Executive management wanted to grow production capacity fivefold, to more than 400 units per quarter within nine months, which would be almost impossible due to fixture and material lead-times.

Test fixtures took six months to develop, build, and deploy. Additional hard tools for fabrication of parts have nine- to twelve-month lead-times. And the existing facility could not accommodate the higher production volume, so a transition in facilities would be problematic.

Collaborating with Finance Controller and Test/Process Engineering Manager accelerated the development of an alternative. Devised a plan for increasing capacity to 650 units in the first year, while staying within the existing facility and limiting the investment.

Quality and strategy proved irrefutable in light of the experienced real demand ramp-up to little more than 200 units per quarter. Executive management agreed, the plan was implemented, and capacity was able to cover the higher product volumes with minimal risk.

Company needed to upgrade storage density and required more high-technology features. Prior storage strategic direction was set based on an incorrect set of assumptions. Collaborating with product marketing and supply chain management facilitated the development of a strategy to enter into new technology arena while improving profitability.

Directed development and implementation of a fourfold strategy to sustain the existing products and utilize another company's storage technology (with minor modifications) while concurrently developing interim and long-term solutions based on well-established engineering, supply chain, and production capabilities. This resulted in broadening market share while launching a much broader line of products within a single product lifecycle timeframe.

The strategy increased product gross margins from 30% to 40%. Company realized rapid to-market turnaround on two new product families while decreasing pressure on the internal design teams, allowing accelerated development of a more extensible product sooner.

Worked with a prototype toolset for operating system upgrades to help a major office supply company upgrade all their Sun systems while uncovering an opportunity to help a small insurance company with a similar project.

Convinced this smaller company to hire Sun to develop a process, test the steps on a sample platform, document the procedure, and work with company's team to perform the procedures on production systems. Once tested, the process could be completed in one weekend, without incident. Subsequent upgrades at that company were completed without assistance due to design quality. Moreover, these documented procedures were published internally so that other customers could leverage this important intellectual capital.

The resultant documented service increased operating margin potential 81%, allowing other companies to utilize capability at more manageable costs and with much lower risk.

Sun delivered architecture to military installation that did not perform at levels required of their unique application set. Basis for solution was sound, although certain shortcuts during implementation needed to be addressed. Relationship with a skeptical customer management team needed careful management. The previous Sun team and customer were equally resistant to change. The impasse had been hindering progress for several weeks.

Explored technical and business issues that blocked progress of the project. Assumed management of the situation and consulted with both teams. Proposed a conciliatory approach. Collaborated with customer to better understand their needs and developed a way to prove solution would meet them. Was able to reconcile the issues and provide verifiable assurance that the performance issue was resolved within one week.

Customer appreciated approach. Effort reestablished relationship with this already $11 million customer site.

Project costs kept increasing due to poor resource utilization. Projects that should not have begun were kept alive, and high priority was not given to appropriate projects.

New executive management was unclear about what business tools were used by own organizations. In addition, management was not fully informed on the status of the various toolsets being phased in or out and which tools would be affected by Sun's corporate database environment's redesign.

Led a cross-functional Tools Team which included members from Marketing, Manufacturing Operations Tool Development, Quote/Order Desk, and Sales. Utilized knowledge of business operations and tools within company to create a roadmap and implementation strategy that management could easily understand and buy into. Developed a communication plan to clearly articulate the direction to executive management.

Project resources were removed from obsolete projects and resources were reallocated to high-priority projects, removing waste and saving money.

Customer-Ready Systems (CRS) operations were housed in a 10,000 square foot lab where project engineers and project managers built one or two solutions per month to customer specifications. The lab-based operation was not well organized for growth. The business needed to move this same customer configuration flexibility into a scalable, quality manufacturing arena.

The new facility had challenges in the area of flexibility and change acceptance. This facility was accustomed to getting complete and stable documented products to build. The CRS business needed to allow for problem discovery and recovery during the manufacturing process as well as for last-minute changes to the solution requirements. High-level project managers and project engineers were needed to manage the solution definition, quoting, order, and operations management. At the same time, materials, engineering, and production staff had to be retrained to operate in an environment of more ambiguity and constant change.

Applied operations engineering background and organizational influence management expertise to develop flexible set of processes to be deployed in high-volume, structured manufacturing environment.

