Michelle: So I know you have a long work history with many different companies, but can you just tell our listeners a little bit more about your background?

Jim: Yes, my undergraduate, when I first kind of got started with this quality stuff. Actually, the best place is when I started building hang gliders and go-karts when I was like 14 years old and trying to see if we could get things to fit together. But I had kind of a tinkering background from an early age and I learned how to fly a hang glider taking a crash course, as it were. And it worked out. I didn't kill myself. So I'm still around to talk about it. But I have an enjoyment for mechanical and electrical and gadgets and widgets.

I went into school learning how to design this stuff with CAD. CAD when I started was very early on and where I went to school at BYU, they were kind of the MIT of CAD. They had more equipment than anybody else in pretty much the US back in the 80s. Most of the CAD vendors were based in Massachusetts, but they used BYU as a location to put their hundred thousand dollar workstations for west coast demos. And so I did that as undergrad.

And then I went to work for a CAD vendor. Then I went back to get a graduate degree in manufacturing, computer integrated manufacturing, also at BYU and learned robotics and CNC programming and all that fun stuff. And went to a generative AI application back before anyone knew what to call it. There's an expert system at Boeing. It was my first job after the graduate degree. And I spent six years at Boeing doing generative NC, generative numerical control, where you'd feed it a model and then that would spit out the GNC code or the, you know, the G code required by the machine tools to manufacture the part that was in CAD. It's quite interesting, but then I got pulled into a group that was trying to re-engineer all the business processes as well. So that's kind of where I got my bird's eye view of how Boeing works as a larger organization, but also kind of end to end, which is my specialty, I guess, at this point.

Going from there, I spent 20 plus years in Silicon Valley and mostly implementing and dealing with systems working full-time with various companies like Google and Facebook and LeapFrog and Palm Computer and Dropbox and Meta slash Oculus and ended up with Tonal, which is like Peloton, but for a weight training machine that goes on the wall and worked there for about three years. It's not like I got fired every time. It was because basically I thought I did a pretty good job. People go to another company and everyone kind of moves around every three or four years in Silicon Valley or less. And they would request me by name to come and help them out. So I implemented probably dozens of PLM and ERP, somewhat QMS related systems or upstream from QMS type tools with all these companies. So I've seen everything from like industrial equipment all the way up to aircraft and tiny little devices that would either fit in your hand like the Palm pilot, Palm cell phone kind of thing on out to exercise equipment and currently even consulting with a cosmetics company. So I've seen a lot of different applications of these tools.

Michelle: So what prompted you to write the Boeing articles? I know you originally were writing some things on LinkedIn and then you wrote for us, but is there something that kind of prompted the topic?

Jim: Yeah, I think one of the biggest things was the fact that this tagline, “if it's not Boeing, I'm not going,” which they had while I was there and I even have a sticker with it that you can put on your refrigerator. But it was just kind of the opposite of that for the folks that were stuck on the International Space Station. They could not return on the Boeing aircraft or the space, the Starliner or whatever. It's not like I've got an extra grind. I love Boeing. I would love to get it back to where it is, but even just the news today about Boeing's pulled away from the negotiations with the union there. It's like, it's not a pretty picture. I think we need to turn things around and I would love to help them get back to where they were in some form or another. So maybe this was my way of sharing my love of the company, but also the sadness in a sense that they need to turn it around.