Why iPSM exists

I didn't plan on getting into ammonia refrigeration. I had an in at a power generation plant and called GCAP to sign up for a boiler class. They talked me out of it in ten minutes — told me ammonia was where I needed to be.

So I sold one of my vehicles, bought a plane ticket and went to sit for an Operator 1 course. Paid the rite of passage like the rest of us. No job lined up. No guarantee of anything on the other side.

Learning the trade

I passed. Got hired at ColonialWebb Contractors and spent the next four years learning the trade from the ground up. Maintenance programs, sensor calibrations, vibration and oil analysis, valve work, oil draining — the jobs nobody glamorizes. You learn the systems by being inside them. You learn respect for ammonia by smelling it and understanding what comes next if you get careless.

From there I went to Independent Refrigeration Services in York, PA. Started taking on bigger work — commissioning equipment, leading startups. Made some mistakes. Learned some lessons. There's no faking competence when you're standing in front of a system that has to run by Monday.

The compliance side

After two years there, I moved to Nexus Refrigeration and spent six years on the compliance side — managing mechanical integrity programs and PSM documentation for enterprise ammonia facilities. I trained at Georgia Tech's PHA course. I helped develop training curricula. I got to see how dozens of different facilities approached the same regulatory requirements.

The safety culture at most of these facilities was real. The tools weren't built to match it.

Most safety managers were doing everything right and still falling behind. The software that existed hadn't solved the problem. Everything was still manual — binders, spreadsheets, somebody's head. Whether your program held together basically came down to which consultant you happened to hire and whether they stuck around long enough to remember where things were.

Why I built iPSM

Much of that time, I was the person staying up late automating the work I didn't want to do manually. Writing scripts. Teaching myself to code because I kept seeing problems that software should have solved ten years ago. When AI got to the point where it could actually read a P&ID and understand what it was looking at, everything I'd been circling converged into one thing.

I didn't build iPSM because I saw a market opportunity. I built it because I've been on both sides of this industry long enough to know exactly what's broken — and for the first time, the technology exists to actually fix it.