Con Scale
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Con(s)quering@Scale. Solving the cube.
About Us
Con Scale is differentiating from other consulting providers by the fact that we know what we are talking about. We have a successful track-record of a total of 43 years in our target industries as system integrators/tech providers but mainly as end customers in R&D and commercial production in OT/engineering with technical & business owner’s responsibility.
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So we know how to walk the talk.
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Our Dedication
Meet the Founders
Randy is a control system & connectivity artist. And he can be your industrial cybersecurity pain in the a...
Not just because he learned it from textbooks, YouTube or any other recently completed conference or web certification. No, it is because this man is a living compendium of expertise, hands-on experience and continuous learning & self-development in these fields.
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Randy is a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering. Believe it or not, he started his work career 28 years ago as a control system & control software engineer. This specialized field is his great passion that he lives it with heart, soul and full dedication. He has redefined this professional field and constantly pushed its boundaries.
Throughout his career he did not only absorb and experience the core systems and technological mechanisms in this professional field but enriched it with elements of operational excellence - Randy holds a Green Belt (LEAN and DMAIC) -, professional project management- Randy is a PMP® -, industrial network design & cybersecurity. Randy can be considered “the friendly hacker for his customers”.
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Especially for the regulated environment, he acquired the deep knowledge of decades of hands-on lean & modular commissioning, qualification & validation.
He still bears with the idea to become a regulatory inspector for qualification & cybersecurity, as he has been exposed to a lot of hide & seek maneuvers in this field, that is so deeply tied to business integrity.
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Randy played on all sides of the manufacturing industry: he has a proven track-record as a system integrator, worked for large tech companies and has been an end customer out of the OT global & local engineering departments in the pharmaceutical/biotech & utilities/oil & gas with technical system and/or business owner’s responsibility.
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From his early career paths, he knows what 24/7 on-site and/or on-call responsibility means, especially in a traffic-dense region like the San Fransico Bay area. Being shaped by this experience, as well as being trained through the accountability in executing numerous plant shutdowns/re-starts/re-vamps and frequent product change overs in an environment where time is money of billions, Randy does everything with voice of reason, efficiency, practicality & ownership in mind. Everything has to have a reason. Especially in the money game. He cuts off the squiggles of inefficiency.
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This sometimes drives the system integrators and technology providers, that Randy is leading, into spheres of their services & products, which they have never thought or developed before. Usability & scalability is key.
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Randy knows that the Automation Engineering Teams usually are, in the life cycle of a production plant, the teams at shortest end of the stick. They need to close the “cracks” in the dream facility between utilities & facility engineering, process engineering and equipment manufacturers as well as business- and manufacturing IT.
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Call Randy the living technology-by-experience compendium for OT & its related IT space but foremost call him the leading operationalization-izor of technical programs. He manages it on global and local level and brings it all to life.
Randy is an enthusiastic beer brewer.
Dr. Nina Schwalb
President/General Manager Con Scale AG
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Randy Simpkins (B. Sc.)
Managing Director Con Scale AG
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Nina is a physical chemist by training with specialization in physics, data science and biosynthesis (biosimilars). She holds a PhD in natural sciences.
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Nina is a very interdisciplinary skilled natural scientist with 14+ years of industry experience in technical leadership, business & line management positions in large global corporations within the chemical process & pharmaceutical industry. She has also worked in academia and tech companies & startups.
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Nina started her industrial career almost 15 years ago in the area of process technology, and tech transfer in pharmaceutical/biotech as well as chemical & polymer industry sectors. She was responsible for DOE including data modeling & data analytics, upscaling and process & equipment (re-)design.
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Due to her background in physics, she took over responsibility in real-time online image processing & machine vision to control continuous commercial production processes & to ensure the products quality. Same physical principles of physico-chemical identification by light & data were part of the position she held in early drug candidate research to boost lead structure discovery.
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Being exposed to data science & big data long before the hype, she understands the magic behind it and has profound knowledge to verify the acquisition process & its specialties, the math behind modeling & analytics, the data correction & interpretation schemes as well as the complexity to access & provide these data to consuming systems, apps & end users. This is for R&D, scale up/tech transfer and commercial production setup.
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Nina is always interested in being stretched from her comfort zone and so she undertook a mission to modernize commercial engineering functions in large corporations and to make them ready for the area of data & manufacturing intelligence, cyber-physical systems & cybersecurity, industrial automation and modern procedural & organizational setups, like concepts for the workflows and workforce of the future.
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Thus, she held multiple corporate tech, business and strategy leadership roles and spread her knowledge to advance the organizations. In these roles, Nina successfully delivered on defining and operationalizing strategies and organizational structures to convert operations and services into transforming, future-ready setups.
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It is important to Nina to understand all sides of the business, so aside from being part of the “user companies of technology” in the pharma/chemical industry, she took over strategic business development & sales and tech marketing roles with tech providers.
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Nina’s passion is to turn thought into action, even if this means to go from stoplight to stoplight. She likes to energize an organization by forward looking opportunities, the creation of a compelling & relatable vision as well as purpose about the future. It is all about setting the spark. But above all that, it is to bring this into reality.
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Nina enjoys traveling the world.
And she hopes to be a space traveler. Soon...
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Meet the Team
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