KURT SHAMPINE

Kurt is currently championing the business side of our brand new prescriptive-analytic patient flow product being designed to help relieve the patient flow issues prevalent in so many hospitals and clinics today.

Kurt brings over 25 years of Sales, Consulting and Project Management leadership experience to the table, much of that with ProModel.  His vision has helped ProModel grow from a one product simulation software company to a provider of an array of COTS (Commercial-Off the Shelf) and Custom prescriptive analytic technology solutions such as MedModel, Enterprise Portfolio Simulator and Clinical Trials Simulator. 

Over his career Kurt has personally worked with more than 200 different companies and created 400 solutions in most every industry where simulation could be applied. He started his career as an automation and robotics design engineer, after receiving his bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from RIT (Rochester Institute of Technology).

One of Kurt’s favorite recent projects was at a large health system in the southwest which was closing one hospital and opening a brand new one.  He helped them virtualize their entire new hospital before it opened so they could “right-size” size the staff and material inventory required for opening day and beyond.   Opening day went very smoothly has carried over to the early stages of operations at the new facility. 

Another one Kurt really enjoyed was a large health system in the northeast which was opening a brand new 44 bed ED.  The new ED was laid out in 5 separate PODs, with significantly newer and different technology and equipment. 

Kurt helped them model the POD’s operations to optimize the staff configuration and POD opening and closing schedules by day of the week and time of day.  One significant result was saving each nurse an average 2.5 mi/day walking, which translates to about one additional hour per nurse per day providing patient care.

In his free time, Kurt enjoys spending time with his wife and son, as well as avidly rooting for his favorite New York City sports teams.

DALE SCHROYER

Dale Schroyer has 20+ years as an improvement consultant in the healthcare field.

He started as an internal consultant in the Management Engineering group of Baystate Health in western Massachusetts. At Baystate Dale provided various process improvement services including standard work measurement, process re-engineering, and process simulation including creating simulation models of every operational area of the delivery system including among others, the Operating Room Suite, the Emergency Room, a four story specialty care clinic building, and every primary care practice in the system.

Mr. Schroyer had been chosen by Baystate because in his prior fifteen years as an engineer in a fortune five hundred aerospace company he had worked extensively in process improvement, simulation and quality systems having been trained in Total Quality Management, Toyota Production Systems, Statistical Process Control, and ISO quality systems.

Dale joined the ProModel consulting team and has for the last fifteen years provided ProModel clients in healthcare with a variety of professional services that cover the entire spectrum of healthcare environments. He has obtained his Six Sigma Green Belt, and the Lean Bronze rating. Mr. Schroyer is in the process of getting a Data Scientist Certificate from John's Hopkins and a Project Management Professional (PMP) certification.

DAN HICKMAN

Daniel K. Hickman is Chief Technology Officer of ProModel Corporation a leading provider of simulation-based, decision making solutions for enterprise performance improvement.

Dan was named CTO in January 2007, assuming full management responsibility for delivering on the company's mission of enterprise decision modeling through predictive simulation solutions. Dan has a real passion for creating software that facilitates strategic decision-making.

In July 2002, he was promoted to Director of New Products, a role that gave him day-to-day responsibility for running development of new products at ProModel. Prior to that, Dan had been involved in several ProModel divisions, including consulting, product development, sales and support. In 1999, before joining ProModel, Dan founded CadreSoft Corporation. Embedding ProModel technology, CadreSoft innovated new approaches to solving capacity problems through simulation.

Dan received his BS in Industrial and Manufacturing Technology from Western Michigan University.

KYLE KESTER

Kyle is a 2002 graduate from Pennsylvania State University with a BS in Industrial Engineering.  After years of industry experience, he validated his career by obtaining his Professional Engineering License as an Industrial Engineer.  Always looking to volunteer, Kyle is also an elected Board Member for Penn State University Industrial & Manufacturing Engineering Society.

Below are a couple of references from Kyle’s life sciences consulting work at ProModel.

Kyle,

It’s hard to believe that we have been only working together nearly three years. We started out with a few smaller models to help the site answer questions about our production lines, people and material flows, and warehousing. I really appreciate the time that you took to understand our requirements and processes. This enabled better collaboration with our industrial engineers and more accurate simulation. These simulation tools have allowed us to evaluate current issues as well a proposed changes. The accuracy of the results has built credibility and confidence in the use of simulation with our site leadership.

The approach of leadership both locally as well as corporate has started to change. Their expectations are changing and simulation are now being required as part of capital projects. We are also seeing the use of simulation starting earlier in the development cycle. The early models are higher level models looking at capacity and utilization while the later models drive towards optimization of the equipment and resources. This approach has allowed the project team to focus on the most impactful issues and most efficiently use precious resources.

As the success of the modelling has grown, so did our dreams for the future. The current challenge is developing a high level site model that allows us to predict our capacity, utilization and bottlenecks. We intentionally designed the simulation to leverage existing corporate systems. Another requirement was for the system to be scalable to other sites as well as the Pfizer manufacturing network. From an administrative side, the tools to upload historical information has significantly reduced the manual effort required to setup and configure the system. From a customer perspective, the Gantt chart display has been extremely beneficial. This tool gives our users a visual display of the historical and predicted execution of our productions lines. This has been a great asset to the Industrial Engineers to explain how the process runs as well as show the impact of proposed change to our customers. Although the system is not complete, it positions us to better understand and optimize our existing production capacity and is expandable for future endeavors.

Thank you so much for your support and we wish you well in your new role.

Michael Jones
Pfizer Kalamazoo

“I have worked with Kyle on a number of projects over the years.  Kyle brings insight and quickly gains the respect of our teams through his ability to translate the business problem into a credible model with users who are generally unfamiliar with simulation.  Kyle recently helped us uncover some potential problems with a clinical study that needed to close very quickly. It was a novel application of simulation technology but  most importantly, Kyle created a visual that communicated  a very complex situation into a simple diagram. This single visual was able to encapsulate and identify  our central problem- one that we would have been blind to without the detailed simulation. In all of this , Kyle was calm and worked seamlessly with the team, using their own language and  familiar reports to build confidence and trust in the outcome. He was central to the success of our project”

Euan Ross, Business Process Analyst
Business Process Excellence
Operations Center of Excellence

BRUCE GLADWIN

With nearly 30 years of experience in the simulation field, Bruce has worked with major corporations worldwide developing hundreds of models across a wide range of industries. In his 20 year tenure with ProModel, he has served as a Product Manager, Senior Consultant, and Project Manager. Bruce was named Vice President for Consulting Services in 2005 and has oversight responsibility for ProModel’s Consulting and Customer Service activities.

Bruce received a BS in Systems Engineering from the University of Arizona and an MBA from Brigham Young University. He is a certified Project Management Professional (PMP), an expert in Lean production principles and he received his Six Sigma Black Belt certification while employed at General Electric.

Bruce has worked with companies such as GE Medical Systems and Olympus America to apply Lean production principles to patient flow optimization. Simulation modeling allows these principles to be used more effectively to Visualize, Analyze and Optimize a broad range of healthcare processes.

Key projects include:

• Creation of radiology process flow models for GE Medical Systems while at GE Global Research
• Development of a simulation-based GI Clinic Simulator for Olympus America’s “Endoefficiencies” consulting unit.
• Design of a multi-clinic family practice simulator for capacity analysis at AltaMed in Southern California.
• Development of a Lean Simulation for Healthcare course that teaches how to apply simulation modeling concepts and Lean production principles to healthcare processes.
• Patient flow simulation modeling and support for Carilion Roanoke Memorial Hospital
• Simulation training and support for Children’s Medical Center Dallas