Foundry Data Group exists because quality teams at small and mid-sized manufacturers spend too much of their week moving numbers between documents — work software should be doing, under rules a quality engineer would sign off on.
Founder & Principal Consultant
Foundry Data Group was founded by Robert Kimmell — a chemical engineer (Oregon State) with more than a decade in semiconductor manufacturing at CMC Materials, Maxim Integrated, and Qorvo, specializing in CMP processes, SPC, and design of experiments.
Semiconductor fabs run on quality data: certificates on every incoming chemical, control charts on every step, and an audit trail behind every decision. I spent years on both sides of that — qualifying materials from suppliers and building the data tools that kept processes in control.
What I kept seeing at smaller suppliers was the same work done by hand. Skilled QC people transcribing certificates, assembling customer CoAs in Word, and feeding SPC software one value at a time. Enterprise LIMS and QMS platforms are priced and scoped for companies ten times their size; IT generalists don't know what a CoA is for.
Foundry Data Group fills that gap: quality systems built by someone who has signed off on the data, not just stored it.
We automate a specific, painful piece of quality work — usually the customer CoA — and prove it on real lots before anything else gets built.
If your data isn't ready for the solution you want, we say so upfront. If the ROI doesn't justify the investment, we say that too. Our goal is a long-term relationship, not a signed contract.
Software collects, checks, and assembles. Your quality reviewer decides. Every system we build keeps a named person on every quality judgment, and records who made it.
No vendor lock-in. Every solution we deliver uses tools you can maintain independently. When the engagement ends, you have something durable — not a dependency.
We automate one material end to end — supplier intake, review, customer CoA — and run it next to your current process until the certificates match. A working system on real lots builds more trust than any requirements document.
We build on PostgreSQL and Python, packaged to run on your own server or a cloud account you own. No per-seat licensing, no proprietary platform. When we're done, any competent engineer can maintain it.
We use AI where it earns its place — for example, speeding up how we onboard a new supplier's CoA format. But the system that issues your certificates is deterministic and checked: the same document always produces the same values, and a person approves every lot.
Manufacturers and processors of roughly 25–250 people who issue certificates with their shipments and know their quality paperwork has outgrown spreadsheets — specialty and high-purity chemicals, electronic materials, coatings and polymers, and ingredient suppliers. Primarily the Pacific Northwest, with remote engagements nationwide.
A free 30-minute call is the fastest way to find out. Tell us how quality data moves through your plant today — we'll be direct about whether we can help.