Foundry Data Group exists because small manufacturers deserve the same operational intelligence that enterprise companies have — without the enterprise price tag or the 18-month implementation timeline.
Founder & Principal Consultant
Foundry Data Group was founded by Robert Kimmell — a process engineer and data practitioner with 20 years of experience working with industrial operations, data systems, and manufacturing automation.
I started this business because I kept seeing the same problem: small manufacturers had real, solvable operational problems — and no one they could call who understood both the shop floor and the software.
The big consulting firms don't care about a 60-person fabricator in Oregon. The IT generalists don't know what OEE means. The platform vendors want to sell you a $50,000/year SaaS subscription before they've seen your factory. And the industrial integrators are great at hardware, but weak on data and analytics.
Foundry Data Group fills that gap. We bring manufacturing operations knowledge and modern data tools to companies that are ready to stop making decisions from spreadsheets — and start making them from data.
We sell measurable operational improvement. Every engagement is scoped around a specific, trackable outcome — and we measure it before and after.
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.
Plant floors run on trust built over time. We earn it by showing up prepared, communicating clearly with your operators (not just your executives), and building solutions your team can actually use and maintain.
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 start every client relationship with a Rapid Assessment and a fixed-fee pilot — not a 6-month discovery phase and a 200-page report. You see results in 90 days or you haven't committed to anything larger. That's the only way we know how to build trust quickly enough to be useful.
We standardize on proven open-source infrastructure: Node-RED, Grafana, InfluxDB, Python, n8n. This keeps your implementation costs low and keeps you in control. When we're done, your team can maintain and modify the systems — or hand them to any competent engineer.
62% of manufacturing employees believe AI is overhyped. They're not wrong about most of what they've seen. We deploy AI agents for specific, bounded problems — predictive maintenance, process monitoring, reporting automation — where the ROI is measurable and the failure modes are understood. We don't pitch AI transformation. We deliver operational improvement that happens to use AI where it earns its place.
We do our best work with manufacturers who have 25–250 employees, are running spreadsheet-based processes they know need to change, and want a trusted partner — not a vendor relationship. We work across discrete manufacturing, food & beverage, fabricated metals, plastics, and wood products — primarily in the Pacific Northwest, with remote engagements nationwide.
A free 30-minute call is the fastest way to find out. Tell us what's not working — we'll be direct about whether we can help.