Forrest W. Breyfogle III
Founder and CEO
Forrest is a Professional Engineer, ASQ Fellow, and serves on the board of advisors for the University of Texas Center for Performance Excellence. His professional career spans over a quarter century where he has established himself as a leading edge thinker, a prolific author, an innovative consultant, a world-class educator, an international speaker, and a successful business executive. His work is documented in thirteen books and over 100 articles on the topics of quality and business-system improvement, which includes his most recent series of books titled Integrated Enterprise Excellence. In 2004, he received the Crosby Medal for his book, Implementing Six Sigma 2nd ed. Forrest founded Smarter Solutions, Inc. in 1992 and remains the CEO. View Full Biography

Rick Haynes
Master Black Belt
Rick has more than 20 years' experience in project management, training, applied statistics, engineering, and customer support. He has taught and certified professionals in all Lean Six Sigma areas. His consulting work has included all facets of business; building corporate performance dash boards, developing the Integrated Enterprise Excellence (IEE) system at a manufacturing firm, development of a process management and control system in a manufacturing firm, quality auditing of construction projects, developing reliability models for equipment failures, facilitating executive strategy development efforts, executive leadership coaching, modeling business performance for predictive analysis, improvement practitioner coach. Professional positions include; manufacturing site engineering manager, US Naval Officer (Submarines), corporate process improvement director, DOE research statistician, chemical process engineer, nuclear engineer.

James A. Alloway, Jr., Ph.D.
Master Black Belt
Dr. Alloway has been providing practical, cost-effective solutions for quality and productivity problems since 1973. He held senior engineering positions at a Fortune 250 company and is a former faculty member of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute's College of Engineering and School of Management, as well as Syracuse University's College of Engineering and Interdisciplinary Statistics Program. He provides practical solutions to a variety of manufacturing, service, and health care organizations. He also designs, manufactures, and markets teaching aids for statistical methods. He has worked with clients throughout the United States, as well as Canada, England, Scotland, France, Germany, Switzerland, India, and South Korea.

David M. Behrendsen
Master Black Belt
David is a Six Sigma Master Black Belt leader with extensive experience in Manufacturing and Transactional Project Management and Training Programs. David has an extensive background in Six Sigma training and project experiences through Allied Signal, Honeywell, and Six Sigma Qualtec. Through these corporations he has managed numerous types of Quality programs, trained both on-site and public Black Belt, Green Belt, Champion, and Executive sessions. David's Six Sigma project experiences consist of Engineering designs, Manufacturing, System Applications, Marketing, Finance, Employment Services, and Customer Support.

Darío Alarcón Hunter
Bilingual Instructor
Mr. Alarcón has over 40 years of professional experience developing different activities as Operational and Support Engineer in Naval Power Steam Plants, Manager of Research and Material Testing Nuclear Reactors and Engineer in Project Planning for Defence Industry. During the nineties he left the navy, and begun to develop consultancy projects related to Quality Management in order to comply with ISO 9001 standard. His experience included working with big companies related to heavy industries like shipyards and mining cooper companies. In the last 10 years, he broaden his scope to cover the process improvement projects with big financial impacts using the Lean Six Sigma Strategy, working with mining companies, pharmaceutical industry, aquaculture companies, in the financial industry, and in the beverage industry.

Ric Love
Master Black Belt
Ric recently completed a stint in education at West Virginia University at Parkersburg where he was an Instructional Specialist in Process Technology. Programs taught include leadership, team building, integrated math and business, and development of lean/5S programs in work place environment. Programs at the academic level include Bachelor of Applied Technology, Process Technology, OSHA 30 training and statistical process control. Prior to education work, he served in a number of industrial capacities and leadership roles, including training, over a forty year period in three countries. Quality specific work has been in the area of process measurement for statistical control, visual control systems, QFD, critical process identification, daily management systems, process flow charting, lean, root cause, equipment reliability, risk analysis, 5S, Design of Experiments, gage studies, Quality Control Planning, Reaction Plans, and ISO 9002 (internal auditor).

Trevor Coughlan
Lean Consultant
Trevor has more than 15 years experience spanning the high volume electronics, automotive, construction, financial services and clinical research industries where he has played a pivotal role in driving process improvement working as an Internal or external consulting. Trevor began his career in Electronic Component Manufacture where he gained valuable training in Lean Manufacturing techniques such as TPM, RTY, SMED, SPC and Gemba Kanri in Ireland and the USA. Trevor has vast experience from the security electronics industry to working with automotive industry in Scandinavia and high tech computer industry in Ireland and USA. Since returning to the United States in 2008 Trevor has helped numerous companies in the Construction, Electronics, Banking and Clinical Research field.

Gary Ekstrom
DFSS Consultant
Gary has been a corporate consultant for the past 18 years specializing in Product Development. He has facilitated a wide variety of development projects using the following processes: Business Situation Analysis, Strategic Product Planning, Strategic Decision Analysis, Customer Requirements Research, Product Definition using Quality Function Deployment, Operations Productivity Management, Process Definition & Control. He has provided training in using these processes for hundreds of corporate managers and employees. His primary focus has been the integration of decision analysis techniques with product planning and development processes. His career also includes 12 years experience in Quality & Reliability Engineering and he has applied his expertise in the development and manufacturing environments to assure proactive and concurrent product development.

Mallary Brown
Director of Operations and Finance
Mallary has been with Smarter Solutions for over six years and manages the daily operations including finance and accounting. She is a graduate from the McCombs School of Business at The University of Texas at Austin. Mallary is a Certified Green Belt and applies the methodologies taught by Smarter Solutions within the organization.