It’s a Celebration
David Allais is celebrating his 90th trip around the sun this Sunday, March 5. He’s still very much a familiar face in the office as he continues to serve as Founder & Chairman of PathGuide and AIDC 100, the not-for-profit international organization of automatic identification and data capture professionals. To celebrate this milestone birthday, we wanted to highlight David’s incredible contributions to the field and to more than three decades of PathGuide’s success.
A Bit of the Backstory
After graduating from the University of Arizona with a Bachelor of Science in mechanical engineering and later a Master of Science degree as well, David’s industry-shaping career started at IBM. Those 10 years with IBM, first in their Research Division and then in “Big Blue’s” Advanced Systems Development Division, were critical to his future career path. David’s mentor at IBM was influential in helping him secure a scholarship to Stanford University, where he received a Ph.D. in electrical engineering with an emphasis on information theory and pattern recognition.
Though he found his work at IBM interesting, David’s entrepreneurial spirit after graduating from Stanford led him to a young startup called Interface Mechanisms (which would later become Intermec Corporation) located near Seattle. Though the company had no product, no customers and no revenue, it had a plan to develop a better paper tape for data storage and communication. David joined as the 17th employee and Chief Engineer in 1968, going on to serve as Intermec’s President and CEO in just five years.
David spent 19 years putting his technical knowledge and creative skills to work on developing innovative ways to implement barcode technology – ultimately building the business from a small company to the leading manufacturer of barcode scanning and printing equipment. Feeling the entrepreneurial itch yet again, he embarked on starting a new business that would eventually become PathGuide Technologies. What follows is an excerpt of the company’s origin story from David’s AIDC 100 memoir, which was written in 2006:
All in all, Intermec had been a great experience. Going forward, my primary interest was in business solutions combining bar code with software. With this objective I formed my new company on April 28, 1989 with Intermec veterans Tom Bartlett, Larry Huseby, and Carolyn Loveland. Reflecting on lessons learned at Intermec, this enterprise would be closely held, thus avoiding conflicts with outside investors and directors.
The company was named Applied Tactical Systems of Washington, Inc.… and after several years I renamed my company PathGuide Technologies, Inc.
In the beginning, we took on consulting work and any custom software that we could sell. Our first big break came in March 1992 when we convinced Airborne Express that we had a robust time and attendance system… The Airborne system we developed on the fly served over 8,000 employees and implemented contract rules for 43 different unions. In time we rewrote the entire package to operate in Windows and web browser environments. Time and Attendance became the first software product that we could step-and-repeat.
Also in 1992, Tom Sweeny came aboard to sell for us. Tom’s experience had been managing an industrial distributor and being an early adapter of bar code scanning in the warehouse. Tom and I put on many educational seminars in Seattle and Portland, OR to spread the good word and drum up prospects for PathGuide solutions. We soon came to appreciate that real-time warehouse management systems could generate large benefits for industrial distributors with potential paybacks of one to two years. Our big break on this front was meeting Bill Derville of General Tool and Supply in Portland. Bill had the vision of making his picking operation much more efficient by using a hand held scanning terminal to pick a large batch of orders simultaneously while keeping the items for each order separate.
With our warehouse system working well at his company, Bill Derville arranged for us to present our capabilities to a national association of industrial distributors (IDA). Additional customers followed in short order. Bill introduced us to Chuck Boyle, president of Prophet 21, a leading provider of enterprise software for industrial distributors. Shortly thereafter, PathGuide and Prophet 21 entered into a co-marketing agreement. This agreement facilitated our selling warehouse management systems nationwide plus Canada and Puerto Rico…
Creating a company has been very satisfying. This is particularly so when customers derive major gains in productivity and can provide better service to their own customers. Today PathGuide has grown to support 18 people and their families. In March my son Eric became president. As PathGuide’s Chairman I provide corporate guidance while working on interesting projects.
Along the way, David became a member of GS1’s Barcode and Identification Technology Group, originally known as the Symbol Technical Advisory Committee. In 1988 he received the Association for Automatic Identification and Mobility (AIM) Richard R. Dilling Award. David has also been instrumental in creating seven U.S. patents and has been credited for the invention of five bar code symbologies, including Code 39: Interleaved two of Five (ITF), Code 11, Code 93, and Code 49.
A True Icon
It’s impossible to highlight all of David’s contributions in such a short post – but we thought this summary of David’s experience, how it led him to start PathGuide, and the ways in which his work shaped the course of our company would be of interest to readers. We hope you’ll join us in wishing David a very Happy 90th Birthday!