David Stockar
David is a Managing Partner at OpExcel Solutions LLC. He has expertise in the areas of change management, organizational transformation, operational risk management, safety, sustainability and environment management. He has a history of leading dynamic organizations, including Fortune 500 companies, in improving operations, strengthening environmental health and safety (EH&S) systems and cultures, managing complex change and creating sustainable value.
With over 30 years of experience, David is comfortable working with executives, managers, labor partners and employees in increasing their risk awareness and collaborative skills. Using a customized integration of innovative approaches, such a Human Organizational Performance, Value-Based Communications and Branding, and Affective Psychology, with more traditional best practices, such as Impactful Leadership, Highly-Effective Teams, LEAN, Process Safety Management (PSM) and Operational Risk Management (ORM), he has guided clients beyond their operational and safety plateaus. His unsurpassed efficiency, responsiveness and attention to specific client requests make David an ideal ‘partner’ whom clients seek for their continued improvement and success.
Prior to forming OpExcel Solutions, David had a senior leadership role at E.I. DuPont and Company where he specialized in Organizational Strategy, Management of Change (MOC) and Organizational Transformation in the areas of EH&S and ORM. While at DuPont Sustainable Solutions, a wholly owned business within DuPont, he led multidisciplined teams of over 100 operational and technical experts and contractors in improving organizational performance across a wide range of global clients and industry sectors, such as energy, healthcare, aerospace, pharmaceutical, petrochemical, food and beverage, transportation and manufacturing. His key accomplishments include building stronger operational, EH&S, ORM, PSM and MOC strategies, systems and processes and improving operational and EH&S performance, organizational culture, employee engagement and impactful leadership to the benefit of safety, operations, labor and employee relations and business financials.
Deborah L. Grubbe
Deborah Grubbe is a Network Executive Partner at OpExcel Solutions, LLC. Her specialty is improving safety and operational performance. Her clients include firms in the chemical, oil and gas, construction, healthcare, power and aerospace industries. She has forty years of results in engineering management, operations turnarounds and safety leadership, and is a recognized safety culture expert with global experience and strong interpersonal skills.
She is the former Vice President of Group Safety for BP plc, which had its two safest years ever during her tenure. Deborah was trained in the characteristics of safe operations during her 27-year career at DuPont, where she held corporate director positions in operations, engineering and safety. Her many assignments have included capital governance, project management and execution, process safety and risk management, strategic safety assessments, manufacturing management, organizational change leadership and human resources. For example, she has worked with the Canadian Railway System on the subject of safety culture and has co-authored an eBook on process safety.
From 2003-2012, Deborah served as a member of the NASA Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel and was a consultant on safety culture to the Columbia Shuttle Accident Investigation Board. For her service, she was awarded the NASA Exceptional Public Service Medal. Deborah currently serves on the Engineering Advisory Council for Rowan University, the Chemical Engineering Industry Council for Drexel University, and the Advisory Council for the Advanced Safety and Engineering Management Masters’ Program at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. She is an Emeritus member of the Center for Chemical Process Safety and has worked with the National Academy of Sciences to support the Demilitarization of the US Chemical Weapon and Conventional Weapons Stockpiles.
Deborah is a former member and current President-Elect of the Board of Directors of American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) and is the former chair of the AIChE Institute for Sustainability, where she led a global effort to establish a professional credential. In 2014 she was requested to head the AIChE Center for Ethical Practice and is developing a multi-year effort to emphasize the role of ethics in business and professional endeavors. In 2002, she received the Purdue Distinguished Engineering Alumni Award, and was named “Engineer of the Year” in the State of Delaware. In May 2010, Deborah was awarded an Honorary Doctorate in Engineering from Purdue University. In 2013, she was elected to the National Academy of Construction, and was named the 2018 Delaware Valley Engineer of the Year.
James B. Porter, Jr.
