Paul Blossom is a Ph.D. in Operations Management with broad and deep experience
in operations and strategy. He has held a number of increasingly more responsible
positions over the course of his career, starting on the factory floor as a journeyman
millwright, to industrial engineer, to project manager to engineering manager
to SVP-Operations to Chief Operating Officer. During the course of his career
he has developed and implemented strategies, policies and procedures in sales
and marketing, accounting, and operations for a domestic and three overseas offices
in China and Pakistan, developed and implemented a process improvement program
for software development processes, including extreme programming, requirements
development, configuration management, and quality assurance. He has investigated,
analyzed and architected new software product strategies for three companies,
managed development and build-out of network operations center for a Managed Service
Provider (up to 2400 seats now), managed the nationwide rollout of thin client
devices, cabling and training for an international common carrier, 3200 devices
at 340 sites in 48 states and Canada.
Paul instituted strong project management methods into these engineering and software
development environments. Paul also led the engineering and software development
for an RFID-based truck tracking and performance measurement system that also
utilized 2.5G technologies. In manufacturing, he has designed and implemented
new preventive maintenance procedures, created and managed capital project for
tool room modernization ($20,000,000), developed labor and material budgets for
maintenance activities of plant ($30,000,000), designed and implemented reorganization
plan for entire plant operations, performed joint (with UAW) analysis of progressive
die construction, project leader to bring timely individualized accounting and
productivity information to supervisors, performed competitive analyses of local
and divisional plants and processes, managed divisional productivity improvement
activities; productivity measurement, and monthly productivity meetings with the
plants from the division., drove 95% reduction in setup time across a division
of 8 plants, lead 100% improvements to uptime across the division, consulted with
plants, one project saved the equivalent of his annual salary every week, and
developed non-financial performance indicators for use in the divisional plants.
Paul’s teaching experience includes courses in Operations Management, Management
Information Systems, Management Science, Purchasing, Introduction to Computing
and Accounting Information Systems, at the undergraduate and graduate levels at
Grand Valley State University, University of Michigan – Flint, and Michigan State
University. Paul was elected to the Beta Gamma Sigma Honor Society Membership
in 1994.
His other consulting experience includes consulting on lean manufacturing and
MRP, he began the process which eventually resulted in a client company becoming
the model plant in corporate operations, consulted with a school district on scheduling
of “special” classes for teachers and students, consulted on operations strategy,
developed the project plan for a move of operations, and analyzed workflow in
new facility for a food manufacturer.
Paul’s software development experience includes developing an Employee Evaluation
Application., which was a multi-user, multi-plant system to standardize employee
evaluations for hourly employees, developing a customer satisfaction database
to allow data input for two customer satisfaction surveys and provide for analysis
of same, SQL Server consulting and Citrix installation. Paul performed the requirements
analysis, architecture and the development of a scheduling package for nurses
and an accident database. He also designed and implemented a corporate-wide reporting
system which delivered reports to marketing, accounting, and operations.
