Dr. R. Prasad Velaga, President

Dr. Velaga has more than 35 years of research and practical experience in scheduling, simulation and optimization. Since 1983, he has been working as a consultant to manufacturing industries for improving productivity and quality. While serving as a regular faculty member at a prestigious research organization and publishing theoretical research articles during 1980s and 1990s, he directly worked with operators and supervisors on factory shop floors for improving productivity and quality. His experience as a practical Operations Research analyst also includes development of optimization tools, intelligent decision support systems and scheduling software for business and industry. He has several years of experience in developing scientific algorithms and writing software programs for them.

With PhD in modeling and analysis of scheduling systems, he has a deep passion for developing scientific, dependable and affordable scheduling software for complex production systems. In 2004, Dr. Velaga founded the software company, Optisol in College Station, Texas exclusively for developing powerful, affordable scheduling solutions for small and mid-sized industries engaged in order-dirven, high-mix, low-volume production and project-based production. Prior to 2004, Dr. Velaga worked as technical lead on many projects to develop and implement scheduling solutions for complex production systems.

Dr. Velaga received his PhD degree in scheduling from Indian Statistical Institute, a prestigious research center in India and published several research articles on scheduling, optimization and applied probability. He served as tenured or visiting faculty at Indian Statistical Institute, Washington State University, Pullman and Texas A&M University, College Station and worked as research scientist at Knowledge Based Systems, Inc. He also worked as a scheduling & optimization specialist for a short period at i2 Technologies, a well known vendor of supply chain management software.

Dr. Velaga is proving that small and mid-sized job shops can get great practical value from powerful, scientific scheduling software at an affordable price if they have no intention to meet shop floor information needs with such software. He is active on LinkedIn by frequently writing articles on manufacturing and scheduling and freely sharing his knowledge in scheduling with members through group discussions.

Daniel Hofford, Manager, Sales and Implementation

Mr. Hofford has more than 25 years experience in database and applications programming. He started his career in IT by designing software for Architects and Engineers to help them track their professional liability obligations and lower their insurance fees. He worked in the the military/industrial complex spending some of his time as both a mechanical and circuit card designer and manager.

Later, Mr. Hofford moved to the private manufacturing sector as a consultant in the design and implementation of Real Time Data Collection systems. He has a lot of experience in integrating shop floor data collection systems to electronic information systems. He acquired a good working knowledge of manufacturing software while working with complex job shops. Mr. Hofford received his masters degree in Clinical Psychology from Goddard University. He promotes the role of human psychology in designing simple, user friendly software that appeals to the common sense and intuition of users. He utilizes his knowledge of psychology for simplifying and improving human-software interaction in complex systems and in helping companies make the change from manual to automated systems.