Gerardo Romero began his career at PCC Airfoils where he had the opportunity to work with casting superalloys for turbomachinery, lead the heat treat Nadcap system, and make the heat treat operation as lean as possible by developing projects of Kanban and supermarkets, removing bottleneck processes, optimizing heat-up rates and cool-downs, and removing unnecessary records.

When Gerardo joined Honeywell Aerospace, he became a recognized authority for heat treating, vacuum, and dip brazing processes. He leads technological projects to relax their dependence on specific alloy specifications and materials to permit alternates, removing unnecessary testing from their processes. Recently, he recognized an opportunity to eliminate one of the heat treat processes the company had been performing: By making some changes to an operation, they could avoid the lengthy heat treatment time for titanium and the need to send coupons for certification. This significantly reduced the cycle time, scrap, and cost of external lab testing for certain certifications. It was a highly successful project with a significant impact on clients. Another key target was to partially remove the dependency of aluminum braze sheet raw materials from a single source.

Gerardo supports Honeywell sites across the world with different applications, such as post-weld heat treating on superalloy components in auxiliar motors, qualification of alternate sources of metallic glass foil for vacuum brazing, developing of heat treat engineers, carburizing transitions, aluminum heat treating transitions, developing of nickel-cobalt base wrought alloys heat treating, reverse engineering, product design review, Honeywell representant for reviewing of aluminum AMS heat treat specifications, supporting as subject matter expert of heat treating and brazing processes in failure analyses, design for brazing and heat treating, quenching distortion control, and avoidance of over-aging in high strength cast aluminum alloys.

He is always willing to learn more, which is demonstrated by his master’s in Engineering from Monterrey Tech and his current pursuit of an MBA. Over the years, Gerardo has pursued various certifications, including his current certifications: Honeywell Heat Treat Certified Agent and Honeywell Welding Certified Agent.

Gerardo’s commitment to developing the heat treatment capabilities both internally at Honeywell and with local suppliers in Mexico and Latin America has yielded incredible results. In the last three years, he has led the sourcing, development, and approval of more than twenty different heat treat capabilities in Mexico. He also participated in over 10 projects to change specs and approve new sources for raw material, with significant cost savings for the company. Gerardo has led at least 10 different engineering change orders to legacy drawings in the company, reducing their complexity and allowing the revised parts to be manufactured by potentially new suppliers. As he has been part of the effort to develop and maintain Nadcap accreditation for Honeywell’s sites in Mexico, he maintains close relationships with leaders and exposure directly to Nadcap meetings as well. Gerardo lives out the values of his company — he thinks big and makes it happens.