About David Carneal

David Carneal

I didn't plan to become a consultant. But looking back, I was probably being trained for it before I even knew what consulting was.

Growing up, my father ran Innovative Resources Consulting Group, a strategic planning firm that worked with large organizations on long-term business strategy. I spent a lot of time helping behind the scenes — assembling planning binders, sitting in on meetings, watching how experienced consultants asked questions and structured their thinking. Most kids would have found that painfully boring. I found it fascinating. That early exposure gave me a front-row seat to how organizations think about problems, make decisions, and plan for the future.

I spent the next 25 years inside the optical industry, embedded in an organization that operated across manufacturing, distribution, wholesale, and a buying group serving independent optical professionals. Because those divisions ran side by side, I developed fluency across all of them. I understood how manufacturing teams thought, how IT and finance saw problems, and how a decision made in one department could quietly create a mess in three others. I ended up acting as a translator between departments more often than I can count — helping teams understand how their work actually affected the rest of the business.

Along the way I worked through company mergers and acquisitions, multi-site operations, and regulated manufacturing environments including Class III medical devices under ISO 13485 and FDA 21 CFR Part 820. I also worked extensively with enterprise platforms including Microsoft Dynamics, NetSuite, Oracle, SAP, and Salesforce — not just as a user, but in system selection, evaluation, and integration projects. I learned pretty quickly that the software is rarely the problem. The problem is usually the operational reality sitting underneath it.

That instinct shaped how I approach everything. Rather than recommending a replacement every time something isn't working, I look for what's actually broken. I've extended legacy systems instead of ripping them out. I've fixed workflows that no one had bothered to examine in years. I've found the small adjustments that nobody was paying attention to — the ones that quietly took hours off someone's week or eliminated the errors that were silently killing margins. Those kinds of wins don't make the company newsletter, but they absolutely show up in the numbers.

Here's what I kept seeing throughout my career: organizations pouring enormous resources into transformation programs that either never finished or didn't deliver what they promised. And the meaningful improvements were almost always hiding in plain sight, waiting for someone to slow down and actually look at how work was moving through the business.

That's why I started Digital Efficiency Consulting Group, and that's what I bring to every engagement. I'm not here to sell you a methodology or a software package. I'm here to understand your business, find where the friction is, and help you fix it in ways you can actually measure. After 25 years of doing this from the inside, I know what good operations look like — and I know how to help you get there without turning your organization upside down to do it.

David Carneal
Founder, Digital Efficiency Consulting Group