About
I started on the bench.
Building wiring harnesses and circuit boards in defense electronics. Seven years of it. I worked to a print and a work instruction, and I know exactly what it costs when the posted revision isn't the current one, because I built to it.
From there I was promoted to technician, then moved into manufacturing engineering — process, tooling, and how the product actually gets built. Planning and purchasing came after that. Since then I've run purchasing and production control, led a continuous improvement program, priced freight for a transportation company, taught business administration to adults going to school at night, and now manage sourcing and supplier development for a manufacturer. I still do that work. This isn't a practice I left the floor to build.
The industries changed. The problems didn't.
Defense electronics.
Fuel systems and measurement instruments.
Precision machining and cutting tools.
Stainless process equipment.
Industrial converting.
Freight and logistics.
Different products, different customers, different ERPs — and in every one of them, somebody was rebuilding the same spreadsheet every morning because the system that owned the data couldn't be trusted to produce it.
That repetition is why LoopSignal exists. After enough plants you stop seeing unique problems and start seeing the same handful wearing different clothes: information living in one person's inbox, a report rebuilt instead of trusted, a handoff that only works because someone walks it down the hall, a decision waiting on the one person who knows.
SS
Seth Sager
Founder
What the bench taught me that the office didn't
I've been on the receiving end of process improvement. I know what it's like when someone shows up with a clipboard, watches you work for an hour, and writes a report about a job they've never done. I know which questions are worth answering and which ones tell you the person asking has already decided.
I also learned how the product gets built before I was responsible for buying the parts. That's backwards from how most supply chain people come up, and it changes what a late order looks like. A shortage isn't a row on a report. It's a specific operation that can't run, on a specific machine, with people standing at it.
That's most of why I start by watching the work instead of asking for the process documentation. The documentation describes the process someone designed. The floor tells you the one that actually runs — including the workarounds people built because the designed one didn't survive contact with a real order.
LinkedIn →How I work
Most of what slows a plant down isn't a technology gap. It's a process that grew around a limitation nobody remembers anymore. I've watched expensive systems get installed on top of that and change nothing, because the software automated the workaround instead of removing the reason for it.
So I start with the work. Sometimes the answer is a process change and no technology at all. Sometimes it's connecting two systems that already hold what you need. Sometimes it's automation, or software built to your specification. Usually it's a combination, in that order.
I also build. I've shipped a consumer platform across web, Android, and iOS — product, payments, AI, the whole stack. When something genuinely needs to be built, I can build it. That's not the starting assumption.
Outside the plant
I chair the policy committee for our school board and serve on our municipal water authority. Both are unglamorous, and both are the same skill this work needs: getting people who don't report to you, don't agree with each other, and have other jobs to settle on a process and then actually follow it.
That's where improvement projects fail. The analysis is rarely the hard part. Getting a change to hold after the consultant leaves is.
The honest part
LoopSignal is new. I've done this work for two decades inside companies; I haven't yet done it as an outside engagement. That's why LoopScan starts with a conversation and ends with a written read-back you can act on with or without us. The risk of being early should sit with me, not with you.
Based in central Pennsylvania. I've spent my career in plants that look like yours.