Alex

I was the kid who took the family computer apart to see how it worked, and most of the time I could put it back together. Nobody taught me. I learned by installing, breaking and fixing things: programs, games, small home networks, the hardware itself.

Soon, neighbors and family friends were calling me to format a PC or set up their network. Looking back, that was my first consulting business: no invoices, a lot of word of mouth. And when I learned something first at school, I usually ended up teaching it to my friends.

My dad told me: don't just work. Find a way to get paid for your hobby.

That's how I chose engineering. I liked to study, I liked physics and math, and most of all I liked solving real problems, the kind you can touch with your hands.

My family couldn't pay for college, so I started working early to pay for it myself. I started a mechatronics technical program at night, and at the same time I got a job in the auto industry, programming and maintaining robots on an electrostatic paint line.

That year became my routine for the years that followed: a full-time shift at the plant, classes at night, and the little time left for my own experiments and books. I worked side by side with maintenance, operations and process engineering, with pneumatic, hydraulic, mechanical, electrical and electronic equipment. But it was with the robots that I really found my place.

• robot programming
• pneumatics
• hydraulics
• maintenance

Next came a mining company. The first five months were a full-time training program in industrial electrical maintenance, 7 a.m. to 5 p.m., while I finished my technical degree at night. After that I worked with instrumentation and electronics repair at the processing plant. Later I joined the automation team, where I maintained and wrote programs for PLCs and SCADA systems.

During this time I started my Electrical Engineering degree. Plant during the day, college at night, studying on weekends. One of my professors invited me to a side project, and I became responsible for the automation and control software of a laboratory furnace. It was my first engineering project from start to finish.

• industrial electrical
• instrumentation
• PLC
• SCADA

A partner company offered me a job in engineering and software consulting, and I accepted. For more than five years I worked as a technical consultant on process data (data modeling, analysis, data engineering, dashboard design), traditional automation projects, IIoT, database and PIMS support, and later I also led technical teams. I finished my engineering degree during that time.

This work took me to clients in more than 25 countries, from Peru and Chile to Finland, from Saudi Arabia to Australia. Each place had a different language and a different culture, but almost always the same question: how do we get the right information from these machines and use it well?

• process data
• dashboards
• IIoT
• PIMS
• team lead

A large American manufacturer hired me as a global data specialist engineer. My job was to connect machine and equipment data (OT) to business systems (IT), model that data, and build the analytics architecture and tools that operators, data scientists and R&D teams use every day.

Then I accepted a new challenge in the same company: local plant engineer at one of our sites in Iowa. That's what brought me to the Quad Cities, where I live today.

• OT/IT integration
• data architecture
• R&D support
• plant engineering

After all these years, what I enjoy most is the same thing I enjoyed as a kid: sitting down with someone, understanding the problem and fixing it.

So here in the Quad Cities I want to offer this directly to small and mid-sized businesses. Person to person, with nobody in the middle, and with everything I learned in plants and projects around the world.