Jim Porter is a Network Executive Partner at OpExcel Solutions LLC and a highly experienced corporate executive with expertise in the areas of operational excellence, capital effectiveness and operational productivity. He is a highly sought-after mentor and coach to the C-Suite in many Fortune 500 companies. He brings decades of executive leadership experience operating a world-class engineering organization at E.I. DuPont and Company and leading complex capital effectiveness projects globally.
Jim was Chief Engineer and Vice President – Engineering and Operations for DuPont until his retirement. Jim joined the company as a chemical engineer and served in 23 technical and leadership assignments.
Today, Jim provides consulting services to help companies make significant and sustainable improvements in workplace safety, process safety management, capital effectiveness and operations productivity. He has worked with more than 25 companies in 10 countries and has contributed to a current book focused on improving the safety, cost, schedule and quality performance on very large projects.
Jim has served as chair for the Construction Industry Institute (CII) and he was the 2004 recipient of CII’s Carroll H. Dunn Award of Excellence. In 2005 he received the Engineering and Construction Contracting Association Achievement Award and in 2007 he was honored with the Society of Women Engineers Rodney D. Chipp Memorial Award. In 2008 he was the first recipient of FIATECH’s “James B. Porter, Jr. Award for Technology Leadership.” He is a member of the National Academy of Construction and was on the Argonne National Laboratory Board of Governors .
Paul Kugelman
Paul is an OpExcel Solutions LLC Network Executive Partner with decades of experience in plant and business operations. During his nearly 30 years with DuPont he effectively led operations with annual production of hundreds of millions of pounds of high-quality textile fibers and other products. His leadership experience runs the gamut from design engineering, maintenance, production, technical support to operations, research, technical service and corporate headquarters organizations. He retired from DuPont as Director of Manufacturing of the Advanced Materials Systems Division. During the past decade of his consulting career, Paul has worked alongside senior executives helping them achieve their operational and organizational effectiveness objectives. These companies range in size and scope from organizations as large as mining and refining operations, extracting oil from the Athabasca oil sands, to smaller companies producing natural gas and other products such as polyester film.
Paul worked side-by-side with senior executives of Canada’s largest energy company to design, develop, and implement the cornerstone of their Operations Excellence initiative. This process encompassed all aspects of organizational behavior, including individual performance, teamwork and communications. This two-year initiative, involving more than 3,000 personnel ranging from senior leaders to operations workers, led to establishing and sustaining their long-term vision for Operational Excellence. Paul’s endeavor has recently been described by one of their senior executives as “the best culture change effort we’ve ever had.”
At the request of the CEO, Paul led a small group of consultants from three different consulting companies in assessing the underlying causes of a series of fatal incidents plaguing one of Canada’s largest energy companies. This four-month privileged, and confidential assessment led to identifying root causes and contributing factors. Effective corrective actions were taken. Paul has performed effective diagnosis of client safety culture through the use of both DuPont’s Safety Perception Survey and personal observation and was instrumental the development of key elements of the safety perception framework. With his training and experience Paul has designed effective interventions, helping a variety of clients make significant improvements to their culture and resulting performance.
Diane Stover Hopkins
Diane S. Hopkins is a Network Executive Partner at OpExcel Solutions LLC and a former Healthcare Executive. She specializes in organizational development, patient and customer experience, and innovative problem solving and workforce training.
Diane was one of the first Chief Experience Officers in the healthcare industry. She has extensive experience as a thought leader in the industry in the areas of innovation culture, marketing strategy and customer experience strategy. She is author of the book, Unleashing the Chief Moment Officers and co-author of Advice from a Patient and Wake Up and Smell the Innovation. She works with a variety of healthcare and non-healthcare companies as a content expert and consultant to improve customer experience and innovation strategy. Some of her clients include Medline, DuPont Sustainable Solutions, Freedom HealthWorks, Saint Gobain, Trinity Health System, Atlantic Health System and Laerdal.
