True North Operations · Prior operating experience
Operating experience measured in results.
Before founding TNO, Hunter Kramer led manufacturing improvement, quality, engineering, and project-execution work inside operating companies. These anonymized examples show the experience behind the TNO method.
Manufacturing reliability and operating discipline
A production environment needed stronger control of downtime, quality, and daily improvement. The work combined technical problem solving with the operating routines required to sustain gains.
From plant engineering to quality leadership
Promoted to Quality Manager after seven months as an engineer, with direct responsibility for four quality technicians covering four shifts and approximately $30 million in annual production output.
Work performed
Reduced unscheduled downtime and production loss; strengthened standard work, visual management, KPI review, and tiered Gemba; and built clearer ownership for improvement across engineering, quality, and the production floor.
Both figures are limited to separate three-month periods. Neither is multiplied, annualized, or extended into unmeasured periods. Benefits outside those windows are intentionally excluded.
Systems that help teams execute
Operational improvement includes the work behind the floor: project cadence, portfolio visibility, leadership routines, and the systems that turn good ideas into completed work.
Engineering delivery system
An engineering team was trained on a shared Agile/Scrum method with Fibonacci difficulty scoring, a morning cadence, weekly planning, and weekly reflection.
A delivery metric—not a labor-hours, financial-savings, workforce-adjusted, or annualized claim.
People-first improvement model
Selected to design and lead a flagship-site pilot intended to inform a broader national rollout.
- Built a 120-day implementation plan
- Developed frontline Lean champions
- Connected hands-on training with tiered Gemba
- Used visual controls and standard work to sustain gains
Technology-enabled operating systems
Applied, human-reviewed workflows now support sourcing, stage-gate screening, market diligence, pre-LOI underwriting, outreach preparation, and recurring administration. Each system retains source traceability, decision gates, and exception handling.
Presented as an applied capability portfolio. No employee-replacement or realized-savings claim is made without observed usage data.
Cross-industry operating perspective
Earlier work across equipment-intensive environments informs how TNO approaches process, product, safety, supplier, and execution problems today.
Aerospace manufacturing
Standard work, safety guidelines, workstation improvement, and practical training for the production floor.
Commercial & industrial HVAC
New-product process development, testing, cost analysis, and supplier qualification.
Commercial refrigeration
Multi-site production methods, waste and safety improvement, and design standardization across more than 2,000 models.
Hunter Kramer
Founder, True North Operations
Technical depth with practical ownership.
Hunter brings more than four years of experience in equipment-intensive manufacturing across engineering, quality, continuous improvement, and operating-system design. His work is grounded in direct responsibility for production performance and the people who sustain it.
The first step is clarity
Discuss an operational diagnostic.
Bring the recurring loss, stalled initiative, or performance gap. TNO will help determine what is happening, what it is costing, and what should happen next.