An engineer who has run plants, not just written code

Daniel Reed II founded Reed Industrial Systems after 20 years in manufacturing engineering. He started as a design engineer, then ran maintenance crews of 42 people across three shifts, led a plant engineering group and its capital budget, and was program lead on a $32M capital expansion.

Most recently he led controls and automation engineering at a plant that runs around the clock. His team's autonomous-operations program cut operator interactions about 96% on the targeted systems, and 28% across the plant within a year, on a project that cost under $140K. He built secure MCP integrations that let AI models query the plant's ERP, historian, lab, and production data.

He leads programs and builds the systems himself: the controls code, the vision systems, the data connections. He has also sat on a site leadership team, in the monthly operations review, where every number had to hold up. That is the difference. When we put AI into your business, it connects to the systems you already run, it is built to keep running after we leave, and it is measured against what it was supposed to save.