One consulting practice since the early 2000s, first as EBS, then PennyDrop Strategies, now ARYS, working with associations, nonprofits, manufacturers, distributors, transportation companies and e-commerce businesses. Client and employer names, and any identifying details, are withheld. The patterns and the decisions are real, and they’re what transfer.
A large membership organization was operating on disconnected legacy systems with no unified view of member behavior. Data moved manually between platforms. Personalization was impossible. Service staff juggled multiple systems to answer a single member question. Leadership had no real-time picture of engagement or performance.
I led a five-year, end-to-end transformation of the association’s entire data and engagement ecosystem. This included a unified real-time data platform, CRM and service system consolidation, AI-powered member personalization, single sign-on, eCommerce integration, and a 24/7 AI member support tool. Every capability was designed around two principles: members feel recognized and understood, and engaging with the association is effortless.
A national industrial manufacturer and distributor with a national distribution footprint had built its technology stack through two decades of acquisitions. Six mission-critical systems operated in near-total isolation: a decades-old WMS running batch processing with no real-time inventory visibility, a homegrown OMS with brittle EDI integrations to hundreds of trading partners, a monolithic ERP that could not consolidate financials across multiple acquired business units, and field service technicians dispatched by phone and tracked on whiteboards. There was no unified customer record across sales, service, and order history. Month-end close required weeks of manual reconciliation.
I led a $125M, three-year enterprise transformation spanning six interconnected platforms: a modern WMS, an OMS with EDI modernization, a consolidated ERP, a CRM, an ITSM platform, and a field service management system. My team served as the program management and integration architecture backbone across 12 vendors, 300+ stakeholders, and eight parallel workstreams. I sequenced delivery to protect operational continuity: ERP and WMS first to stabilize the operational core, OMS and CRM next to unify the customer layer, then field service and ITSM to close the loop on service operations.
Most organizations that call me have a stack that grew one decision at a time, and a list of problems nobody has ranked. Leadership can feel that something is off, but not what to fix first, or what the next five years should look like.
I look at the current stack and the problems people actually live with, then build two things together: the low-hanging fruit that pays off in weeks, and a long-term technology vision tied to what the organization needs and wants. In many cases I stay on to help implement it.
Manufacturers, distributors, e-commerce businesses, associations, nonprofits and founders, all asking the same question: where should AI actually go first, and what has to be true before it works?
Assessed each organization’s data maturity, governance gaps and real opportunities, then delivered a prioritized roadmap grounded in its own context rather than a generic framework.
Not every organization needs a full assessment to start. Some just need someone experienced to look at the stack and say plainly where they stand.
A focused working session, typically four to six hours, on the stack and its problems, followed by a clear read on what’s working, what isn’t, and what to look at next. Many clients go on to a larger engagement; others I point to the right vendor or implementer for the job.
Several associations, including a medical professional association, had tech stacks that had grown piece by piece around the AMS, and no shared picture of where to go next.
Worked through each organization’s stack with its team and delivered a technology vision: what to fix now, what to plan for, and how the pieces should fit together over the next several years.
Two associations, in the late 2010s, had outgrown their AMS and needed an independent view of which platform to move to, and how to get their data there cleanly.
Ran the vendor evaluation, built the data migration strategy, and helped negotiate the contract, so each association chose on its own requirements rather than on the best demo.
A national financial association had accumulated 15 disconnected data sources across their AMS, accounting platform, event management, regulatory reporting, and a tangle of spreadsheet workflows that had grown over a decade. Staff spent days each month reconciling figures that never quite agreed, and leadership had no reliable real-time view of organizational performance.
Audited all 15 sources, designed a centralized cloud-based data architecture, and built automated pipelines to consolidate everything into a single source of truth. A continuous-monitoring data quality framework replaced manual reconciliation. A self-service analytics layer then put trusted, governed data directly in the hands of staff and leadership.
Small carriers run on thin margins, and without good analytics it is hard to see what the operation really costs, or how fuel surcharges are landing against actual fuel spend.
Built analytics on operating costs and fuel surcharges from the systems each company already ran, so owners and dispatchers could see the numbers without waiting on anyone. For some, I also built driver scheduling systems.
A retail group was planning inventory for more than 200,000 SKUs in spreadsheets. Overstock was tying up cash, and stockouts were costing sales and customer goodwill.
Built and deployed machine-learning forecasting models integrated directly into their ERP and merchandising systems, with monitoring and retraining so the forecasts stayed accurate after go-live.
Tell me about your situation. Most engagements start with a 30-minute conversation, candid and short. The first call is free.