Account Growth, from Legacy Replacement to Predictive Innovation

When one of the nation's largest oil pipeline operators sought to modernize their critical infrastructure, they brought me in to lead what would become a multi-year digital transformation initiative. We began with a design workshop with expert users who knew their industry and the current system's pain points. The client was thrilled with the PoC and asked me to hire and lead a team to build the full version. The app was a rousing success, so they asked me to build a second team for a sister application that, despite some struggles and wayfinding in dark places, navigated complexity and suceeded as well.

Scaling Success

With these successes under our belt, I secured executive buy-in to significantly expand our engagement. We:

• Established a multi-disciplinary organization of 35+ developers across four teams
• Integrated dedicated design and marketing resources to deliver a full service package
• Created a specialized tiger team to rapidly respond to emerging needs
• Packaged our work into reusable assets for other dev teams at the client

Data-Driven Transformation

Seeing the untapped value in their existing data assets, I championed an initiative focused on predictive capabilities:

• Develop sophisticated time-series forecasting models for product movements, integrating external factors like market prices and weather patterns
• Extract operational insights from satellite imagery analysis to determine physical terminal characteristics
• Create predictive models for terminal wait-times and loading operations
• Implement a decision-support system for proactive resource allocation

These models working in tandem improved efficiency at the terminals by allowing them to pre-load anticipated products and co-locate products loaded by the same carriers. Dispatchers could schedule drivers with precision rather than guesswork, and this produced a ripple effect of improved efficiency.

Lasting Impact

Traditional, infrastructure-heavy players in highly-regulated industries don't need to be left out of building the future. Our group became an engine of change within the organization. Other departments lined up to work with us. Why? Because we asked the right questions, and we delivered. We felt a responsibility to come through for the manager at our client who'd had the guts to break through bureaucracy and geography to bring us on board. But I'm not sure any of this progress showed up in the price of gas!