Ali comes from a deep academic and real-world industrial operations in process simulations and operations management. He has managed onshore/offshore/war zone logistics as well as batch, continuous, and discrete manufacturing setups. At Schlumberger, he became one of the youngest Geomarket Production Services, pioneering 3 projects and serving 50+ industrial clients. His production teams were responsible for billions of dollars of hydrocarbon output to the global economy. Ali joined his first tech startup while still an undergraduate student at the University of Pennsylvania. Since then, he has been eliminating one global bottleneck after another, with his current focus on optimizing supply chains that extend to Mars.
Jon Kirkegaard is the founder and President of Dynamic Cycle-time Reduction Associates (DCRA Inc.). Prior to founding DCRA Inc., Mr. Kirkegaard held several founding senior management positions in supply chain technology and strategy firms. Mr. Kirkegaard was Executive Vice-President, Operations and Chief Marketing Officer for Vizional Technologies. He was an early leader at Viewlocity, a leading EAI vendor for the supply chain and spent 4 years at i2 Technologies in several VP of Business Unit leadership roles. As the Vice President of Logistics Operations at i2, he led numerous innovations, including originally authoring i2's distribution planning solution, as well as co-authoring a patent in 1995 on e-commerce-based Collaborative Planning Technologies (EPI, Electronic Planning Interchange). Mr. Kirkegaard spent 8 years in the strategic management consulting business with Booz Allen & Hamilton Management Group and Coopers & Lybrand, where he specialized in diagnostics and information technology support for supply chain and logistics operations in the industrial manufacturing and consumer goods industries. He has 21 years professional experience, with emphasis in the automation of collaborative workflow solutions in a variety of manufacturing and distribution intensive industries. Mr. Kirkegaard holds a Masters in Finance from the University of Texas at Dallas and an Industrial/Manufacturing Engineering degree from Kansas State University, as well as completing an intensive Engineering Management Program with Conoco Pipeline/Dupont in 1983.
