Team

Joe Craig President

Computer Engineer, MBA, Lover of things entrepreneurial

Our resident QFD expert has a B.S. in Electrical Engineering (Computer Engineering track) from Wayne State University in Detroit, and an MBA from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His MBA focus was Corporate Strategy and Entrepreneurship.

Joe’s background is diverse, spanning from software/hardware development and technical training to consulting and coaching.

He wrote assembly and PL/1 software on PDP/11 and VAX computers used in factory automation while at DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation). There, he also designed computer hardware circuitry to enable early networked communications between shop-floor devices. He has written software for teen entrepreneurship, vehicle design, and for General Motors, he created a financial simulation computer game used to teach financial management. Along with authoring and teaching robotics for GMF-Fanuc, he also authored and taught FMEA (failure prevention) courses for Saturn, Ford Motor Company and TRW Automotive.

In ’89, he founded Qualisoft Corporation, one of the earliest Microsoft Windows development firms. Together with Bill Eureka and Larry Sullivan of partner firm American Supplier Institute, they launched the world’s first QFD software for Microsoft Windows, QFD Designer®.

Joe has trained and coached in QFD for many Fortune 1000 corporations and governmental agencies like: US Army, US State Department, NASA, IRS, Raytheon, SAIC, Plug Power (a DTE Energy fuel cell company), Bama Foods, ClubCar, Navistar, City of Detroit and Caterpillar to name a few. He has continued evolving his experience, even adding a Black Belt in QFD(r), one more notch in his proverbial belt of knowledge. He also teaches our Voice of Customer Discovery course, explaining techniques used in the “fuzzy front-end” of product development and QFD. For Dow Chemical, Joe consulted in interface usability for global Six Sigma web application development.

He works closely with our clients to synthesize their Voice of Customer, helping insure we deliver on market demands. Joe is a past member of the IBM Small Business Panel of Experts. He is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). He is originally from Grosse Pointe, Michigan.

Dr. Jay Chandra Six Sigma Expert and Advisor

Medical six sigma expert, PhD in Engineering, Outstanding communicator, educator and consultant

Quality Engineering Experience

• Served for eleven years as in-house corporate consultant/trainer in Quality Engineering with an eminently successful 12 billion dollar engineering-and-manufacturing company based in the U.S.A.
• Provided Master Blackbelt, Blackbelt, and Greenbelt training as well as implementation help in their corporate Six Sigma program
• Created the Design for Six Sigma (DFSS) program for the company and applied throughout its automotive, electrical, fluid power, and truck transmission businesses worldwide
• Trained more than 5000 engineers and project leaders from manufacturing and R&D from across all G7 countries and The Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Brazil, China, and India.

Academic Experience

• Three years as a full-time Visiting Professor in the School of Business at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, U.S.A. Taught Operations Management courses to MBA, Executive MBA, and BBA classes.
• Presented a paper entitled Decision-making Using Statistical Techniques at Northern Illinois Quality Conference at Chicago sponsored by the American Society for Quality (April 1998).
• Presented a paper entitled Opportunistic-part Dispatching in Flexible Manufacturing Systems in the Production and Operations Management Society Conference in New York, November 1991.
• Published a paper (with the Ph.D. advisor at Purdue as the co-author) entitled Intelligent Dispatching for Flexible Manufacturing in The International Journal of Production Research, U.K., November 1991.

Academic Attainments

• Ph.D : Industrial Engineering, Purdue University, W. Lafayette, IN, U.S.A.
• M.S. : Industrial Engineering and Operations Research, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, India
• B.S. : Mechanical Engineering, National Institute of Technology, Durgapur, India

Jerry Deng Senior Software Engineer

Problem solver, Enjoys video development, Once studied actuarial science

Jerry is a degreed Computer Information Scientist with broad professional interests ranging from PHP Web Programming to Ruby on Rails, Objective-C, JavaScript, and many JavaScript frameworks. Jerry has even worked with C/C++, Flash ActionScript too, to name a few. Jerry wears a lot of hats at IDEACore including pitching in with Sysadmin functions to make sure our infrastructure is humming, whether Open Source stack or Microsoft-based.

Jerry enjoys building social web software, solving complex puzzles and studying the art of computer programming and new IT technologies. Jerry also does some video editing and most people aren’t aware that he even studied for the actuarial science.

Anton Djurasaj Senior Software Engineer

Simplifier of Tech, Lover of fishing, Enjoys Michigan waterways

Anton is a degreed Computer Information Scientist with broad professional interests ranging from
web development to hybrid cloud computing. Having taught himself BASIC on the Commodore 64,
a long time ago, he realized early on what his true passion was. Later, through formal education, he was introduced
to Pascal and C, an experience that further cemented what he wanted to do.

Prior to his involvement with IDEACore, he was in Retail and International Trade
Management. There he learned how to get outside of his comfort area, research and learn effectively, and
apply quickly. Broad interests lie behind his broad skills. His next learning topic: Arduino.

In his college years, he continued on to learn Java and JSP, C++, C#, Perl, Visual Basic, JavaScript, XML.
His passion in explaining difficult-to-grasp topics lead him to begin assisting fellow students. He loved
it so much that he obtained his CRLA Certification. Among other interesting things, Anton has done some
programming in RPG on IBM System I. On the database front, Anton has worked with Apache JavaDB,
Microsoft SQL Server, PostgreSQL, and MySQL. Recently, he is introducing himself to the NoSQL world
via MongoDB. Perhaps the best career move he made in his career yet is learning Ruby and Rails.  He has been using it since early 2008 while at IDEACore.  Suffice it to say, he never looked back!

When not working hard to deliver business value and quality to our customers, Anton is either watching
movies, taking brisk walks, visiting new places, or fishing and enjoying the view of Michigan’s waters, among other
hobbies.

Rob Worley Senior Software Engineer

Web software guru, Author of children’s stories and comics

Rob Worley – BS Computer Science, Director of Web Development. Our resident web software guru, Rob comes to IDEACore with almost two decades of software development experience, and over eight years experience developing applications for the web. Rob’s IDEACore roots go way back as he was actually involved in the early development of QFD Designer in the ’90s.  Besides being a PHP computer language virtuoso, Rob is also an esteemed author in the English language.  He has created several children’s stories and his most recent book is Heir to Fire. He is a comics author, aficionado and former webmaster of comics2film.  Read his bio for more.