CARAVEL SOLUTIONS - Key Persons
During his career with Koch, Allen held key manufacturing positions such as:
Prior to 2016, Allen' career spanned 25 years with Koch Industries. During his career with Koch, Allen
Barney has led or participated in Operational Excellence implementations around the globe for over 15 years. These implementations have been across a variety of manufacturing environments and have been executed as a consultant and as an employee. Barney takes a ‘hands on' approach in driving success through one-on-one coaching that builds relationships as a trusted advisor. For that reason, Barney maintains relationships that last long after the engagement is complete.
Barney has delivered 1 and 2 day experiential workshops on organizational behavior to over 1000 attendees across the entire span of organizational hierarchy. These workshops are focused on providing attendees with tools that enrich conversation to drive improved relationships for sustainable success. These tools have also been known to improve personal relationships.
Prior to ARGO, Barney has worked in a variety of consulting and manufacturing organizations for almost 40 years. He has filled roles in virtually every functional area in a manufacturing environment. He has led improvement activities in each of those roles and built successful working teams. His projects included:
Bert's career spanned almost 24 years with Dow Chemicals with various roles and projects. His roles included various technical and operational support roles and well Human resource and change management roles. During his last part of is career with Dow Chemical he focused on merging and acquired company and led the adaptation of Dow's Operation Discipline System.
He demonstrated leadership and success in organizations that needed strategic change, transformation and improvement, applying knowledge of his change management skills as well as his skills in business transformation using disciplined work systems.
Bert has also delivered l workshops on organizational behavior to attendees across the entire span of organizational hierarchy. These workshops are focused on providing attendees with tools that enrich conversation to drive improved relationships for sustainable success.
Bert has worked in consulting operational management for international clients to do organizational assessments and follow up coaching and improvements-implementation to reach higher performance and better bottom line results. Focus on work processes, leadership coaching, org structure improvements, culture change, etc. Have been active at multinationals in Europe, USA and Latin America. Bert is fluent in Dutch (native) and English and speaks German.
David Revels is a seasoned professional with extensive expertise in Manufacturing Excellence, Maintenance, Construction, Safety, and Organizational Development. David's impactful leadership within his nearly 25-year career with DuPont, demonstrated across multiple key positions, resulted in significant contributions to critical areas such as Plant startups, Capital Project Execution, Turnarounds, Cultural transformation, Reliability and Maintenance, and Operations Leadership. In his last role before coming to Caravel, he was Plant Manager of a large site startup where he set the strategic vision and established standard roles and work processes for all functions. David's career underscores his versatility and ability to navigate and excel in complex manufacturing landscapes.
As a consultant, David extended his expertise to assess manufacturing and operational performance across various industries, including petrochemicals, polymers, fibers, textiles, specialty chemicals, and agriculture products. This consulting work highlights his ability to apply his knowledge and insights to benefit a range of organizations.
David believes helping clients understand their impact and the care and discipline with how they choose their actions is critical to deliver bottom line sustainable results to shareholders and customers. His career showcases a dynamic and accomplished professional with a broad skill set. His leadership philosophy and consulting experience further emphasizes his commitment to driving positive change and delivering sustainable results within the business world.
Jim is a Management and Engineering Professional with strengths in Industrial Manufacturing and Process Plant Operations, Maintenance, and Reliability. He has a background in Nuclear Power Plant construction.
Jim has BS degree in Engineering Sciences from Louisiana State University, New Orleans, LA.
He began his career as Mechanical Discipline Leader and Mechanical Team Member, welding and piping, for the Georgia Power Company Construction Division at the Plant Vogtle and Edwin I Hatch Nuclear Power Plants, respectively.
Jim has 28 years of Maintenance and Engineering experience in the Chemical Process Industry with various roles in Maintenance and Maintenance / Reliability Engineering Management for both DSM Chemicals and PCS Nitrogen Corporation at a shared site in Augusta, Georgia.
With an expertise in Maintenance Management, Maintenance Planning and Scheduling, qualitative approaches for both Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) and Risk Based Inspection (RBI), Operations Driven Reliability (ODR), Operator Basic Care, and Equipment Condition Monitoring, Jim began consulting in September 2002.
Jim's career has centered around Manufacturing, Technology, and Process Safety. Before retiring and becoming a consultant 2012, Jim's career was with Celanese. Jim led the largest division within Celanese ($4+B annual sales), Global Manufacturing, and R&D for Acetyls for nine years. Where he focused on process safety and connecting the business strategy to manufacturing assets and technology competitiveness improvement.
Jim was known as a champion for model-based control/automation of manufacturing processes and process safety. Key accomplishments for Acetyls manufacturing include:
Outstanding safety performance with a multi-year trendline of improvement
Outpacing growth in the competitive market through technology and manufacturing excellence driven enhancements in process efficiencies: energy consumption, manufacturing cost, and asset utilization.
Successful integration of acquired plants in France for both speed and effectiveness and
Via new greenfield operations in China led a $500M capital program management role (1991) in Corporate Environmental, Health, and Safety.
