Most operations lose money in the seams — between the estimate and the buyout, between the system of record and the spreadsheet somebody rebuilds every month. The work is visible. The leak rarely is.
You priced one thing. Procurement bought a substitute. Nobody closes the loop until the job is over, and by then the variance is something to explain rather than something to fix.
It arrives in an inbox, moves to a spreadsheet, then gets keyed into the system of record. Every hop costs an hour and invites an error, and none of them are anybody's actual job.
Document review, quote comparison, compliance checks, reporting prep. It is real engineering and administrative judgment, it is almost never measured, and it is usually the most automatable work in the building.
Cost, schedule and compliance assembled by hand from systems that were never designed to talk to each other. The work happens twice — once to run the operation, once to describe it.
The landscape turns over monthly, most of it is marketing, and the cost of choosing wrong feels higher than the cost of waiting. So the genuinely useful pieces sit unopened.
Estimating-to-buyout reconciliation, vendor and quote workflows, cost and schedule reporting, supply chain and capital asset purchasing.
Deciding what is real, then deciding whether to buy software, build it, or wire together what you already own. Implementation, not a slide deck.
Certification pathways, cooperative contract vehicles, and the procurement rules that determine whether a small vendor can actually sell to a district, library or university.
Curriculum and program design for engineering and applied AI, built by someone who has run both the coursework and the jobsite.
Entity structure, operating process, and the systems an organization needs in place before it has the staff to run them.
Griot Systems was founded by a Black Houstonian engineer-trained founder — B.S. Mechanical Engineering, Prairie View A&M University — whose career has run from heavy-industrial construction sites to corporate procurement to engineering design.
That has meant overseeing the issuance of roughly $150M in LNG, flat-bottom and specialty tank proposals, and working on site in As Saffaniyah, Saudi Arabia, responsible for physical layout and field modifications across 23 service tanks and for the mobilization and demobilization of every tool and piece of equipment on site. It has meant buying specialized construction equipment from international vendors, leading procurement on roughly $10M in corporate asset purchases, and designing the cryogenic containment and tank systems that project schedules were built around.
It has also meant teaching. As program coordinator for Prairie View A&M’s College of Engineering Enhancement Institute, he ran daily operations for 60+ engineering students across coursework and project work — which is why the curriculum advisory work is not a departure from the engineering work. It is the same work, earlier in the pipeline.
The background is industrial, but the failure mode is not. The same seams open in a professional services firm, a nonprofit, a school district, or a nine-person shop running four systems that have never spoken to each other.
Most consultants hand you a roadmap. I can build the workflow layer too — on a platform I already run in production.
See the platform →A bounded look at where hours and margin actually leak out of your project and procurement workflow. You get written findings and a prioritised roadmap with dollar estimates attached — yours to keep and act on, whether or not we work together again.
The roadmap, built. Scoped as a project with an estimated hour band and a cap you approve before anything starts, so the budget is knowable without pretending an estimate is a promise.
For teams where the work keeps going — new jobs, new vendors, new reporting requirements. A standing block of hours rather than a new negotiation every time something changes.
Rates are published because you should not have to ask what something costs before you can decide whether it is worth a conversation.
Two weeks, a fixed fee, and a written answer to where your project and procurement hours are going. If the answer is “nowhere unusual,” that is worth knowing too.
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