Flint Hills Group helps businesses leverage technology as an Innovation Award Winner

Dave Cunningham believes companies that don’t fully leverage technology are left behind.

That thinking led to the 2016 creation of Flint Hills Group LLC, a custom software and technology company.

Cunningham, a Wichita State University graduate, saw an opportunity to create a business-to-business service and help his customers grow their operations.

Flint Hills Group has two employees and 34 full- and part-time contract engineers, many of them with ties to NetApp. The Flint Hills team members collaborate remotely and can be dispatched to quickly respond to customer needs.

Flint Hills provides custom software development, information technology security, mobile and cloud computing and technology consultations.

“In this area, we have found that manufacturing and industrial-type companies rarely have these type of resources,” says Cunningham, the Flint Hills CEO.

He wants the company to be rooted in Wichita but also serve higher cost-of-living regions, such as San Francisco, Seattle, Dallas, Denver and New York.

“We trying to export our skill sets outside Wichita,” says Cunningham, whose career stops include engineering work with The Boeing Co., Pizza Hut, Cargill, NetApp and Koch Industries Inc.

Cunningham founded Flint Hills Group after being laid off from NetApp, where he spent nearly five years as a senior engineering manager.

Flint Hills, he says, is creating opportunities for software engineers who may have otherwise had to leave Wichita to find this type of technology work.

That also benefits the local economy, Cunningham says.

Much of the work Flint Hills has done to this point has been project-based and includes mobile application integrations, database work, manufacturing automation and monitoring.

One company Flint Hills has worked with is PetroBase LLC, an oilfield software solutions company in Wichita.

James Stephenson, a software developer and owner at PetroBase, says Flint Hills assisted his company in expanding a desktop application for mobile uses and making the technology scalable.

“We needed to reach out to a company like Flint Hills Group that could help boost the technology we already had,” Stephenson says.

The result: PetroBase Explorer, a portal through which oil and gas stakeholders, such as geologists, engineers or investors, have access to more readily available production and well data.

The system was released to the public in early October and provides data for oilfield operations in Kansas, Oklahoma and Nebraska.

Stephenson says incorporating data from additional states will be the next phase of the software development.

“It’s going to help us grow ultimately,” Stephenson says.

Source: Wichita Business Journal, October 19th, 2017

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