Drove the growth of CRS production from $37 million and 5,000 units to more than $500 million and 12,000 complex solutions annually within two years. At end of three years, entire global business was more than $1 billion.

A new functional business operation needed to be constructed from existing organizations, but buy-in from key Materials, Supply Chain Management, Manufacturing, Test Engineering, Quote/Order Desk, and executive management stakeholders was needed.

This new business required more flexibility and broader reach from Materials and Supply Chain, because every order utilized different materials from a constantly changing supplier base. Manufacturing and Test Engineering had no processes in place to resolve non-repeatable assembly and test issues. Quote/Order Desk was not trained to support building quotes or place specialized orders with manually generated quotes and instructions. Executive management would be receiving calls from new internal and external customers trying to better understand this unique business model.

Attended backlog reviews in materials organization, and drove issue resolution. Conducted detailed process-development team meetings for manufacturing/test engineering organization. Conducted specific training and follow-up sessions nationwide for Quote/Order Desk and helped develop a Center of Excellence. Attended weekly management update meetings to respond to issues and provide business and large account updates. Proactively communicated key issues to executive management before they received the escalation call.

Improved operational efficiency and work culture. Secured acceptance by all key employees. Organizations responded with specific forums for issue resolution and instituted additional metrics for tracking successes within functional areas.

Company was division of larger disk drive company, Maxtor. Executives were seeking potential buyers and identified need to remarket division as a complex systems business. Products had been lower technology boxed disks coupled with host adapters and software. Marketing had been targeting customers seeking disk drives, not the higher margin storage system consumers.

Collaborated with Marketing and key technology partners to develop new product line based on Redundant Array of Independent Disks (RAID) technology with new marketing collateral to sell the value differently.

Launched new family of systems products which made the business more attractive to institutional investors. Management team was therefore able to perform the $100 million-leveraged buyout from Maxtor.

Sun had recently acquired the Beaverton, OR, division of Cray Research from Silicon Graphics. None of the ex-Cray employees understood Sun's internal culture or processes and tools. Organization, manufacturing space, and assembly/test processes in Beaverton could not sustain volume of operations required to meet Sun's volume and pace of new product production.

Established organization of product engineers responsible for providing technical direction to suppliers of complex electro-mechanical assemblies, high-density electronic printed circuit boards, elaborate power systems, associated interconnect, and environmental monitoring systems. Created specific duties for process engineers, test engineers, test-stand development engineers, and engineering coordinators.

Grew operations engineering organization more than 462%, from 8 in one building to 55 in three manufacturing sites worldwide.

Company's CRS engineering capabilities were not recognized within broader internal customer engineering organizations. Only those field engineers with CRS experience understood the services and expertise the CRS engineering team provides. The challenge was broadening the reach and understanding of the CRS engineering capabilities. For years CRS had attempted to attain a presentation slot at customer engineering conferences, without success.

Developed and spearheaded delivery of a new engineering strategy. Established team's priorities to address the reach deficiency. The group delivered on objectives for meeting with customer engineering thought leaders, revamping CRS's Web presence, posting significant intellectual capital on the Customer Engineering Wiki, and teaming with Marketing to present at-large sales training sessions. Also, leveraged CRS "champions" to share their experiences with others.

Targeted efforts expanded reach 10 times for CRS engineering organization, so much so that of the 740 abstracts submitted for selection at the huge annual customer engineering conference, only 101 were selected and 1 was CRS's. Moreover, the feedback gathered indicated that the perception of CRS had changed from "Why bother?" to "How did we live without it?"

Sun was developing a service-level management assessment and reporting-packaged service, utilizing Six Sigma process enhancement concepts. The service development team needed practical experiences and some examples for others to use in selling this service to customers.

Collaborated with seasoned Project Manager to pilot the service to a major financial services company while refining the questionnaire and delivery process. Utilized that experience and extensive operations management background to then assess Sun's own IT processes for its ERP system. The result was a comprehensive report and customer presentation that could be used to demonstrate process gaps to all management levels.

The report and presentation were so well received that the documents were made generic, archived, and rolled back into the collateral package used in future sales efforts. Pull-through product sales were in hundreds of millions of dollars. These samples can be found at: http://www.towlehouse.net/DaveResume/.