Rethinking How Software Serves Manufacturing Operations

I paid for college building websites and custom applications. In my senior year of industrial engineering, I presented on where manufacturing was heading: per-unit customization and the systems it would require.

But I deliberately didn't build that software until I'd spent 20 years learning how manufacturing actually works.

I worked my way from managing a 24/7 machine shop through production management and operations management in the pediatric wheelchair industry. During that time, I was part of the team that invented revolutionary dynamic seating technology.

I was eventually brought in as president of that company to lead a turnaround, negotiate with vendors and shareholders, and orchestrate an exit to a major industry player. I led the due diligence process and negotiated the transition, then stayed on for a year developing new products post-acquisition.

After exiting in 2011, I stepped back to focus on family and BozemanMaze, a seasonal entertainment business I'd started in 1998. I returned to the industry in 2015 as operations manager at another pediatric wheelchair startup, helping them transition from product design to manufacturing by setting up inventory management, order flows, and assembly systems from scratch. I continued working with them through 2019, helping coordinate their move to a new manufacturing location in Texas. During this transition, they became a customer of Wheelhouse Software.

These frustrations eventually pushed me to stop critiquing and start building. In 2018, I put together a team to build Wheelhouse Software, a Manufacturing Operations Management platform that challenges these assumptions from the ground up. It connects dealers to delivery, validates manufacturability at order entry, handles configurable BOMs properly, and knows when to step back and let physical processes do what they do best. One integrated system that manufacturers can start with, instead of ten poorly connected ones they'll have to unwind later.