Jim presents seminars for AIChE and teaches clients on on Process Safety. He has managed many Manufacturing and Operations Excellence and Process Safety Assessments for clients such as Valspar, Dupont, Koch Industries across different sectors such as Textiles & Fibers, Specialty Chemicals, Methanol & Ethanol, etc. Additionally, he advises for unique startups and capital projects.
Kelley has dedicated her career to quality systems, laboratory optimization, and quality assurance management and improvement.
During her career she has successfully helped major companies implement and sustain ISO 9001:2008 certification, ISO 17025 multiple testing accreditation, and ISO Guide 34 accreditation.
She has also been accountable for all quality procedures at a corporate level, implementing and maintaining within the multiple laboratories across an organization. During this time, she was also responsible for optimizing testing procedures as well as mapping out roles and workflow, and driving efficiency in various labs.
She has worked in various consulting roles, assisting a broad range of clients to optimize laboratory layout. She has also focused on testing procedure optimization and capability studies to ensure quality guidelines are met with a focus on efficiency and effectiveness by reducing testing procedures and testing times.
Job Titles:
- Senior Partner
- Senior Maintenance and Reliability Specialist
As Caravel's senior maintenance and reliability specialist, Michael DePalma is an expert at conducting maintenance and reliability performance assessments and executing operational change management. He has led and successfully managed many large-scale transformation/organizational change projects engaging stakeholders at the shop-floor level.
Job Titles:
- Director of Strategic Operations and Planning, Director of Operations Excellence
Job Titles:
- Senior Consultant
- Senior Maintenance and Operations Specialist
As Caravel's senior maintenance and operations specialist, Peter Bobbe is an expert at conducting maintenance and reliability performance assessments and executing operational change management. He has led and successfully managed many large-scale transformation/organizational change projects engaging stakeholders from the shop-floor level up to Global Management.
Experienced maintenance, and reliability leader with the knowledge and skills to improve and optimize processes and systems. Ron has worked as a project engineer, maintenance engineer, reliability engineer, reliability team leader and all levels of maintenance management.
Ron has gained knowledge and skills in the set up and application of computerized maintenance management systems to enable efficient and effective maintenance work. Specialist in the application of maintenance and reliability systems: SAP, Meridium, MAINTelligence and certified by SAP as a Plant Maintenance consultant. Configured and implemented the SAP Plant Maintenance Module for: Riverwood/Graphic Packaging paper mills (2) and paper converting plants(18); Afton Chemicals Singapore fuel additives plant
Stephan Whitley began his career at Exxon USA Refining, spending most of his ten years there as a Senior Refining Economist building economic models of oil refineries and later working on real-time optimization as a Process Control Engineer.
During his 22 years of consulting experience, he has participated in more than 30 manufacturing due diligence projects for strategic buyers and private equity. Spanning over a wide variety of industries and have a total of more than 40+ Billion in value.
He has benchmarked, analyzed, and assessed the operating performance of more than 400 manufacturing facilities globally, for industries ranging from Crude Refining, Power Generation, Pulp & Paper, to Fine Chemicals and Flavors & Fragrances. He also modeled and optimized Production and Supply Chains for various companies.
Currently, he is involved with the University of Washington on how to best apply Advanced Analytic techniques (ex: statistical analysis, neural nets, machine learning) in industrial settings. Helping discover insights into manufacturing performance, improving profitability as well as understanding the probability of risks such as EHS and Process Safety Events.
Stephan as a degree in Chemical Engineering from University of Washington, Seattle WA, and is fluent in English (native) and German
Prior to 2015 Theo Goutier worked for over 20 years in European and Global leadership roles in Supply Chain & Operations in Blue Chip companies such as GE, Sara Lee and Koch Industries. Theo is an expert at end-to-end supply chain assessments and executing projects to implement the opportunities found. He has led and successfully managed European and World-Wide transformation/organizational change projects in Supply Chain at Sara Lee, Sandvik, GE and Koch Industries.
Job Titles:
- Senior Consultant
- Engineer from the University of Houston
Zeke is a chemical engineer from the University of Houston. He worked for The Monsanto Chemicals Group for over 30 years. This entire career was spent directly in line manufacturing with extensive experience in operations, maintenance, process/reliability, cost control and capital project management.
Since becoming a consultant in 2005, Zeke has worked with companies such as Koch Industries, Georgia Pacific, Valspar, SABIC, Kraton, and Dupont. He has lead many projects teaching, consulting and implementing best practices in Operations Change, Maintenance, Reliability and Turnaround Management. He has successfully managed teams working with large scale clients on many business /organizational change projects at the shop-floor level. Zeke has participated in more than 20 successful client transformation projects.
Duties in these transformation projects included Operations ( from Plant Managers to Shift Personnel) , Maintenance Redesign ( from Dept Supervision to Technicians), Turnaround / Materials Control, Reliability process implementation. Zeke has a working knowledge of the process elements, organizational roles and responsibilities, associated metrics and cultural impact of transformation projects.