Hamilton, Ontario
I spent 31 years at Taylor Steel, a steel processing and distribution manufacturer with about 500 employees and facilities in Canada and the US. I started as a programmer in 1993 and left as Vice President, People and Technology, with corporate technology and HR reporting to me.
In between, I did the work I now do for clients. I led development of our in-house ERP and brought in a custom EDI system, then led the deep integration of the two with each other and with our largest trading partners, in a plant that runs 24/7, with the EDI system carrying thousands of transactions a day. Most of that integration work happened on the shop floor and in the office, where I learned how each process ran and rebuilt it wherever the systems required, so productivity improved along with the technology. I also moved the company off legacy UNIX onto a redundant VMware/Linux environment. I founded and chaired the Continuous Improvement Group, which put productivity measurement and reporting on the shop floor and used it to find where the real bottlenecks were.
For my last four years I ran HR alongside IT: labour relations, policy, succession planning, and the annual wage review, which I negotiated directly with plant employees. I also built incentive programs tied to safety, productivity, quality and attendance. That side of the job taught me that when a new system fails on a shop floor, the cause is often how the people using it were brought along.
I also sat on the executive team, which means I have been on the buying side of a lot of technology pitches. I know what a vendor demo leaves out.
That is the background I bring to Architected Intelligence. AI is the newest tool I work with, and I use it the same way I used every system before it: after I understand how the business runs and where the friction is.