“Jim rebuilt our maintenance function from the ground up — not just the technology, but the people. He built an apprenticeship program and a real training curriculum for maintenance and operations so we weren't permanently dependent on two or three guys who knew everything. He put standard work and 5S in place on the floor, then layered on a genuine condition-based monitoring program — real-time vibration and asset monitoring, infrared inspection, oil analysis — the full Industry 4.0 toolkit, not sensors for the sake of sensors. He used AI tools to extrapolate all of that data into real signal on asset health and failure risk instead of a static maintenance log. That's what got uptime up 25% and turned us into a genuinely proactive maintenance operation instead of a reactive one. He also built a daily KPI execution habit that outlasted his time here. He's an operator first, which is why the changes stuck.”

“We brought Jim in to run a $75M union operation that had lost its operating discipline. He rebuilt how we used Oracle NetSuite and PLEX, and layered AI tools over both platforms to model production scheduling, inventory, labor, and tooling changes before we ever touched the floor. That surfaced inefficiencies we couldn't see any other way. Lead times came down 25% and we eliminated $1.2M a year in scrap. He did it while managing a 200-person union workforce — not an easy environment to drive that kind of change in, but the tools gave him data to back up every call he made.”

“Jim didn't just tighten reporting across our North American and Canadian sites — he layered standard work and AI tools on top of our existing ERP and Power BI environment to extract real signal from our CMMS data: asset health trends, failure risk, and where our maintenance dollars were actually going. He ran digital twin and virtual modeling to pressure-test capital and labor decisions, and rolled out tablet-driven safety and asset inspections across the network. Jim worked with Caterpillar to deploy the VisionLink platform for real-time equipment monitoring, condensing mountains of asset data to determine the best steps to maximize our nearly $750M in capital operating assets. That combination let us cut operational spend while expanding margins, develop and deliver a $27M capital program on time, and pull roughly 10% out of inventory working capital — without disrupting service to a single site.”

“We'd lost nearly 100 years of combined manufacturing experience when four key employees retired within about six months — we hadn't put a real succession plan in place, and that knowledge walked out the door with them. Synergy (Jim) came in and helped us rebuild structure around that gap. He implemented a daily stand-up, our ‘G.A.S. Station Meeting,’ that gets the right people talking every day about equipment, quality, production, and delivery — the things that used to live in a few people's heads and nowhere else. He also helped us standardize work and put real KPIs in place so we could actually measure whether we were improving instead of guessing. Within 90 days, we increased monthly production by 30% without adding equipment, headcount, or capital — just by resequencing how we ran production. That's a number I still have a hard time believing came from process discipline alone, but it did.”

“We brought Synergy (Jim) in to assess the health of our manufacturing assets ahead of a potential sale of the business, and we needed an honest, defensible picture — not just for us, but for what a buyer would want to see in diligence. Jim gave us a clear-eyed view of where our equipment asset health truly was: what was at risk, what had been over- or under-maintained, and where the real exposure was hiding. That assessment gave us confidence going into conversations with buyers, and just as importantly, it gave us a straight answer instead of guesswork at a moment when the stakes were high. Synergy followed up with a bridge analysis that provided a clear strategy with execution plans to address any gaps.”