NET Core MVC with a SQL Server backend—C# for business logic, JavaScript for the front end. Standard web technology, but applied to solve real manufacturing problems, not to check boxes on a vendor's feature list.

The first module tackled chop saw optimization head-on. I put tablets at each saw that operators could actually use. After completing a cut sequence—say, three different sizes across however many bars—they'd input what they actually produced. The system would immediately recalculate the next best sequence based on what remained, what got scrapped, and what each saw still needed to do.

If they needed to trim 100mm off the front of bars because of damage? They'd tell the tablet, and it would recalculate on the spot. No more guessing. No more mental math from exhausted operators at the end of a shift. The optimization stayed live and relevant throughout the entire production run.

But the tablets were only half the solution. The initial version still required someone to manually pull data from the ERP into Excel, format it, and upload it to generate each optimization—a process that took over an hour and represented a full-time $60-70K salary just to keep up with demand.

So I built the planning interface directly into the MES administrative view. Now planners could pull data straight from the ERP in real-time, slice orders across multiple machines based on capacity and timing, and generate optimizations in under five minutes. Need to split a single customer order across three chop saws to balance the workload? A few clicks. Need to reallocate because a machine went down? Seconds, not hours.

The complete optimization system—from planning to execution—saved a minimum of $120,000 annually in material waste alone, eliminated an entire full-time position, and removed the constant interruptions where operators had to stop, recalculate, and make judgment calls that might cost thousands of dollars in scrap.

Production Scheduling and Shop Floor Control

Beyond optimization, the broader scheduling challenge was coordination. We had 5 people across scheduling, planning, and coordination roles manually managing data entry, reconciling information across disconnected systems, and trying to keep the shop floor aligned with customer demand.

The MES transformed this entirely. The system became the single source of truth for production scheduling across the entire facility. Every machine, every process, every order flowed through one integrated platform. Schedulers could see capacity constraints in real-time, adjust priorities on the fly, and push updated schedules directly to the shop floor—no more printing revised paperwork or walking station to station with updates.

The impact extended beyond just speed. With integrated scheduling, we eliminated the constant reconciliation loops—the endless back-and-forth trying to figure out why the paperwork didn't match what actually happened on the floor. The MES tracked it all automatically: what was scheduled, what was started, what was completed, and where deviations occurred. This visibility allowed us to go from 5 scheduling and coordination positions down to 3 while actually improving schedule accuracy and responsiveness.

Laminate Management: From Chaos to Control

Manufacturing wrapped doors means managing hundreds of laminate rolls in different widths and colors. The slitting department would cut master rolls into smaller widths for specific jobs, printing tags to track them—but those tags weren't connected to anything. The wrap lines didn't know what was available. Planners couldn't see what had been cut. And if someone needed a different roll than originally planned, the whole tracking system fell apart.

I built a laminate management module that tied everything together. The slitting department now works directly from the wrap line schedule within the MES. They can visually optimize their cuts, scan barcodes from the master rolls, and automatically generate child rolls with proper tags—each one recording width, color, parent roll, and target job.

When those rolls reach the wrap lines, operators scan the tags again, and the system records consumption automatically. The beauty is in the flexibility: if someone grabs a roll that's the right width and color but was originally cut for a different job, the system doesn't care—it tracks the actual consumption and reconciles everything behind the scenes. No more hunting through paper logs. No more manual ERP entries at the end of the shift.

The result is complete traceability from master roll to final product, automated ERP consumption posting, and the ability to substitute materials intelligently without breaking the tracking system.

Real-Time Production Visibility

Every machine on the floor now has a terminal and screen. Operators pull their live schedules, declare production in real time, and report issues—all without leaving their stations. The interface intentionally mirrors their existing workflow. No start-stop timers. No intrusive monitoring. They're doing what they've always done—just digitally instead of on paper.

This seemingly simple change transformed how we manage the plant. Supervisors used to walk the floor with clipboards, manually collecting data to figure out where production stood. Now they can see everything from the office: which jobs are running, what's been completed, where slowdowns or scrap issues are occurring.

The purpose of walking the floor completely changed. We don't go out to collect data anymore—we go out to solve problems. The visibility is already there. The human insight is what matters now.

Tooling Management

Tooling used to be tracked through institutional memory and hope. "Where's that die?" "I think it went out for sharpening last week, but I'm not sure which vendor." "How many meters has it processed?" "No idea."

The MES tooling module changed that. Every tool gets a unique code. We track sharpening history, current location (in-house, with supplier, in use), runtime metrics—how many meters it's processed, on which machine—and replacement cycles. This gives maintenance and production teams complete visibility into tooling assets, enabling proactive replacement before performance degrades and reducing unexpected downtime.

Quality Control Integration

Quality checks used to live on paper forms that got filed away and forgotten. Operators would measure parts, write down dimensions, and move on. If there was a recurring issue with a specific machine or parameter, you'd never know until someone manually compiled weeks of paper records—which, realistically, never happened.

I integrated QC directly into the shop floor terminals. Operators now perform dimensional checks against targets set by the Quality Manager, and every measurement gets recorded digitally. We have permanent records for every customer order, every job, every process across every station.

More importantly, we can actually analyze the data. Real-time dashboards show which parameters are trending out of spec, which machines are producing consistent issues, and where process improvements are needed. What was once unusable paper has become actionable intelligence.

The Results

• $120,000+ annual savings in material waste - from dynamic cut optimization alone
• Complete material traceability - from raw stock through consumption, including overstock management and digital lookups
• Real-time production visibility - eliminated manual data collection walks, refocused supervisors on problem-solving
• Proactive tooling management - extended tool life and reduced unexpected downtime through runtime tracking
• Actionable quality analytics - turned paper forms into real-time insights for continuous improvement
• Weeks to deploy, not years - built iteratively based on actual needs, not vendor timelines