Normand Frenette, President and CEO
Norm has built international experience covering R&D, engineering management, sales management and strategic marketing at executive levels. His successes come from a deep technical understanding combined with the reality of business imperatives and clients needs.
Normand holds a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering form Queen’s University in Canada and started his career as university faculty with research interests in VLSI, optics and microwaves. Moving to industry, he built over 15 years of corporate experience in North America, Europe and Asia. He has been VP engineering, VP Sales & Marketing, CIO, and has worked in Strategic Planning, Engineering, Product Management, Sales, and e-business strategy. His work in strategic focus and process change as taken him to Germany, France, USA, working with multinationals, small businesses, and the US Army.
Show details of Normand Frenette's bio.Graduating with top honors from the Royal Military College (RMC) in Kingston, Canada, Normand earned his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering while holding a professorial post at RMC, and later moved to the electrical engineering faculty at Queen’s University also in Kingston. His advanced research in VLSI, optical communications and microwave circuits has been the foundation for further publications in those fields.
Moving to industry, Norm first managed a software and hardware engineering team at a prominent Toronto R&D firm. His skill as a turn around agent first emerged here as he took over late projects in automotive control systems and brought them to successful on-time completion.
During the 1990’s in Paris, France, Normand held progressively important positions in the railway signaling division of GEC Alsthom (now Alstom), spearheading 50% cost reduction programs in complex subway control systems and leading engineering and sales teams to book over $200 M of business in Hong-Kong. There he headed three bid teams concurrently, and handled technical, commercial and legal contract negotiations with the customer. Promoted to Group Marketing Manager, Normand was responsible for overseeing product strategy and system definition for competitive bids worldwide with units in France, UK, Brazil, Canada, Hong-Kong and Australia. He also worked on various North American acquisitions.
In 1997, Norm moved to Ansaldo Signal (ASNV) in Pittsburgh, Pa. as VP Markets and Technology to define the product strategy after the conglomerates’ various acquisitions worldwide. While at ASNV he stepped into various executive positions as a turn around agent. As VP of Engineering of the American unit of ASNV (US&S), he led a technical staff of 250 people, improving project management processes, introducing concurrent engineering, and bringing about significant reductions in execution costs. As VP of Sales, he refocused the sales force, introduced sales and bid management processes, and created long-term sales strategies that brought sales back in line with budget expectations. As CIO, he launched online sales strategies to reach countries where ASNV had no direct representations.
Since 2001, Norm has been working with executives both locally and internationally. He works with engineering project teams to train staff and implement structures that improve on-time and on-budget execution permanently. He also guides engineering sales teams to increase the competitiveness of systems bids. He continues to work with executives advising on product strategy, market positioning and the operational aspect of Mergers & Acquisitions.
Tom Pidgeon, KTS Associate
A seasoned executive with profit and loss responsibility for operational and manufacturing divisions of multi-nationals, Tom has worked on both sides of the Atlantic turning around production, reducing costs, improving efficiency and leading skilled and less skilled work forces to competitive success.
Tom, a proponent of Lean Manufacturing, brings a wealth of experience in operational management including manufacturing, production control, procurement, and inventory control. Not an ivory tower executive, Tom has a unique background that has taken him from the manufacturing floor to the general management of both multi-nationals and privately held companies. This enables Tom to work well with shop supervisors and CEO alike.
Show details of Tom Pidgeon's bio.Tom started his career on the manufacturing floor at General Electric Company, enrolling in the GE Apprentice Program and the GE Management Training Programs while completing his college degree in mechanical engineering. He became supervisor and then manufacturing manager at the Electric Motor plant.
Tackling a turn-around, as Plant Manager of a smaller electric motor company, he reduced costs by 37%, cut lead-times in half and boosted sales by 24%.
Tom later moved to ITT to accept a new challenge: Setting up a green-field production facility for the Suspension Systems Division. With automatic and semi-automatic manufacturing, Tom went from zero to full production in 14 months, increasing production efficiency from 37% to 80% in the first year of production.
In the mid 1980’s, starting as VP of Operation Tom rose to General Manager of GEC Automation Projects. With bottom-line responsibility Tom oversaw finance, sales , engineering and production with $45 M of sales in three US locations and a work force of 300 union and non-union employees. With an eye to constant cost control while growing the top line with new products introduction, Tom became a master at introducing best practices ranging from purchasing practices, inventory control to soft issues like bottom-up employee communications.
In the 1990’s. Tom moved to Union Switch & Signal Inc. first as Manufacturing Director and then as Vice-President Operations. With Products ranging from electro-mechanical components to SMT electronics systems, Tom introduced cellular manufacturing techniques, cross-functional teams, and spearheaded the introduction of concurrent engineering working closely with the VP engineering. Capitalizing on his experience as a change agent, Tom assume executive leadership of the company wide Re-Engineering effort.
Tom holds a BSME from Union College in Schenectady NY and a MBA from Georgia State University in Atlanta,Georgia.Chuck Weintraub, KTS Associate
Mr. Weintraub, founder of PPT Strategies and several technology companies is a proven Sales Executive who thrives as a client-partner, sales leader, channel strategist and client-mentor. He is a Certified Management Consultant and Certified Sales Consultant that he integrates in all of his selling venues. Mr. Weintraub has had the good fortune of working with and/or personally starting over 5 technology companies in the past 20 years. Currently, through PPT Strategies he offers CEOs, Presidents and VPs of companies, mentoring on building a value & consultative driven sales culture while training their sales team.
Show details of Chuck Weintraub's bio.Chuck's previous company, Veratage: a Business Intelligence software firm (Bio/Med/Marketing/Banking Informatics), was recognized in the Pittsburgh Business Times as the fastest growing technology company in Pittsburgh and as one of the Fortune 500’s fastest growing companies. Veratage outsourced the building of data-warehouses and created an integrated data collection tool for Fortune 1000 companies that pulled data from disparate systems to predict marketing and sales effectiveness. Veratage, a bootstrapped initiative, grew 600% in 4 years, selling direct and through resellers. Mr. Weintraub led and managed the entire sales effort. Prior to that, his company CRS, a middleware/integration Oracle software shop and Sun Microsystems reseller focused on repurposing and outsourcing major data centers and moving the data onto Oracle and Sun. Their channel product, InterPhase, a tool to repurpose various types of mainframe data, won many awards in VAR Business magazine, InformationWeek and other venues. In the late 80’s, Mr. Weintraub was also one of the 1st Sun Microsystems Channel Sales employees in the East Coast, successfully selling commercial systems through integrators, OEMs and VARs to the Federal Government, Boeing, Large Pharmas, Bell Atlantic, AT&T and many others. He grew his first company, MicroSolve Inc., in Tampa Florida, from one MicroAge Computer Store franchise to four in three years.
Mr. Weintraub recently retired as the President of the CMU GSIA Entrepreneurial Alumni Association and lectures on both technology and sales through the Limbach Entrepreneurial center at the Univ. of Pittsburgh and CMU Don Jones Entrepreneurial Center. He is a philanthropist and/or volunteer with Make-A-Wish, American Cancer, Children’s Hospital and ALS Foundation.