Tom Hennessey likes an engineering change order because it refuses to remain a mere engineering matter. Imagine an engine component that overheats. The fix looks modest: alter the design, substitute a part, revise the process. Then the change walks out of engineering and acquires a social life. Purchasing must order the right version. Suppliers must ship it. Warehouses must stock it. Production teams must receive new instructions. Quality records must reflect what happened. A small correction becomes a relay race across an industrial organization, and every handoff is an opportunity for the baton to fall.
This is the kind of scene Hennessey uses to explain enterprise software. He does not begin with a grand diagram or a parade of initials. He begins with the wrong part arriving at the plant. The image is mundane enough to understand and alarming enough to remember. In his telling, digital manufacturing is not an abstract future. It is the practical business of keeping everyone on the same version of reality.
That talent has suited a career spent where complicated systems meet complicated buyers. Hennessey is Chief Marketing Officer of iBASEt, the California software company behind Solumina, a manufacturing operations platform used in fields such as aerospace, defense, electronics, nuclear work, shipbuilding, and industrial equipment. These are industries in which a product can contain many thousands of parts, live for decades, and gather an archive of inspections, repairs, and revisions along the way. The sales brochure has to compete with physics.
A career following the information
The path to the factory floor began with corporate information. From 1999 to 2007, Hennessey served as Director of Marketing and Corporate Relations at FileNet, a company associated with enterprise content and business-process management. He later held marketing leadership roles at Fluor and at Apriso, where software moved closer to manufacturing operations. By the time he joined iBASEt in 2016, the recurring problem had broadened from managing documents to connecting the full record of how a complex product is built and maintained.
His formal education gives the route a tidy bookend: management at Northeastern University, followed by an MBA at the University of Southern California's Marshall School of Business. The more telling education, visible in his articles, is an extended apprenticeship in explaining specialists to one another. Engineering speaks in revisions. Operations speaks in throughput. Quality speaks in traceability. Finance asks about return. Marketing must make a sentence they can all inhabit.
Hennessey was promoted to CMO in June 2021. The assignment paired market growth with iBASEt's shift toward subscription and SaaS software. He was also charged with expanding business development through direct and partner channels. It is a broad brief, but the company description of his method is revealingly compact: educational content, customer-focused programs, measurable returns, and urgency.
“I'm honored to be leading iBASEt's market growth efforts.”Tom Hennessey, on his 2021 promotion
There is a useful restraint in that sentence. The work was already underway; his job was to build on it. For an enterprise marketer, continuity is a form of credibility. Customers buying manufacturing software are not searching for a seasonal novelty. They are choosing what may become part of the operating memory of a plant.
The clipboard is innocent
Hennessey's paper-versus-digital comparison could easily have become a hymn to screens. Instead, the argument turns on change. A paper process may function when designs, suppliers, and customer needs barely move. Complex manufacturing does not enjoy that luxury. Engineering change orders are ordinary, and an ordinary change can touch far-flung plants, stockrooms, vendors, schedules, prices, approvals, and work instructions.
Paper is merely the visible suspect. The deeper offenders are delay, duplicate entry, split conversations, and uncertainty about which record is current. A digital system earns its keep when an approved change can ripple outward without losing its identity. The worker sees the right instruction. Purchasing sees the right part. Managers see the operational effect. Later, an auditor can reconstruct who did what and when.
The paperless factory can be understood as a factory with fewer competing memories.
This is why Hennessey's subject is as much organizational behavior as technology. In his writing, resistance to digital operations is rooted partly in emotion, culture, and fear of the unknown. Few managers volunteer to gamble with production output. A technically superior system can still fail if it arrives as an edict, disrupts practiced work, or makes the operator feel like an afterthought.
His answer is to bring frontline workers into operational-technology purchasing decisions. They know which steps pinch, which exceptions consume the afternoon, and which promised efficiencies will require six new clicks. Their involvement improves selection, but it also turns adoption from something done to a workforce into something shaped with it. The principle travels beyond factories: the user is not a final obstacle between procurement and success. The user is evidence.
