Vladimir Romanov

Delivery first, then ownership

Vlad began at Procter & Gamble, leading the deployment of multimillion dollar production lines and delivering the fastest startup in that site’s history. The work was capital project execution: controls, vision systems, commissioning, and the schedule pressure that comes with all three.

He then moved to Kraft Heinz, managing operations and maintenance in high-throughput food manufacturing. Leading a team of technicians and electricians, he ran preventive maintenance programs, worked through obsolescence, and delivered plant-wide system upgrades.

The order matters more than either role. Delivery people leave before they find out whether what they installed was supportable. Maintenance people never carried the schedule pressure. Vlad did both, in that sequence, and then took on a greenfield expansion at Post Holdings knowing exactly what the maintenance team would inherit.

That sequence is the reason Joltek’s central argument is not a slogan. Running is not the same as supportable is a lesson learned from being the person who had to support it.

What he does at Joltek

Vlad leads engagements personally. In practice that means holding the technical picture across four disciplines that usually sit with four different people: controls, SCADA and historians, MES and plant data, and OT networks. Most of the expensive failures in modernization happen in the gaps between those, which is why one owner across all four is the point rather than a convenience.

He is a consultant and systems architect. He is not the labour on an engagement, and Joltek does not compete with integrators on rate. The integrator supplies the hands. Joltek protects the plant’s definition of done.

Outside Joltek

SolisPLC. Vlad founded SolisPLC, a training platform for industrial automation that has reached hundreds of thousands of engineers and plant leaders with in-depth material on PLCs, HMIs, SCADA and MES.

Manufacturing Hub. He co-hosts Manufacturing Hub, a podcast with over two hundred interviews with leaders across manufacturing and industrial automation. It is the reason he has an unusually wide view of what is actually working in plants right now, as opposed to what is being marketed.

Kerno. As co-founder he helped build and scale a venture-backed SaaS company, leading go-to-market, onboarding and internal operations.

Credentials

Electrical engineering, and an MBA from McGill University. The combination is the reason Joltek engagements resolve to a business consequence rather than stopping at a technical recommendation. A plant manager does not buy an architecture. They buy a schedule that holds and a line that runs.