Clay Rippenhagen is the President and owner of Rippenhagen Consulting, a consulting practice focused on developing and implementing advanced dispatching systems, planning systems, and simulation modeling solutions for the semiconductor industry. Mr. Rippenhagen is an Industrial Engineer and PMI certified project manager with 17 years of semiconductor manufacturing, operations, and capacity analysis experience.

Mr. Rippenhagen was previously a Sr. Manager of the semiconductor consulting practice at Avicon, where he was responsible for managing all aspects of defining and implementing semiconductor eValue Chain solutions as well as leading the development of Avicon's Austin, Texas office. Prior to joining Avicon, he was the Industrial Engineering Manager at Advanced Micro Devices, responsible for the modeling, simulation and dispatching efforts in Fab 25. Mr. Rippenhagen previously spent 10 years with IBM as an Account Systems Engineer and Industrial Engineer. 

Mr. Rippenhagen graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Industrial Engineering from Texas A&M University. He has spoken at a number of semiconductor industry focused organizations including the 1998 Winter Simulation Conference in Washington DC, the AutoSimulations Symposium 2000, and the 2000 Brooks Automation Users Conference. His article published in issue 6 of Future Fab International titled "Implementing the Theory of Constraints in Highly Reentrant Systems", details his experiences and approach for implementing the Theory of Constraints for managing wafer fab operations. A subsequent article published in the October 2000 issue of Advanced Planning and Scheduling magazine is entitled "Success with Real-Time Dispatching", reaches beyond the technical aspects and into the broader cultural and organizational challenges of implementing successful manufacturing systems.

Mr. Rippenhagen as developed and implemented simulation modeling and advanced dispatching systems both nationally and internationally for companies such as Advanced Micro Devices, Texas Instruments, LSI Logic, and Silterra.