About Telos
Built on thirty years of operational excellence. And the engineering to make it last.
Telos was founded on one observation: lasting improvement needs both the expertise to redesign how work is done, and the engineering to build the tools that run it.
Founder
Martin Conroy
30+ years across Operations, OpEx, R&D, and PMO, including 17 at Medtronic, where he served as VP of OpEx.
Martin Conroy has spent over three decades in regulated, high-stakes manufacturing (Medical Devices, Automotive, Consumer Products, and Capital Equipment) in senior roles spanning Operations, Operational Excellence, R&D, and PMO. Seventeen of those years were at Medtronic, where he served as Vice President of Operational Excellence.
At Medtronic, Martin worked directly with Hajime Oba, formerly of Toyota and the Toyota Supplier Support Center, to develop a value-flow-focused, employee-owned operating system designed specifically for the medical device industry. That work shaped his conviction that the answers to most performance problems already exist inside the organisation. The job of a consultant is to help the organisation find them, not to import a methodology and leave.
He launched the Medtronic Academy, an immersive learning programme delivered to more than 1,500 people: from Production Team Member to EVP, and to stakeholder groups including the Medtronic Board of Directors and the FDA. Operating systems built under his leadership scaled from single-site pilots to global deployment across manual assembly and equipment-intensive manufacturing (extrusion, metal forming, drug spraying and coating), delivering 2–10% RTY improvements, 25–35% lead time reduction, and sustained year-on-year cost reduction.
Martin founded Telos to do that work differently. Not as an external consultancy that hands over a report, but as a partner that builds the operating system and the software that runs it, with the people who have to live with it.
Medtronic
VP of Operational Excellence
Medtronic Academy
Founder: 1,500+ trained
Toyota Supplier Support Center
Direct work with Hajime Oba
Telos Ltd
Founder & Principal Consultant
Why Telos
The name says it all.
Telos is Greek for “purpose”: the thing most improvement programmes can't articulate. What does good actually look like here? Do leaders agree on the real constraints? Are people equipped to change how they work, or just told to?
That alignment gap is the first thing we solve. The second is the one most consultancies leave open: the software to actually run the new standard. Off-the-shelf rarely fits. Dashboards, models, workflow automation have to be built around your process, your data, your operation.
So we built that capability in-house. Shane Conroy, Martin's son and a machine learning engineer, leads the build practice. The same family of expertise that ran operations at Medtronic now writes the software to run them.
“The operational design tells you what the process should do. The software tells you whether it's doing it. We stopped treating those as two separate engagements.”
Martin Conroy
Founder, Telos Ltd
The Build Practice
Software, built in-house.
The build side of Telos is led by Shane Conroy, a machine learning engineer with experience across engineering and medical devices. The same regulatory environment, the same operational complexity, the same standards for what “production-ready” actually means.
The build practice exists for one reason: the operational design is only half the answer. The other half is the software that lets the new standard hold. We write that ourselves (predictive maintenance, automated quality control, yield loss analysis), in the same engagements, by the same team.
Credentials
Experience you can rely on.
Medtronic
VP of Operational Excellence
Led company-wide transformation in complex regulated manufacturing
Lean Six Sigma
Master Black Belt
Certified expertise in data-driven process improvement methodologies
Toyota Production System
TPS & Lean Practitioner
Deep grounding in the principles that define world-class manufacturing
AI & Software Build
Built in-house, not outsourced
Custom ML models and operational software developed by the same team that ran the diagnosis: no handoff between the process design and the technical build.
Start the conversation
Ready to find your bottleneck?
Most operational losses have a single root cause. A Performance Diagnostic gives you clarity on where it is, what it's costing, and what kind of solution (process, system, or software) is most likely to close the gap.
3–5 days on-site. Clear priorities.
Serving manufacturing and industrial organisations across Europe. Based in Galway, Ireland.