Input/Output: My life in manufacturing

You may have noticed a theme in most of my jobs to this point. The only company that actually made anything was Exxon. (S/N notwithstanding).

But now I was about to embark on a new branch of my career. I/O (now called Ion, if you are at all interested. Or maybe Inova, depending on what part of the company you are looking at) made stuff. We made seismic acquisition stuff. Geophones, Hydrophones, Seismic Cables, Land Acquisition Systems, Vibrator Trucks (not as sexy as their name implies), and everything to support the acquisition of seismic data.

Collecting seismic data is really doing nothing more than recording sound. Granted, you are recording sound from thousands of different sources located either on the trackless ocean or buried in the ground over many square miles, and then the sound waves need to be reconstructed so you can see what they bounced off of, many thousands of feet underground. (crazy stuff. The largest Seismic Vessels now (from PGS, thank you very much) can tow as many as 22 streamer cables, each about 8 km long. They are the largest man made moving things on earth). You can imagine that you need to know exactly where those geophones are located, and when, exactly you deploy the "source" of the sound waves (either explosives like dynamite or the vibe trucks mentioned above). It is complicated.

I was hired to run the Land Data Systems group. We were responsible for the new digital "geophone" (actually a MEMS accelerometer) the Central System, which is the computer that keeps track of where all the data is coming from and then puts it all in the right place, and the sales thereof.

It was a hard time in the oil business, and not many oil companies were collecting land data. And not many service companies were buying new seismic equipment. But we had a net technology (Vectorseis is what we called it) and were sort of effective. I had to cut my staff from over 160 people to under 70 people (which was not fun), outsource some manufacturing, and try and learn about things like "Long Lead Time Items" and "Inventory". Neither of these were too important (or even existed!) in the software or data world.

I had a good time learning these things. I would walk around our factory floor and pick things up (which you can't do with software) just to hold in my hand something I made.

We did pretty well considering the environment. We increases sales in the year I was there from about $3 million a quarter to about $8 million a quarter.

But soon enough some headhunters came calling. I was destined to get back into software. I worked for I/O for 14 months. There was such a strong culture there (and such a great CEO, who quit before I did) that I still consider myself an I/O Alumni.