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Expert has worked most of his career in aluminum smelters many of those years as a project engineer, area engineer and project manager. Much first hand experience was gained in designing and installing new equipment as well as correcting deficiencies in existing equipment design. He is recognized for his knowledge with hydraulic and pneumatic systems, bulk material handling (especially abrasive material handling) and screw conveyor design to eliminate wear problems and eliminate hanger bearings.

Expert' motto when designing or revising equipment is "NO MAINTENANCE REQUIRED". He has built a career on finding permanent solutions to nuisance maintenance problems with most times simple solutions.

Expert was also trained to be a Continuous Improvement Black Belt. He spent his black belt years leading teams to improve the plant profitability by tackling various issues to increase revenue, cut maintenance costs, reduce manpower needs, simplify systems, etc.

After some time as an engineering manager, improving the productivity of the plant engineering group, he accepted the operations manager role for the carbon plant, landfill, raw material unloading and potlining areas.

As a consultant, Expert' goal is to provide cost effective problem solving/process improvement leadership to help businesses maintain their competitive edge in a constantly evolving global environment.


Expert developed a fully automated carbon anode slotting system for one of the largest aluminum companies in the world. This system included automated storage and retrieval, conveying systems, hydraulic and pneumatic systems, dust collection and transport systems, a one-of-a-kind slotting system as well as the MCC and building. This system operates 24 hours a day without an operator. It was designed to minimize energy consumption and maximize reliability with very little maintenance required. Expert was contracted to correct the problem of high scrap rates on five rotary blow molding machines in a new packaging plant. The design of the machine did not allow for snchronization of the molds with the material to be molded. Rather than totally dismantle all the machines and re-engineer the hydraulic systems, Expert developed a unique yet simple pipe-in-a-pipe hydraulic tubing system using standard off the shelf components that allowed the installation of the proper synchronization hydraulic components. Scrap rate dropped from >10% to a fraction of 1%.Expert has redesigned several high maintenance screw conveyors to eliminate high trough and flighting wear as well as high hanger bearing failures. Expert has installed several redesigned screw conveyors that have been operating continually for as long as 21 years, moving highly abrasive materials, and none have since had to be replaced due to wear. He has accomplished this by designing to a strict set of guidelines that he developed after observing so many conveyors that wore out quickly when the manufacture used normal design guidelines.Expert has developed numerous scoreboards for process monitoring that allowed the customer to see the actual situation that was causing their particular problem. He did this by identifying what was really important in each given situation and then showing that in a simple, clear way. The customers were able to finally understand their process issue and adjust their management accordingly.Expert has used LEAN priciples and processes to map out current processes, identify ways to improve, implement those changes and end up with a much leaner (more efficient) process.
One example is a rebuilding process that was taking on average 34 days to accomplish. By mapping the process with the help of the rebuild group employees, we were able to reduce the time to 22 days, then 17 days, and now 14 days. They are now so used to the continuous improvement process, they have set a new goal of 7 days which they are now working on achieving.
It should be noted that the rebuild time has been reduced while not increasing the rebuild cost.