Founder
Kyle Nadler
I design distribution centers, and I build the software I needed to do it.
Systems architect and supply chain strategist in Lafayette, Indiana. Material flow, automation selection, capital projects. Founder of Applied Continuity, which holds KnowledgeBricks, Highbay and Reparse.
Flow does not fail in the middle of a run. It fails at the transfer.
That is literally true of a conveyor. The merge, the induction point, the handoff between two systems designed by different people in different years. It is also true of a plant that loses the one person who knew why it was built that way, and of a career that becomes unreadable to the next employer.
So the interesting problem is rarely the machine. It is the seam. Most of what I do, in steel or in software, is find where a system hands off and make sure something survives the handoff.
Practice
What I actually do
Distribution center design
Facility layout and material flow, from concept through commissioning. Greenfield and, more often, retrofit into a building that is already running.
Automation selection
AGV and AMR, AS/RS, conveyor and sortation. Deciding what the operation actually needs, which is usually less than what it is being sold.
Capital project development
Building the case, the scope and the sequence for spend that has to be defended to people who did not attend the design meetings.
Software, when it does not exist
Three products in production, each one started because the tool I needed was not for sale. I build, ship and run them.
Approach
How I tend to come at it
Brownfield, not blank sheet
Almost nothing real is greenfield. There is always existing construction, prior decisions and undocumented reasons. The work is figuring out what survives, what goes, and what has to land on both sides of the change.
Set a datum, do not span the gap
On a retrofit you do not bridge a discontinuity. You establish a reference both sides can find, and whoever arrives later ties in to it. That holds for steel, for a knowledge base, and for a handover.
Engineer's method, artist's instinct
Trained in industrial engineering and Six Sigma, which is where the rigour comes from. The part that finds the odd solution is not that. I am generally looking for the shape of a system before I am looking at its numbers.
I would rather build it than specify it
The fastest way I know to test whether a process is right is to make the thing and use it. That is how all three products started.
Built
Three products, in production
Each began as a tool I built for myself, and I still use all three.
KnowledgeBricks
Knowledge capture from the people who are leaving. On-site elicitation from retiring specialists and undocumented legacy systems, delivered as a structured machine-readable vault the client owns. knowledgebricks.com
Highbay
On-demand subject matter expertise, project structuring and tracking, for supply chain and logistics practitioners. highbay.io
Reparse
Job filtering and application packets tailored to a real professional profile. It exists because I had to re-key a resume into a form that had already parsed it. reparse.app
Credentials
Certification and education
ASQ Lean Six Sigma Black Belt
Certification.
Executive MBA
Graduate degree.
M.Eng Industrial Engineering
Graduate degree.
BBA
Undergraduate degree.
Contact
Direct
Open to conversations about founding, advising and technical partnership, and to distribution center and automation work.