I’ll share something that does not get said often enough. I spent much of my career in manufacturing, supply chain, operations, and finance. In those roles, I was often responsible for explaining what was happening inside a business: why costs moved, why output changed, why margins shifted, and why a plant performed better or worse than expected. And most of that time, I was making critical decisions about power and energy with almost no real data to back them up.
I do not think that experience is unusual. Many operators are making thoughtful decisions every day with incomplete information. They are not careless—rather, they are working with the data they have.
My career started in finance—controller roles, mostly. I learned early that the numbers tell you a story, but only if you actually have the numbers. From there, I moved into operations and supply chain, working across multiple industries in B2B manufacturing environments where the expectations were high, the timelines were tight, and the cost of being wrong was real.
Despite that, much of what we were doing still relied on making educated guesses.
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I remember mornings on the plant floor with production targets to hit and equipment running around the clock. We knew the schedule. We knew what each machine was supposed to produce. But we often did not know what was actually happening with the power behind those machines.
Was consumption where it should be? Were we running efficiently or just running? If a machine started drawing more power than usual, was that a sign of wear or just a normal fluctuation? In many cases, we had no clear way to know.
Often, the main indicator was output. If parts were coming off the line, things were probably fine. If they weren’t, something was wrong. We’d scramble, pull people off the floor, ask questions, gather opinions, and rely heavily on experience. In other words, human judgment was filling in for data we did not have.
“There’s a difference between judgment informed by data and judgment that’s compensating for the absence of it.”
That does not mean human judgment does not matter. It absolutely does. Good operators know their facilities. They know their people, their equipment, and the rhythms of the floor. Experience matters. Judgment matters. But judgment is much better when it is supported by data.
The thing about operating without power visibility is that you start building in buffers everywhere. You leave capacity unused. You avoid pushing systems too close to their limits because the downside risk is too high. You over-allocate, under-utilize, and make conservative decisions because the cost of being wrong can be high.
Often, it is like driving a car without a fuel gauge. You may have a general sense of how far you can go, but you are likely stopping sooner - or more often - than necessary just to avoid running out.
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That instinct, that constant hedging against the unknown, followed me through every role I held. It wasn’t until I came across Packet Power that I realized there was a company solving the exact problem I had lived with for two decades.
It was not a dramatic realization. It was more like recognition. Real-time power monitoring, alerts, historical trends, and useful data without major disruption — that would have been valuable in many of the environments I had operated.
The wireless architecture made sense to me immediately because I had lived the alternative. In many facilities, adding monitoring sounds good in theory but becomes difficult in practice because it can mean downtime, disruption, installation complexity, or a budget conversation that never rises to the top of the list. Packet Power made the value much easier to access.
“I understood the value because I had felt the cost of not having this information.”
That’s what drew me to Packet Power—not the specs, not the technology for its own sake. It was the fact that I had been the buyer. I had been the guy on the floor who needed this information and didn’t have it.
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Today, as CEO of Packet Power, that experience still shapes how I think about our work. We are not just selling monitoring equipment. We are helping facility leaders make better decisions with better information.
This series is a way to share what I have learned from both sides of the equation — first as someone who needed better data, and now as someone leading a company that provides it. I want to talk about the real operating challenges facility leaders face, the blind spots that create cost and risk, and where the industry is headed as demands on power infrastructure continue to grow.
I’m not going to pitch you products or bury you in technical specs. I’m going to tell you what I see from where I sit, and I hope it’s useful.
If there is one lesson I took from years in manufacturing, it is this: better information leads to better decisions.
The Bigger Picture is a monthly series from Packet Power CEO Nate Nomeland exploring the operational and strategic challenges facing facility leaders.