Everything on this page is live: satellites overhead, aircraft in flight, ships at sea, the ground shifting, tonight's ballgames. Public signals broadcasting around the clock — plain to anyone who knows where to look.
West Technical Services is the personal portfolio of Jacob West. It sets out two kinds of experience and keeps them clearly apart: a twenty-year professional career, today leading product lifecycle management at Cre8tive Technology & Design, and the software and research he builds independently, on his own time.
Jacob's experience comes from two places, and this site labels every piece of it. Career work was done as an employee and belongs to his employers and their customers. Personal work is what he builds independently, under the West Technical Services name.
Jacob leads Cre8tive's PLM practice: PRO.FILE PLM (Epicor PLM) implementations, custom development, and support for manufacturers across North America. Before that, seven years implementing PRO.FILE at Procad USA, and IT, help desk, and audio-visual roles going back to 2006.
Done as an employee. The work and its code belong to Cre8tive, Procad, and their customers.
The name Jacob puts on the software and research he builds himself: a community theatre's ticketing platform, a household finance app, a youth-baseball team manager, and the live-data globe at the top of this page.
Separate from his role at Cre8tive. Nothing here was built for Cre8tive or its customers.
Jacob's day job is leading the PLM practice at Cre8tive Technology & Design, an Epicor Platinum Partner and the exclusive North American partner for PRO.FILE PLM. Everything in this section is employer work, described as experience.
PRO.FILE PLM rollouts for aerospace, engineering, and manufacturing teams: process mapping, configuration, custom forms, reporting, and data migration.
An integration hub, import utility, document viewer, problem-reporting portal, process automation, and job webhooks, maintained across two release lines.
Epicor Kinetic extensions for engineering change and MRO, earlier BizTalk and Service Connect integrations, and an Autodesk Inventor iLogic processor.
Statement-of-work drafting, business-process review, and Claude skills that give AI agents working knowledge of PRO.FILE development.
A SCORM packager for LMS-ready courses, and an AI-narrated video pipeline for product marketing and training.
Presents Cre8tive's PLM webinar series on document management, document control, and CAD/ERP workflows, and works on the Cre8tive PLM website.
“Jacob’s expertise and dedication turned a complex transition into a smooth journey.”
This is employer work. Its code lives in private repositories owned by Cre8tive, Procad, and their customers, and none of it is West Technical Services work. Full career on Jacob's page →
Everything in this section is personal work: designed, built, and run by Jacob under the West Technical Services name, on his own time and separate from his role at Cre8tive.
FrugalVueEvery account. One honest picture. A private, self-hosted money hub for households.
FrugalVue brings a household's checking, savings and credit cards into one read-only view: a year of history imported from Rocket Money or any bank's download, then a daily bank sync, budgets with room for giving, monthly cash flow, a bill tracker, and a morning email for everyone in the house.
AI on the household's own terms. Bring a Gemini, Claude or OpenAI key and FrugalVue answers questions about your money with read-only tools, and suggests categories from payee names alone. Without a key, everything else still works.
The platform a community theatre runs on: seat-picking and ticket sales, show-night check-in, and the back office for shows, people and sponsors.
See the project →A team-management app for youth baseball, built by a coach for the coaches and families in the dugout.
A running experiment in reading public signals: aircraft, ships, earthquakes, ocean buoys, the ISS, and today's MLB games, all live, served by a small Node.js app.
Back to the globe ↑Tell Jacob what you're working on. (PLM work goes through Cre8tive Technology & Design.)
Start a conversation →Every line names its source: Career for work Jacob did as an employee, Personal for his own projects under West Technical Services.
Jacob's career has run through engineering vaults, shop floors, and event stages. His personal projects serve sanctuaries, theatres, ball fields, and households. The two lists are kept apart.
A personal project, a collaboration, or a question about something on this site: share a little about it. Jacob reads every note personally — and replies.
Career Looking for PLM implementation, extensions, or support? That's Jacob's day job. Contact Cre8tive Technology & Design so the whole team is behind the work. ctnd.com ↗