Al Wofford founded CDO Technologies 15 years ago based on a simple "can do" philosophy of business. In fact, if you look closely, Can DO is right there in the name.
Today, Wofford's own name is mentioned among the heavy hitters around west central Ohio. Recently listed among the Dayton Business Journal's regional 10 Most Influential People of the year, Wofford has built a company with 330 employees in Ohio, Illinois, Alabama, Georgia, and Washington, D.C.
CDO is one of Dayton's largest minority-owned firms and an IT integrator with numerous clients in defense, government and private industry.
One of CDO Technologies' core competencies is in asset visibility and management -- think bar codes and radio frequency identification (RFID) systems -- that track inventory accurately and precisely real time.
"We don't build any technology and hardware, but we build software to tie different systems together," explains Bryce Stuckenschneider, marketing coordinator. "Sometimes we're getting calls from the CFOs and CIOs saying we need more accountability (for assets), and we're losing things at a rapid rate, and other times we get calls from the engineer on the line saying I'm being held accountable for this.
"One of the big commercial areas we're diving into are hospitals," he says. "They lose an alarming amount of inventory, and every year they will order four times more than they need because they have no idea what they have."
While asset identification and tracking comprises much of CDO's business, Stuckenschneider says the company can't be pigeonholed.
"Everything we do is focused on creatively applying technology, and sometimes that's auto identification -- RFID or bar coding -- and sometimes the market asks us 'how do you redesign air space over major cities?' which is a huge problem that America has. So we have a couple of industry experts who have recently come on board trying to come up with great ways to retrain air traffic controllers."
About a third of CDO's employees are in Ohio, with about 65 at company headquarters in Dayton.
Source: Bryce Stuckenschneider, CDO Technologies
Writer: Gene Monteith