I have been extremely fortunate to work with fantastic teams in a wide variety of end markets and have led the development of entirely new, differentiated, and commercially successful product lines on multiple occasions. Along the way, there were also product development programs that were commercial failures.  The lessons learned from those experiences profoundly shaped my approach to product development risk management. 

After completing graduate studies, my career began in semiconductor capital equipment at Applied Materials (NASD: AMAT).  Initial assignments included designing subsystems for electron beam metrology and inspection products.  Over time I gravitated to a hybrid role that included cross-functional program management.  This was my first exposure to the complexities of capital equipment product development beyond the engineering department.

An opportunity to join KLA Tencor (NASD: KLAC) as a Program Manager arose.  This was appealing as it came with the responsibility for an entirely new X-ray material characterization product development program as well as direct management of the engineering team.  Later I took on roles leading eBeam defect review engineering, manufacturing operations and, at the onset of the financial crisis, management of the transfer of manufacturing to southeast Asia.

Factory transfers are dynamic and complex but driven by operating cost-reduction motives.  In searching for a company with growth prospects – very difficult indeed given the macroeconomic climate – a head of engineering role within a business unit of Veeco Instruments (NASD:  VECO) became available.  At the time Veeco was one of just two capital equipment manufacturers in the compound semiconductor deposition sector serving the LED lighting market. After decades of frustratingly slow innovation, blue LED technology, the type required for white lights, was predicted to hit a tipping point in cost and efficiency that would drive enormous end-market demand.  To support large scale LED production, we focused on new equipment solutions that were easier to use than existing products requiring expert technical operators.  In later years we released a cluster tool solution to further improve scalability and operating cost.  The result was a massive market share and profitability gain for Veeco, career advancement for myself, and a significant impact on energy efficiency globally. The odds are very good that the LEDs used to backlight the display you are using to read this and the room lighting above you were made on a Veeco machine I developed.

Continuous improvement in device efficiency, combined with the fact that LEDs last for many years, resulted in an equipment demand ramp that was limited in duration.  The world would only need so much manufacturing capacity to satisfy global LED long-term production needs.  We therefore embarked upon a strategy to leverage third-party manufacturing versus expanding internal capacity.  Ramping production of new products in multiple global third-party manufacturing sites was an immense challenge that drove higher levels of engineering rigor. This resulted in the creation of new business processes to ensure machines built at different factories delivered to the same customer be at the same revision and performance level.

Veeco was a formative experience for me but once it became clear the LED equipment business cycle was past peak, I sought new career opportunities.  A position as the head of engineering with what later became SHAPE Technologies Group was available.  SHAPE is a global leader in high pressure waterjet cutting systems, ultra-high-pressure pumps and general automation solutions. SHAPE was also my first experience with a private equity (PE) owned company.  After more than a decade of limited R&D investment one of the PE investment strategic pillars was to revitalize aging products to recapture lost market share at an improved profitability profile.  We embarked upon the development of entirely new product lines of cutting systems and pumps that were higher performing and lower cost than the incumbent products.  Developing and rolling out those new products to the market and realizing market share and profitability improvements took approximately 5 years and culminated with a PE exit process.

A PE exit is often an inflection point for the management team to seek new career opportunities.  My next role was as head of engineering with Key Technologies, another PE held operating company.  Key had a long track record of success with optical sorting equipment in the food processing market but had an aging product portfolio (sound familiar?). The assignment was to develop new product lines and enable retirement of legacy platforms suffering from waning market share and high sustaining engineering costs. While the challenges and technologies were very different from previous organizations I had worked in, the objective was the same as at SHAPE: improve performance, reduce cost, develop IIoT capability and position the business for sustainable long-term growth. Once these new products were in the market, I found myself at another career inflection point: do I seek yet another industrial capital equipment organization looking to accelerate their product development initiatives?

I founded CapSure Solutions to enable collaboration with multiple capital equipment organizations concurrently as an advisor and coach. My mission is to help businesses capture commercial opportunities and more broadly disseminate the knowledge, methodologies, and business processes I developed and refined over decades in the industrial and scientific capital equipment market.

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