About

I design warehouse systems from Salt Lake City, Utah. Conventional material handling and automation both, usually on the same project, because most buildings need some of each and the interesting decisions live at the seam between them.

Most of my work starts before there is a layout: order data, throughput targets, a building that may or may not be the right shape, and a set of code constraints that will quietly decide half the design if nobody reads them early. I do that reading, then the layout, then the analysis that shows whether the layout holds.

I came at it from supply chain rather than from a drawing board. I studied Global Supply Chain Management at the Marriott School at Brigham Young University, with a minor in Mandarin and terms abroad at Saïd Business School in Oxford and at Nanjing University. That turns out to matter more than it sounds: the equipment in this industry is largely Dutch, German, and Chinese, and being able to read a spec sheet or talk to a supplier without an interpreter changes what you can find out.

I have been at Intralog since November 2018, currently as VP, Engineering. In practice that means I am the principal engineering and solutions consultant on projects, and I lead a team of three to five across design, systems, and CAD. It is a small firm, which is the reason the job is interesting: I do the analysis, the layout, the code work, and the equipment specification myself, on every project, rather than reviewing one slice of somebody else's. I have also built internal tooling for our own engineering workflow, mostly to make the slow and error-prone parts faster and more accurate. TKTK on what that tooling does and what it replaced.

What I am interested in now: discrete event simulation as a design tool rather than a sales tool, what fire code actually permits versus what everyone assumes it permits, and how far you can get automating the boring half of systems design without pretending judgement is automatable.

Read my resume, or download it as a PDF.

This site is mine, not my employer's. Everything on it is my own work and my own opinion.