She is a certified Experience Economy Expert and certified WOW Project expert and has been a frequent speaker at industry conferences including the Cleveland Clinic Empathy and Innovation conference. She was a founding faculty member at the University of Notre Dame IVIA Innovation mentor program, guest faculty at the Pennsylvania College of Health Science and committee member at the Patient Safety Movement.
Peter Diana
Peter Diana is a Network Partner at OpExcel Solutions LLC. He is a results-oriented professional with extensive experience streamlining processes, simplifying product flow, and improving manufacturing operations across a wide range of industries, including oil and gas, electrical distribution, automotive, manufacturing, transportation and food distribution. Pete utilizes his LEAN and Six Sigma skills to manage organizational change and continuous process improvement and work with employees in a variety of management positions. He is a decisive leader with strengths in strategic goal setting and developing and leading key program initiatives. He has a track record of proven success in problem solving and cost savings. Utilizing Six Sigma and Lean manufacturing technologies and his management expertise, Pete has improved business systems and processes.
Peter has over 35 years of operational and consulting experience with specific expertise that includes: Oil & Gas Upstream and Downstream Processing, Six Sigma Black Belt Champion, Environmental Health & Safety (EH&S), Process Safety Management, Operations Risk Management (ORM) and Contractor Safety Management within the Service Industry, Manufacturing, Construction, Transportation, Government Projects and Electrical Distribution.
Prior to joining OpExcel Solutions, Pete held senior leadership roles at E.I. DuPont and Company where he specialized in Engineering and Maintenance Improvement, Process Safety, Management of Change (MOC) and Organizational Transformation in the areas of EH&S and ORM. While at DuPont Sustainable Solutions, a wholly owned business within DuPont, Pete led multidisciplined teams of operational and maintaining experts and contractors in improving organizational performance across a wide range of global clients and industry sectors shown above. His key accomplishments include building stronger operational, EH&S, ORM, PSM and MOC strategies, systems and processes and improving operational and EH&S performance, organizational culture, employee engagement and impactful leadership to the benefit of safety, operations, labor and employee relations and business financials.
Garrett Forsythe
Garrett is an experienced operational excellence practitioner and a Network Partner at OpExcel Solutions LLC. He has engaged in all aspects of operations including developing an operational excellence framework and implementation for several chemical enterprises. He currently consults in operational excellence, risk assessment, leadership development and change management strategies. He is certified as a John Maxwell Leadership coach and has coached and is coaching a number of early, mid and late-career professionals.
With 40 years of experience in the chemical, pet-chem and mining industries, Garrett has led operational, business, supply chain, sales and marketing, safety and process-hazard improvement teams throughout his career. While at DuPont, Garrett led an international supply chain team overseeing a several hundred-million-dollar enterprises operating in over 12 countries. Early in his career, he led DuPont’s sodium cyanide operations team in Memphis, TN and gained valuable process safety management expertise. After several business, sales and marketing leadership roles, he helped to implement the DuPont Production System internally across a large chemical enterprise as an Operations Business Leader. He also led an enterprise improvement team for energy efficiency, with over $100 million of cost savings.
In 2010, Garrett joined DuPont Sustainable Solutions to form an energy efficiency consulting practice. He then helped to lead the design of the first external implementation of a Production System at a Russian Petrochemical enterprise. Following this, he helped design and implement both a Production System and an Integrated Business Improvement System at a large Asian Petrochemical client. This included better integration of operations with Supply Chain and Business teams, with a client-confirmed consulting payback of 4 – 10 times investment
Garrett has published multiple papers on operational excellence and has spoken at several conferences and roundtables. His passion is to help organizations through change management journeys with effective design and engagement of personnel at all levels.
Jyoti Patel
Jyoti is an operational and enterprise risk management expert and an OpExcel Solutions LLC Network Partner. She has a strong track record of providing superior business solutions to a wide range of international clients, including numerous Fortune 500 companies. Her work has reduced their operational and enterprise risk profiles and improved their bottom line.
