DOSSIER / ABOUT

Ted Hebert.

Thirty years inside industrial operations learning where the invisible bleed hides. Now I find it — and build the AI that resolves it.

FILE T.HEBERT_v52.26
CLASS OPERATOR+BUILDER
BASE LONGMEADOW, MA
COORD 42.05°N · 72.58°W
Industrial Vending Expert — patent-style illustration of Ted Hebert beside a vending machine schematic
FIG. 1 / INDUSTRIAL VENDING EXPERT EST. 1994

> identity.txt

I'm an operator who builds. Thirty years running industrial distribution — 40+ branches, six- to seven-figure accounts, ERP data governance. And I build my own AI tools. That rare overlap collapses the gap between diagnosis and fix.

Discipline
AI Operations · Industrial Distribution
Role
Domain-native operator + builder
Entity
rAIzor crest AI
Location
Longmeadow, MA · works remote worldwide
Not
A slide-deck consultant. A developer who's never seen a warehouse.
02 Industrial Vending · Deep Specialty

> vending.dossier

Managed 500+ client sites
in three countries.

I installed my first AutoCrib system in 1998. Twenty-five years later, I've designed, deployed, and managed hundreds of vending systems — from a single coil machine at a two-person shop to multi-dozen-machine deployments spanning multiple plants.

Vending is where operations, inventory, data governance, and supplier economics collide. I've spent a career learning where the machine hides the bleed — and where it reveals the lever.

PLATFORMS / 25+ YRS

AutoCrib
CribMaster

Certified operator across both ecosystems · design · install · manage · integrate

500+

client sites managed

3

countries deployed

1998

first install · AutoCrib

Ted with AutoCrib locker and vending machine deployment
Ted with Blackhawk Industrial vending machine deployment
Ted in front of AutoCrib PowerVend industrial vending machine

SIGNATURE DEPLOYMENT

$320K → $7M

annual · single account

Smith & Wesson — grown from $320K annual to $7M annual through a vending program I designed and managed across two sites with 25 machines.

Not a procurement win. A full operational rebuild: machine placement studied against line-level consumption, SKU strategy rewritten, replenishment cadence tied to actual turnover, and the program instrumented so the data came back clean. Twenty-two times growth didn't come from discounts — it came from being impossible to replace.

03 The Story

01 · Before

For about fifteen years, I had the same week on repeat. Show up Monday. Open the ERP. Watch the fires start. Expedites that should've been standard orders. Stock-outs on parts we had too much of three months ago. Overnight shipments burning cash because someone missed a reorder point nobody was watching.

Everywhere I looked, I saw the same thing: good people, working hard, exhausted — doing work that shouldn't have existed in the first place. Rekeying the same data into three systems. Four-hour Excel reports answering questions the ERP should've answered in seconds. Holding processes together with tribal knowledge and sheer willpower.

02 · The Rising Tension

Nobody thought it was broken. The availability numbers looked good. Customers weren't loudly complaining. The dashboards were green. So the response was always the same: hire another person. Buy another tool. Push harder.

I watched that playbook fail for years. More headcount didn't fix it — it just spread the same broken process across more people. Better software didn't fix it — it just put a prettier interface on the same bad logic. Consultants gave us slide decks. Beautiful frameworks. Recommendations that would take eighteen months and a seven-figure budget.

Nothing changed. Because none of it addressed what was actually wrong. And nobody could tell me what was actually wrong — because everyone was too busy fighting fires to look for what was starting them.

The hardest part was never the fix. The hardest part was getting people to see the problem.

03 · The Turning Point

One week, I stopped firefighting. I pulled the data. Not dashboard data — the real stuff. Transaction logs. Error rates. Manual touchpoints. Shadow workflows nobody had ever mapped.

I documented it. Dozens of cases. Real financial damage — six figures, seven figures — that had been completely invisible. Not because anyone was hiding it. Because when you're in reactive mode every single day, you never stop long enough to see what's actually costing you.

I put it in front of the leadership team. And the room went silent. Not because I was a great presenter. Because the numbers were undeniable. They'd been bleeding — in places they couldn't see, in amounts they'd never tracked — for years. And nobody had ever shown them.

04 · After

That moment changed everything. Because once the bleed was visible — once you could point to it, quantify it, name it — the fix moved fast. Weeks, not years. That's what I've done ever since. For thirty years now. I find the invisible thing that's costing you a fortune. The ghost employees. The vanity metrics hiding dead inventory. The processes your best people are holding together with heroic effort that nobody should need.

Then I build the fix. Myself. In weeks. Not because I'm faster than everyone else. Because I've been inside operations like yours long enough to know exactly where it hides.

05 · The Universal Truth

The biggest problem in your operation isn't the one you're fighting every day. It's the one you've never seen — because you've been too busy fighting everything else to look.

Every operation has a lever. Most companies can't see it because their ghost employees have been standing in front of it for twenty years.

Find the lever.

04 Credentials

SCALE

40+

branches managed internationally across US, Mexico, Philippines

TENURE

30 yrs

in industrial distribution, since 1994 — cutting tools, fasteners, hose, MRO

GROWTH

$320K→$7M

Smith & Wesson annual spend · 25 vending machines across two sites

Industries
Aerospace · Defense · Automotive · Firearms · Industrial manufacturing · General distribution
Expertise
Industrial vending (AutoCrib + CribMaster, 25+ yrs), inventory management (proprietary sliding time-scale methodology), international ops, ERP data governance, supply-chain optimization, account growth
AI practice
Custom GPTs · Workflow automation · Micro-SaaS · ERP integrations · vending-to-ERP unified interfaces · LLM-assisted analysis replacing multi-hour Excel workflows
Selected clients served
Pratt & Whitney · Raytheon · Smith & Wesson · MB Aerospace · Cummins · dozens of mid-market distributors

Ready to see what your ghost employees are hiding?

Let's start with a 20-minute look under the hood.

Book Discovery Call →

20-minute discovery call · no pitch · look under the hood