Experience That Cannot Be Taught. Only Earned.
The DES team combines deep technical expertise with genuine operational instincts, the kind that only come from time spent inside facilities where getting control right, or getting it wrong, has consequences measured in millions of dollars. This is not a team that reads about industrial processes. It is a team that has run them.
Cliff brings to DES an operational depth that most technology executives never acquire: extensive hands-on knowledge of plant operations across the Pulp & Paper, petrochemical, and utility industries, from unit operations through facility superintendent level. His background spans the full operational spectrum: start-up and commissioning, facility operations management, training, production maximization, and cost control at industrial scale.
That twenty-plus year operational heritage is precisely what allows Cliff to bridge the gap that defeats most technology deployments, the gap between what a control system is theoretically capable of and what the operations team will accept and trust in practice. His solutions are not limited to technical issues. They extend to the organizational, procedural, and cultural dimensions that determine whether a deployment sustains its results or quietly regresses to baseline.
Cliff is actively involved in the Technical Association of Pulp and Paper Industries (TAPPI) as an instructor, and contributes to several other professional organizations in support of industry advancement.
Ron is the primary research investigator at Dynamic Energy Systems, the architect of the patented control technology that defines DES's competitive position. His career has been devoted to the development of advanced software and control system platforms across the heavy industrial and utility sectors, with the last twelve years focused specifically on Real-Time Pricing control technologies that solve complex, multi-variable optimization problems at industrial scale.
To address the full scope of large-scale energy management challenges, Ron developed a rule-based controller for which he holds an applications patent and has since expanded the system's capabilities with additional patents pending. The result is the EMRS platform: a new class of Energy Management and Reporting System that solves the most difficult process control problems the industry presents, and has been validated through documented client results at facilities across North America.
Ron is the author of multiple technical papers and journal articles, including the foundational DES research published in the Association of Energy Engineers Journal that established the theoretical and practical framework for autonomous closed-loop industrial energy management. He is also the inventor and primary author of the MultiMaxx operational theory, the technical foundation for DES's flagship boiler control product.
James Robinson brings more than thirty years of experience in power and control system projects across the industrial and utility sectors, a career that spans R&D support in mining equipment development, field liaison engineering, senior design engineering at Catalytic Construction, and more than a decade at Honeywell where he worked with emerging Distributed Control System and PLC technologies across marketing, turnkey project delivery, and product development functions.
In 1990, Jim founded his own company with the explicit objective of developing a new class of Energy Management System, spending thirteen years as a Principal Project Engineer developing Energy and System Audit Techniques and executing energy projects while earning his Certified Energy Manager (CEM), Certified Energy Practitioner (CEP), and Canadian Professional Engineering designations. During that period he published multiple papers in the energy field that contributed to the professional knowledge base the industry relies on today.
Jim joined DES to implement EMRS technology for the reduction of heavy industrial energy usage, bringing to the team the combination of engineering rigor, field project experience, and audit methodology precision that underpins DES's ability to quantify client opportunities with the specificity necessary to fund and justify major capital commitments.