The thread must reach the hands
The phrase “digital thread” sounds decorative until one considers the life of an aircraft. Design data begins the story. Manufacturing adds process records and inspection results. Service adds repairs, replaced parts, and new conditions. A useful thread keeps those facts connected across systems and years. A digital twin, in this context, is not a glamorous replica floating in blue light. It is a durable and evolving body of product information.
Hennessey's public work has followed that thread into maintenance, repair, and overhaul; supplier quality; shipbuilding; and aerospace production. The industries change, but his questions remain stable. Can teams see the same information? Can a process enforce the right sequence? Can the record survive a handoff? Can the organization change without losing control?
His recurring editorial bandwidth
That framework also explains his interest in sectors beyond aerospace. In 2025, he wrote that scaling clean-energy equipment is a manufacturing challenge as well as a matter of research and policy. Hydrogen electrolysers, turbines, and small modular reactors share traits with aircraft: long-cycle production, engineered-to-order complexity, regulated supply chains, and a costly intolerance for ambiguity. Experience learned in one demanding factory can become a map for another.
“Resilience is not a buzzword, it's a survival strategy for the future.”Tom Hennessey, on adapting operations
AI, after the air-show applause
The air show is a fitting workplace for Hennessey. Aircraft turn the factory's hidden disciplines into objects that make crowds look up. At the 2025 Paris Air Show, he appeared with iBASEt President Naveen Poonian to report what they were hearing from customers and partners: safety and traceability remained central, aircraft backlogs were pressing, and supply chains were fragile. Digital execution was presented as operational control under pressure, not novelty.
At Farnborough in July 2026, the word in nearly every conversation was AI. Hennessey's distinction was practical. Manufacturers were looking beyond systems that analyze information or orchestrate workflows. They wanted assistance where products are built, maintained, inspected, and certified. In other words, AI would have to leave the keynote slide and report for shift work.
This is a tougher standard than novelty. Factory-floor intelligence must understand process and permission. It must preserve the record while helping a person decide. It has to be useful during an exception, when neat demos traditionally develop an urgent appointment elsewhere. In regulated manufacturing, cleverness without accountability is simply a new variety of paperwork.
“We want AI that actually helps execute the work in aerospace and defense.”Tom Hennessey, Farnborough 2026
The statement also completes a career-long arc. FileNet helped enterprises manage content and process. Manufacturing software connected operations. The digital thread connected the product's life. AI now promises to interpret that connected information in the moment of work. Each wave sounds larger than the last, yet Hennessey keeps returning it to the same modest test: does the person doing the job receive better guidance?
The marketer as translator
There is a lesson here for anyone asked to explain a difficult product. Start with the consequence, not the category. Follow one change until its hidden dependencies become visible. Respect the worker who will live with the purchase. Give the executive a measurable reason to care. Do not flatten complexity; arrange it so another person can walk through.
Hennessey's own materials repeatedly perform this translation. A digital thread becomes the continuous history of an engineered object. Supplier quality becomes a question of whether distant partners can collaborate on the same record. MRO becomes the effort to return an expensive asset to service without sacrificing proof. SaaS becomes a different route to deploying capability. Even AI becomes a colleague that must understand the work before it can claim a place beside it.
The aspiration behind his 2021 promotion was to expand iBASEt's influence in complex manufacturing and sustainment. Five years later, the vocabulary has advanced from cloud subscriptions to AI-native execution, while the operational stakes remain familiar. Aircraft still need to be built, inspected, certified, and repaired. Engineering changes still travel. People still need to trust what appears on the screen.
Good industrial software tries to make a complicated system coherent. Good industrial marketing should do the same. Hennessey's career sits at that joint. He follows the information from the executive plan to the workbench, then tells the story back in language that fits on a page. Somewhere in the factory, a corrected instruction arrives before the wrong part does. It is not a dramatic ending. It is the ending everyone worked for.