Companies> People>Ron Suarez

A continuous theme for projects that Ron manages has been to build technologies that enable people to work better, faster and cheaper by first studying the underlying business processes and then engineering flexible solutions. In 1989, Ron designed a system at a power plant (Dayton Power & Light) that enabled operators to scan in engineering diagrams and associate diagram elements using "drag and drop" for any of 10,000 values (voltages, temperature, etc.). Operators with a high school education were empowered to build their own "web like" interface and create their own manuals for starting up and shutting down turbines. From 1992 - 1995, Ron managed a project that completely revolutionized how Ford handled their design document versioning process for new cars. Working with a Mathematician and employing predicate calculus, Ron helped design a Feature Definition Language that limited descriptions of how auto parts connected by using only seven verbs in documents, which greatly simplified a system still in use today at Ford by tens of thousands of employees worldwide.

* Over 20 years experience managing software development
* Founded (1988) and sold (1998) Arbor Intelligent Systems, Inc. for over $3M (software consulting in Power Industry, Manufacturing, Telecommunications, Banking & Finance)
* Managed large scale digital asset management (DAM) projects for JSTOR and Proquest (world’s largest online libraries)
* Founded MediaRica with a focus on syndicating (RSS) audio and video (rich media)
* First person to use podcasting for fans to preview music before a show by encoding event metadata into the MP3 - ID3 tags (May, 2005 Detroit Electronic Music Festival)
* Former Psychology Professor with expertise in usability, information architecture, user experience (UX), certified by IBM (Rational) in object oriented analysis and design for large scale projects
* DJ and Host for Network Downtown
* Elected to Ann Arbor City Council