Company memo · October 12, 2026

From: Steve Paulsen, IT Manager
To: All OPV Employees (Rockford, RKW, Tulsa)
Cc: Carol Ostrander-Reyes; Leadership Team
Date: Monday, October 12, 2026, 7:42 AM
Subject: Introducing IMPEL: getting OPV ready for AI (please read, it affects all of us)

Good morning everyone,

I don't send many all-company emails, so when I do it's usually about a password reset or the printer in the front office. This one is bigger. With Carol's full support, I'm kicking off a new company-wide initiative called IMPEL.

IMPEL = Intelligent Machines Powering Every Line

(Yes, it's an acronym. Kevin and I spent more time on it than we'd like to admit. "Every Line" means our product lines, our production lines, and every line of business in the company. And since this is a pump company, we figured anything that sounds like an impeller would stick.)

The short version

AI is changing how companies like ours do business, and we need to get on board or get left behind. IMPEL is our plan to get OPV, and our data, ready for agentic AI: software "agents" that can look things up, answer questions and handle routine tasks for us and our customers.

Why we're doing this

Our customers and competitors aren't standing still. Over the next couple of years we expect AI agents to take on a lot of the repetitive work that eats up our days:

• answering "where's my order?" calls and emails;
• working up warranty claims and pulling the test records for a serial number;
• watching inventory and suggesting restock orders before we run short;
• and plenty more we haven't thought of yet (that's where you come in).

I want to be really clear about one thing: this is NOT a cost-cutting program. Nobody's job is being "replaced by a robot." Carol has been very firm on this. The goal is agility: freeing up our people from busywork so they can focus on what we're actually good at, which is engineering, building and supporting great pumps and valves.

It's also about offering new services. One example we're excited about: an agent that helps a customer or a distributor pick the right pump or valve for their project. They'd tell it the flow, head, fluid and pipe size, and it would walk them through sizing, materials, seals and options, the way Sales Engineering does today, at 2 AM on a Sunday if that's when they're working.

As Carol put it at last week's leadership meeting: "People are still OPV's number one resource. These agents are going to give every one of us super powers."

Let's be honest about where we're starting

OPV hasn't always invested heavily in IT, and our data shows it. A lot of you know what I'm talking about:

• the same customer set up three different ways in three different systems;
• order statuses that changed meaning in 2018 and again in 2020;
• PRISM screens from the 1980s that still work, mostly;
• reports that stopped updating and nobody noticed for a few months (sorry);
• spreadsheets that are "the real number" for some things.

None of that happened because anyone did anything wrong. We're a 52-year-old company that grew, bought Kessler, and kept bolting new systems onto old ones to keep the shipping dock moving. But AI agents are only as good as the data they can find and understand, and right now ours is not optimally organized, to put it nicely.

What we've done so far

We've been working with Google Cloud this year. The first step was moving our core database and our main applications (OPS, PRISM Web, the accounting module and the reporting tables) out of the server closet and into the cloud.

Does everyone remember August 2022, when a UPS battery caught fire in the server closet off Bay 1 and we were basically down for two days? Order entry on paper, FloorLink dark, shipping working off printouts, and me sleeping in my office? Moving to the cloud means a small fire, a bad storm or a failed hard drive in Rockford doesn't take the whole company down anymore. That's a big reduction in operational risk, and frankly it lets me sleep at night.

That move is done. The data and the applications are in Google Cloud. FloorLink terminals and the Tulsa office connect to it over a secure link. Most of you didn't notice, which is exactly how it was supposed to go.

What's changing in the plan

Our original plan was: move to the cloud, then spend a couple of years consolidating all our data into one clean system and rewriting our older apps, and then look at AI.

Honestly, the world moved faster than that plan. We can't wait two or three years to get started with agents, so we're doing things in parallel.

1. Prototyping agents now, on the data we have. We're evaluating and prototyping several different frameworks and architectures for building agents that can work with our data. Some lean on Google's built-in tools for asking questions of a database in plain English, some use tools we build ourselves, and some use a data catalog. We'll compare them head to head on real questions from customer service, production, purchasing, quality and finance, and see what actually works.
2. Building a "single source of truth" for the long term. At the same time we'll be investing in a consolidated semantic ontology. That's a fancy way of saying a common dictionary of what our data means: what a "customer" is, what each order status means, which tables to trust. It goes along with an overhaul of the whole data estate. This is the multi-year part.
3. Deploying prototypes to real users. We'll start rolling out test agents to small groups so we can learn which use cases deliver value and where the agents get confused.

How you can help (this is the important part)

We need everyone to pitch in. You know this business far better than any software ever will.

• Try the agents. When a prototype comes to your area, use it and kick the tires. Ask it the questions you get asked every day.
• Tell us when it's wrong. If an agent gives a bad answer, gets confused, or is just slow, post in #impel-feedback on Slack or open a Jira ticket in the IMPEL project. A screenshot plus "here's what the right answer is" is gold to us.
• Share your ideas. What drives you nuts every week? What would you hand off to an assistant if you could? Big or small, wild or boring, send it in. Some of the best ideas will come from the shop floor and the front desk, not from IT.

We'll hold a couple of lunch-and-learn sessions in the Bay 6 break room and in Tulsa over the next few weeks to show what we're working on. Pizza is on IT, which means it's on Carol.

Questions?

Stop by my office, catch me at the 7:15 production meeting, or email me or Kevin Tran (ktran@ostranderpv.com). For anything that is just plain broken, the help desk is still Andre Willis at it-help@ostranderpv.com. There are no dumb questions about this stuff. Most of us are learning as we go, me included.

Thanks, everyone. This is an exciting step for OPV, and I'm genuinely pumped (sorry) about what we can do together.

Steve

Steve Paulsen
IT Manager | Ostrander Pump & Valve Co.
2200 Volute Drive, Rockford, IL
815-555-0101 | spaulsen@ostranderpv.com
IMPEL: Intelligent Machines Powering Every Line