Founder
Kyle Nadler
I design how people, machines and software share the work. It is one design, not three.
Conveyor, robots, software, and the shift that has to run all of it at five in the morning. In supply chain and logistics, the work runs from corporate strategy down to which machine goes where on the floor, on projects in the United States, the United Kingdom, Spain and Canada. Founder of Applied Continuity, the parent company of KnowledgeBricks and Highbay.
Practice
The work
Supply chain and logistics operations, and the supply chain function inside industrial manufacturing, GMP-regulated manufacturing and life sciences, and food and beverage.
Human and machine interaction
AGV and AMR, AS/RS, conveyor and sortation, and increasingly a model in the loop. Deciding what the machine does, what the person does, and what happens where the two trade off. Automation does not remove people from a process. It moves them to the edges, where the exceptions are, and the edges are where these projects fail.
AI, where it earns its place
Deciding what a model should do, what a person should do, and what has to stay deterministic. Most operations questions are not model questions, and the ones that are usually need the data shaped before anything else works. That shaping is the hard part, and it is what KnowledgeBricks was built to do.
Software, when it does not exist
Two platforms, shipped and running. I build them, ship them and support them. Each one started because the tool I needed was not for sale. Same habit, different material.
Early-phase planning and the capital case
Feasibility studies, basis of design, Class 3 and Class 4 estimates, schedule baselines and risk registers. Concept through FEED, directing the multidisciplinary team that produces it. The work is finished when someone signs an FID or an AFE, not when the drawing is done, and the estimate is the easy half of that. The case has to hold up in a room of people who were not in the design meetings.
Adapting a running process
Material flow through a warehouse, a distribution center or a manufacturing line. Layout, staffing, standard work and the order things happen in. Throughput modeling and network optimization where the question is which site should do what. All of it changed while the operation keeps running, and the constraint is usually not the equipment.
Corporate strategy and sales innovation
Work on what the business sells and how it reaches the customer, not only how it gets delivered. It sits upstream of the operations work and usually decides what the operation is handed. New commercial models fail for the same reason new equipment does: nobody agreed what the problem was.
Built
What I have built
Two platforms and a personal project. Each began as a tool I built for myself, and I still use every one.
KnowledgeBricks
Captures what your experienced people know, before they leave, and turns it into knowledge your teams and systems can use. On-site capture from the people who hold the method, delivered in the form the client needs, from a standalone tool to structured data alongside their existing systems. knowledgebricks.com
Highbay
Built with the KnowledgeBricks capture system, now a standalone platform for logistics automation knowledge, with paid consulting and implementation services. highbay.io
Reparse
A personal project. Job filtering and application packets built from a real professional profile. It exists because I had to re-key a resume into a form that had already parsed it. reparse.app
Work
Selected work
Projects I have worked on, and ventures of my own. Clients are described by type and scale rather than by name. Anything more specific happens in conversation.
2026KBaaS.ai Estimating Hub
A subscription knowledge base for capital project estimating practitioners. Eight pillars, from fundamentals through commercial strategy, drawn from a curated vault with an AI index over it, with accounts and billing. Built as a product, then transferred entire to a privately owned design-build and EPC firm with revenue over 300 million dollars, who adapted it to their own data and their own projects. It runs there now, under their people.
2023Operations and technology augmentation control tower
Built for a top ten global contract logistics provider. It assessed 60 distribution centers across the network automatically and continuously against emerging technology, so where to augment an operation was answered from the network's own data rather than from a vendor's roadmap.
2022Global product innovation strategy
Managed globally for the largest pallet pooling provider. Future platform roadmap, digitization, and consolidating design across regions that had each solved the same problems separately.
2020Machine vision for inventory control
For a global Fortune 20 pharmaceutical distributor. Contracted the program, wrote the test and performance plans, and defined the computer vision system, including fixture and process concepting for drone and vehicle based inventory control.
2019Early cube AS/RS turnaround
One of the first integrated cube AS/RS systems in the United States, an AutoStore deployment for a top five global contract logistics firm. It came in as a turnaround of a defective design. Goods-to-person at that scale changes who does what, so recovering it meant reworking the process and the human and machine interaction around the system, not only correcting the equipment.
2018Lean value stream roadmapping
Ran value stream roadmapping and savings events for global aerospace propulsion and industrial automation manufacturers. The roadmaps carried savings above a million dollars.
2017Ergonomic analysis for moving pick faces
A new approach to ergonomic analysis in distribution environments, for a leading North American automaker. Static workstation analysis assumes the worker stays put. Heavy and bulky auto parts picking does not work that way, so the method had to be adapted to a pick face that moves.
2016Contracted warehouse turnaround
Lead turnaround across contracted warehouses for the largest e-commerce fulfillment operator, running dedicated teams to re-engineer building layouts, processes, staffing and material handling equipment. All of it done without disrupting critical operations, which is the constraint that decides how the work is sequenced.
2015Bid management tooling, oil and gas
Built and operated no-code tools to manage and tender bids, streamlining oil field services and transportation for one of the five largest oil and gas companies globally. The tools were the fastest way to find out whether the process was right.
2014Nationwide experiential rollout
Rolled out a nationwide experiential marketing campaign across Canada for a global interactive entertainment company, educating customers on a new platform.
2013Arbor Herb Co
A natural skincare line built on ingredients a customer could pronounce, made by a third party copacker. Founded and sold.
2013Citrus Health
A free magazine distributed through a natural food store chain in British Columbia and paid for by advertising. It documented what was actually in natural products, and what the trends were good for. Founded and sold.
2010Exterra Property Maintenance
Lawn care, gutter cleaning and landscaping in the Okanagan, British Columbia. Started and operated it, and it was later absorbed by a municipal contractor.
Approach
How I come at it
Agree the problem before the design
Every discipline has to be able to state the same problem, the same definition of done, and the same picture of how it runs now and how it should run after. Software, hardware, scheduling and cost, operations, management. Where that agreement is missing each group solves a slightly different problem, and the mismatch does not surface until commissioning, which is the most expensive place to find 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.
Nobody owns a handoff
I list the black belt because people ask for it. The certificate is not the interesting part. Lean is a way of seeing where the work actually goes, and most of the waste is not on the floor. It is between planning and operations, between the people who approve the equipment and the people who run it. Nobody owns a handoff, so nobody measures it, so it stays expensive.
Wide first, then the pinch points
I grew up surrounded by art. The useful part was not taste, it was the habit of taking in a whole thing before breaking it down. I start wide, on the whole operation, then close in on the bottlenecks and the exceptions and reengineer the places where it binds. You can feel a bad building from the mezzanine before the data tells you why, but the feel only points at the pinch point. The data settles whether I was right about it.
Buy what exists, build the gap
The first question is what can be bought, because building everything is slow and expensive. Where nothing on the market closes the gap, I build an MVP and run it in the real process. If it holds up it becomes the specification for the proper build. If it does not hold up, it was a cheap thing to lose. Every product started that way.
How I know it worked
I check a design three ways. Does it move what it was funded to move. Is anybody working around it. Would I take a shift on it.
Credentials
Certification and education
- ASQ Lean Six Sigma Black Belt
- Master of Business Administration
- Master of Engineering, Industrial Engineering Management
- Bachelor of Business Administration
Contact
Start with an email.
Email Kyle.