Project Manager Electrical Engineer

Director / VP – Product Development / Operations

Leadership in Engineering Turnaround: As a result of working with the top engineering talent across electrical, mechanical, software, firmware, and manufacturing disciplines both internal and outsourced at Motorola, Samsung, Nokia, medium scale and startup environments, I have cultivated practical methods to drive cycle time and costs to a minimum, control schedules, and consistently deliver quality products and services.

Proven Record in Operational Discipline: Leveraging 20+ years in engineering development discipline, a law degree, and entrepreneurship, I have successfully brought diverse cross functional groups together through collaboration, tools, and practices to drive business excellence.

Entrepreneurial Experience: Over a 3 year period during my spare time I utilized the experience gained in Fortune 500 corporations and my law degree to develop a business plan for a billion dollar pro forma consumer electronics product/service Company and spent over a year pitching to investors. The experience enabled me to measure all my decision through the eyes of shareholder value, model the financial and operation modes for a complex business of products and integrated services, competitive strategy development, and positioning innovative ideas.

Unique Attributes: Transparent, honest, direct, root cause problem solver, fast and aggressive recruiter, people and process (a hammer to drive a nail) centered manager, and analytical business planner.

BS - Computer Engineering - Cum Laude, University of Hartford / JD - Law, Texas Wesleyan University

Major Achievements

Increased profitability of a custom systems integration group. Created new position at Nokia as Tender manager and collaboratively developed end to end tools and practices to deliver thorough cost assessments, project plans, pricing and proposals for multimillion dollar bids. This practice contributed significantly to our services group being the only profitable services segment in North America.

Enabled cost and schedule containment through prototype pass reduction tool. Principle in the development of an engineering end-user interface that isolated engineering from the complex integration of a variety of off-the-shelf software products used in digital board simulation including HW/SW co-verification. The tool would dramatically reduce training and enable elimination of over 50% of prototype turns. The off-the-shelf software components were nearly unusable without this innovation.

Reversed stagnant Development Methodology. Reversed an ineffective quick turn methodology with a fundamental hierarchical development process targeted to produce a single manufacturing compliant prototype followed by production quality deliverable. This effort required a massive culture shift in executive management and the entire engineering organization comprised of RF, Mechanical, Software, and Systems engineering. Recognizing early that this paradigm shift in engineering discipline would not occur instantaneously I effectuated this change in a way that garnered respect and a new team drive to improve.

Reduced cost and cycle time by unifying operational practice. Starting with a wildly disparate, costly, and inefficient quoting practice in North America, I successfully led the stakeholder business requirements assessment and owned the interface to internal/external IT staff to create a unified solution with only a bare minimum corporate investment. The solution stimulated a vision for the value of operations in profitability.

Career Overview

Illinois Tool Works – Director Engineering / Product Dev - Food Service Electromechanical Equipment

CrossRate – Director Engineering / Product Dev & Mfg - GPS/Loran Position, Navigation and Timing

Frontrow – Director Engineering / Product Dev & Mfg - Classroom Sound Reinforcement

Nokia – Sales, Marketing, and Operations / Services - Telecommunications

Entrepreneurial – Business Plan Development and Investor interaction / Consumer Electronics

Samsung – Sr. Engineering Manager / Product Dev & Mfg - Telecommunications

Motorola – Electrical Engineer / Product Dev & Mfg – Telecommunications

CAREER HISTORY

Director of Engineering / Illinois Tool Works, FEG, Hobart Weigh Wrap / Troy, Ohio / Sept 2010 – Sept 2012

• Engineering leadership and management of 30+ person new product development and sustaining team consisting of electrical, software/firmware, and mechanical engineers, doc control, technicians, program managers, project manager, outsourced design, and manufacturing collaboration.

• Architected incremental, practical implementation of best practices in a culturally rigid turnaround environment.

Director of Engineering / CrossRate Technologies / Windham, Maine / Nov 2009 – Aug 2010

• Engineering management of a 6 person startup environment in the product development of position, navigation and timing products based on GPS and Loran technology.

• Worked with a bright young group of entrepreneurs to navigate the transition to mass production discipline.

• Collaborated with PHD level technical advisers at the University of Maine and Rhode Island.

• Managed adaptation of existing product to a non-magnetic heading device for DOD.

• Lead the transition to a new contract manuf. and new hardware design firm while holding existing schedule

Director of Engineering / Frontrow / Petaluma, California / Oct 2007 – Sept 2008

• Consistently maintained a surplus on a $1.9M engineering budget for a sound field system product line.

• Managed team of 4 engineers (electrical, mechanical, embedded & DSP SW), 2 Technicians (PCB tools and automated test), and a Project Manager.

• Talked with customers, experienced the market segment environment, and created successful actions to improve quality and stimulate future product initiatives.

• Reinvigorated the engineering team, by building back good engineering fundamentals.

• Managed a transition over 4 months from a poor quality Thailand-based contract manufacturer to a world class Chinese CM. With the same new vendor, led outsourced product development.

Sales/Marketing, Operations / Nokia & Nokia Siemens Networks / Irving, Texas / Feb 2001 – May 2007

• Messaging Business Program Management for Mobile System Integration Group. Part of team that sold first mobile internet application (Multimedia Messaging) into North American market to Cingular.

• Successfully turned around a chaotic, inefficient tender practice by collaboratively developing tools and templates for proposal practice. Responsible for managing software/IT engineering, project management, account management and sales teams during proposals.

• Incrementally changed the behaviors of cross functional departments to create synergy in bid development.

• Led the business requirements gathering and IT implementation of a unified quoting solution for North America. Business requirements were gathered across finance, logistics, IT, sales, and other stakeholders to specify a valued tool that reduced cost and improved cycle time in managing associated commercial transactions.

Sr. Engineering Manager / Samsung / Richardson, Texas / May 1997 - Feb 2001

• Requirements specification and vendor management for a Global Positioning System (GPS) / Time Frequency Unit Card. Developed system backplane.

• Responsible for the evangelization, selection, and implementation of over $250,000 worth of Digital Engineering Computer Aided Design Tools from Mentor Graphics Corp. including schematic capture, printed circuit board layout, timing analysis, and digital signal integrity tools.

• Advocated and executed disciplined development environment by incrementally changing the behavior of all departments from executive management, systems, software, RF, digital and mechanical.

• Sr. Digital Hardware Engineering Manager responsible for building team of 15 staff engineers, 10 onsite contract PCB designers, and all discipline EDA application support.

• Advocated and drove up front design for regulatory/safety, PCB fab, doubled sided reflow and wave operations for electronics, and mechanical assembly in South Korean factory.

Electrical Engineer / Motorola / Fort Worth, Texas / Jan 1990 - May 1997

• Completed a real time embedded firmware development for Land-mobile Radio.

• Developed GSM Transceiver Control ASIC emulator using HP Pattern Generator and Labview software.

• Developed redundant CDMA base band forward and reverse link path on transceiver card and co-developed a widely used smart micro backplane to enable bench and factory testing of CDMA transceiver.

• Redesigned a DC/DC converter reducing cost by 50%, increased efficiency by 5%, and eliminated thru-hole and hand placed parts by 95%.

• Developed power system specification including low voltage battery disconnect, and system battery backup.

• Principal architect in the process dev and integration of digital board simulation and HW/SW co-verification.

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