About CEO & President, Tim Ward
History of Manufacturing Consulting Services, Inc.
The history of Manufacturing Consulting Services started about 80 years before registering the company with the state of Utah.
Tim’s father, Delbert Ward, was raised on a farm in Southern Idaho. Delbert wanted to be a pole-vaulter. Unfortunately, his right hip never formed correctly, so running really fast was, sadly, out of the question. His physical disability also really cramped his farming style: he could not physically do it. So, unlike many of his peers, Delbert went to the University of Southern Idaho and graduated with a Bachelors of Science in Electrical Engineering (while most of his peers never graduated from high school).
Subsequently Delbert worked for many organizations including teaching electrical engineering at Calpoly Technical Institute in Southern California. As his family grew, he went to work for other companies–among them was Douglas Aircraft. Within a few years, he became the head of Research and Development for Douglas Aircraft in charge of over 100 engineers and researchers.
When Douglas Aircraft got bought out by Mr. McDonnell to make it McDonnell Douglas, Mr. McDonnell put his nephew in charge of Research and Development and then informed Delbert that he could move to maintenance. Tim’s mother informed her husband that she would not have much respect for Delbert if he took that job — so he quit & started private consulting.
Delbert did a number of things, such as calibrating ovens and solving other instrumentation issues. Eventually he was approached by an electric motor manufacturer in Southern California because of his reputation for solving particularly nasty electrical engineering problems. Based on this contract, he invented the automatic electric motor armature testing device.
This manual-operation, electronic-tube-based equipment was used for testing the production line output for electric motor manufacturers and subsequently was sold to electric motor manufacturers. Eventually it evolved to solid state-electronics, automatic-operation equipment. By the time this company stopped operations in the mid-1980s this equipment could be found in many of the major electric motor production plants in North America and Europe. You could walk into the “Tool Crib” of any major hardware store and find that most of power tool manufacturers represented there used Delbert’s testers for qualifying their electric motor production line output.
What It Was Like Growing Up
This family business influence on Tim was apparent from a very early age. When Tim was 6 years old, he began wiring electronic subassemblies for the business, and by the time he was 8, his father moved him to the machine shop. By age 10, he could run everything in the machine shop (including the lathe), with the exception of the vertical mill, the welding equipment and the table saw/ jointer because his father thought that they were too dangerous for a 10-year-old!
By the time he was 12, Tim was running the vertical mill and doing full-on manual machining. He could even do some of the combination lathe/vertical mill operations faster than his father because he would just do the math in his head.
By this time, Tim was hand grinding high-speed steel and carbide tools for the lathe as well as hand sharpening drill bits. Throughout high school Tim became more skilled at running the equipment and became able to fabricate his own designs. He eventually learned to use the woodworking and welding equipment.
At age 18 Tim went to study mechanical engineering at Brigham Young University before going on a two-year, volunteer mission for his Church. When he returned, Tim started working as a prototype robotics machinist for the Department of Technology at Brigham Young University, which he did for three years.
While working and going to school, Tim transferred from Brigham Young University to the University of Utah to continue studying mechanical engineering. Midway through his junior-level mechanical engineering studies, Tim decided to defect to the College of Business and finished both a Bachelors degree and a Masters degree in Business Administration, specializing in production and operations management. Out of the 100 MBA graduates in his graduating class only two specialized in production and operations. (The other guy wanted to get a Ph. D. but had never been in a production plant in his life!)
Tim applied the skills he acquired across several operations before starting Manufacturing Consulting Services in July of 2000. He’s been an industrial engineer, a plant engineer, a manufacturing engineer, and has done ten full plant layouts for companies in eight different industries. He has done similar work in service-based businesses. While service businesses do not require plant layouts, they do absolutely require a service-delivery layout. In fact, the first two thirds of the processes in a service business are exactly the same as a manufacturing business… they have the same sorts of functions in the same order! They just call them different names!
Tim is continuing to consult full-time. He is grateful to be married to Karen. They are the proud parents of seven children and are grateful to have such a wonderful family.
Please see Tim’s LinkedIn Profile for a more complete look at his professional resume’.
