Jim Connor, Senior Partner

Jim’s career has centered around Manufacturing, Technology, and Process Safety. Before retiring and becoming a consultant 2012, Jim’s career was with Celanese. Jim led the largest division within Celanese ($4+B annual sales), Global Manufacturing, and R&D for Acetyls for nine years. Where he focused on process safety and connecting the business strategy to manufacturing assets and technology competitiveness improvement.

Jim was known as a champion for model-based control/automation of manufacturing processes and process safety. Key accomplishments for Acetyls manufacturing include:

• Outstanding safety performance with a multi-year trendline of improvement
• Outpacing growth in the competitive market through technology and manufacturing excellence driven enhancements in process efficiencies: energy consumption, manufacturing cost, and asset utilization.
• Successful integration of acquired plants in France for both speed and effectiveness and
• Via new greenfield operations in China led a $500M capital program management role (1991) in Corporate Environmental, Health, and Safety.

Jim presents seminars for AIChE and teaches clients on on Process Safety. He has managed many Manufacturing and Operations Excellence and Process Safety Assessments for clients such as Valspar, Dupont, Koch Industries across different sectors such as Textiles & Fibers, Specialty Chemicals, Methanol & Ethanol, etc. Additionally, he advises for unique startups and capital projects.