Jyoti has over 15 years of professional and consulting experience in a wide range of industries, including: oil and gas, energy, chemical, mining, manufacturing and transportation. She currently serves as a Board Member within the Chemical Industry of Canada (Industry Liaison – West), and also Past Chair of the Process Safety Management Division in the Chemical Society of Chemical Engineers (CSChE).
Jyoti is actively engaged in evaluating process safety risks and portfolio prioritization used to streamline operational and regulatory requirements. She works closely with global and regional business leaders to identify, design and optimize process safety engineering to improve the quality of management systems and business information. Always solution oriented, she uses her technical knowledge and strong interpersonal skills to help clients clarify, own, implement and develop solutions to their unique risk management challenges. This makes Jyoti a highly sought-after partner in the complex field of operational and enterprise risk management.
Doug Poole
Doug is an OpExcel Solutions LLC Network Partner specializing in organizational development and operational improvement. Energetic and engaging, Doug has a proven record of delivering measurable improvements in safety performance, organizational engagement, and leadership capabilities across wide range of industries and cultures.
With more than 40 years of experience, Doug has worked at all levels of organization to create structures and systems that drive excellence and operational improvement. His approach is to look at all we do as part of an integrated whole. From what values we hold, to how we communicate, to tying together all the systemic elements so that people know not only what to do, but why. Having worked with virtually every industry category and size from multi-national to local, Doug knows how to identify and leverage what’s working and identify gaps in systems. He provides a clear, specific road map that works within the culture of the organization, enabling real and significant improvements that lead not only to a safer organization, but also one that is more productive.
Prior to joining OpExcel Solutions, Doug held senior roles at E.I. DuPont and Company where he integrated Safety Management and Process Safety Management Systems across organizations. Working at the C-Suite to the floor, the focus is on values, communications, organization design, operational excellence and more, including development of customized training. Doug has led large teams on multi-year, complex projects across a wide range of global clients and industry sectors, such as energy, utility, electronics, automotive, aerospace, petrochemical, trucking and manufacturing. After DuPont, Doug spent two years as a VP for DEKRA, working on projects in the oil & gas industry, research, trucking, and ship repair. Doug takes care to ensure that actions and activities integrate into operations seamlessly – safety is not another thing you will do; rather, it is how you will conduct your operations.
Vic Stroud
Vic is a Network Partner at OpExcel Solutions LLC. He is an accomplished and proven change agent with broad expertise in operations management, capital effectiveness, venture management and project management. His approach to delivering sustainable value centers around assessing operations, formulating strategies, and engaging and motivating cross-functional teams to achieve best-in-class performance. His specialty is collaborating with internal and external stakeholders to maximize return on investment of capital and the productivity of limited resources and creating and building on a foundation of operating discipline to mitigate risk and deliver competitive and predictable results.
With more than 35 years of operations and engineering management experience with E.I. DuPont and Company and INVISTA Inc., Vic has worked at all levels of organizations in multiple industries to create structures and systems that drive excellence and operational improvement. During his tenure with DuPont Sustainable Solutions, Vic built trusted partnerships with clients, analyzed client challenges, identified enterprise and operations risks, examined alternatives and collaborated with client cross functional teams to implement sustainable operations improvements. As the Global Practice Leader for Capital Effectiveness, Vic organized and led client assessments and engagements, incorporating project best practices aligned with client requirements. Prior to his tenure with DuPont Sustainable Solutions, Vic was the Engineering Manager for INVISTA’s Nylon Industrial, Polymer and Specialty Chemicals Businesses and Operations Leader for DuPont’s highly hazardous plant operations in Mississippi, Texas and Michigan.
Vic has demonstrated success leading complex consulting engagements and delivering outstanding results with clients across multiple industries. Vic’s expertise includes: Venture Management, Organizational Transformation, Program and Project Leadership, Mergers and Acquisitions Due Diligence, Supply Chain Management, Operational Risk Management, Capital Projects Front End Loading, and Capital Project and Portfolio Risk Management.