About Us
Some problems have straightforward solutions. The ones that come to Blue System Control usually don't.
We are a contract software and electrical engineering firm specializing in industrial automation: the kind of work that requires custom thinking, deep technical fluency, and a willingness to stay with a problem until it's actually solved. Founded and led by Barry Gardner, Blue System Control was built on a simple conviction: that the best engineering happens when someone genuinely cares about the outcome, not just the deliverable.
Our work spans the full range of industrial automation challenges. We design and build custom control systems, develop software for PLCs, robotics, touch screens, drives, and servos, engineer machine vision solutions, and create the bridge software that connects factory floors to business systems. When a client's process demands something that doesn't exist yet, we build it.
What sets us apart isn't a product catalog, it's a method. Barry brings decades of multi-industry experience, applying techniques and patterns from automotive assembly to food production, from printing presses to mining equipment. That cross-pollination is deliberate. The solution to your problem may already exist in a completely different industry, and recognizing that connection is a skill that only comes with breadth of experience.
Our clients come to us in two kinds of situations. Sometimes they have a vision (a machine, a process, a capability) that no one has built before, and they need an engineering partner who can take it from concept to production. Other times, something has gone wrong, the clock is running, and the original manufacturer isn't picking up the phone. In either case, the answer from Blue System Control is the same: we show up, we dig in, and we don't leave until the problem is solved.
That commitment isn't marketing language. It's the reason we drove 300 miles on a Sunday to get a client's operation running by Monday morning. It's the reason customers who came to us in a crisis become long-term partners. And it's the reason we continue to be the engineer of record on projects our clients could have taken elsewhere.
We measure success the way our clients do: in uptime restored, waste eliminated, orders won, and processes that run the way they're supposed to, every shift, every day.
Blue System Control. We’re at our best when challenged.
Meet the Team
Barry Gardner
Barry Gardner is the founder and President & CEO of Blue System Control, an engineering firm built on a foundation of client service, trust, and relentless problem-solving. With deep expertise spanning software development and testing, metallurgy, robotic automation, and precision welding and brazing, Barry brings a rare cross-disciplinary fluency to every engagement. His career is defined by a deliberate practice of transferring techniques across industries, applying insights from paper manufacturing to potato processing and from transmission assembly to agricultural robotics, a methodology that consistently produces solutions others don't see. His project record reflects both technical depth and the ability to compress timelines without sacrificing reliability, including field-ready CANopen control software for a concept blasthole drill delivered in under six months against an 18-month estimate, the world's first automated brazing machine using HHO gas, and a Rolling Drag testing suite integrating servo-driven analysis with Six Sigma statistical fulfillment.
What distinguishes Barry beyond his technical credentials is his ability to communicate sophisticated engineering concepts clearly to customers, board members, and non-technical stakeholders throughout the lifecycle of a project. Customers and industry peers consistently seek him out as lead engineer on their most demanding challenges, not only for his proven track record, but for the clarity and confidence he brings to problems that have resisted conventional approaches. At Blue System Control, that combination of depth, creativity, and client focus is the product.
President & CEO
Gayle A. Gardner
Gayle Gardner is the Chief Strategy & Operations Officer of Blue System Control, the operational architect behind the firm's ability to deliver complex, high-stakes engagements with consistency and care. With more than two decades of experience managing high-value projects, regulated compliance environments, and sensitive client relationships, Gayle brings a rare combination of systems discipline and emotional intelligence to every dimension of BSC's operations. Her background spans end-to-end project logistics for Fortune 500 clients including Microsoft, McKesson, and Starbucks, multi-market operations management, and vendor and contractor oversight across demanding, time-sensitive engagements. That cross-functional range equips her to anticipate and resolve the operational, regulatory, and relational complexities that surface in BSC's most demanding client work, before they become problems.
What distinguishes Gayle beyond her operational credentials is her capacity to hold the infrastructure that makes precision engineering work possible at the client level: the documentation standards, compliance workflows, vendor coordination, and client communication systems that ensure nothing falls through the cracks when the stakes are highest. Her instinct for discretion, her fluency in regulatory frameworks, and her commitment to meticulous process mean that clients experience BSC not just as technically capable, but as a firm that operates with the same rigor behind the scenes as it delivers on the project floor. At Blue System Control, Gayle Gardner is what makes that promise sustainable.
Chief Strategy & Operations Officer
Cale Hingiss joins Blue System Control as Vice President of Sales, bringing a track record defined by one consistent pattern: entering a territory or market and fundamentally changing its trajectory. At AT&T he earned the fastest promotion in company history. At Imagine Learning he grew territory revenue 143% in 12 months and achieved full product suite integration across 115 school districts. At WITI-Fox 6 he managed a $2.5M pipeline and closed new business at a rate exceeding 75%. Across industries and sales environments, the results have been the same: rapid relationship-building, disciplined pipeline management, and revenue growth that outpaces the expectation.
What ties Cale's career together is less the industries he has worked in than the skills he has carried across them: B2B relationship development, complex solution selling, and the ability to earn trust with sophisticated buyers who have real alternatives. As the owner and operator of Speckless Auto Spa, Wisconsin's only certified and skills-validated detailing operation in its category and an authorized dealer for Modesta, one of the world's most exclusive ceramic coating brands, he demonstrated those same instincts as a business builder, scaling from a 600 to 2,400 square foot operation in under three years. At Blue System Control, Cale brings that builder's mentality to a firm whose technical capabilities have consistently outpaced its market presence. His mandate is to change that.
Vice President, SalesCale Hingiss
Dawn Werner is a Systems Controls Engineer at Blue System Control, bringing more than 30 years of automation experience to every project she touches. A graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee with a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering, Dawn began her career at the integrator level, where she handled the full project lifecycle from electrical drawings and BOMs through programming and onsite commissioning. That foundation gave her something most specialists lack: a ground-level understanding of how automation systems actually get built, not just designed.
What followed was a career that moved deliberately across every vantage point the industry offers. As a Product Specialist at Braas Company and later as an Application Engineer at Control Technology Corp., Dawn developed deep fluency in vision systems, PLCs, and motion control while working directly with customers across virtually every industry vertical, from large-scale packaging operations to custom theatrical automation. Her 13 years as a Motion Solutions Engineer at Omron Industrial Automation sharpened that breadth into a specific and highly sought expertise: complex motion control applications in demanding production environments. Clients sought her out not just for technical answers, but for her ability to engage a problem from concept through commissioning and communicate clearly at every stage.
At Blue System Control, Dawn has returned to her integrator roots, and it shows. She brings the perspective of someone who has sat on every side of the automation table, as the engineer building the system, the application expert solving the customer's problem, and the motion specialist others call when conventional approaches fall short.
Systems Controls EngineerDawn Werner
Chris Linske
Controls Engineer
Chris Linske joins Blue System Control as a Controls Engineer, bringing a software engineering foundation that adds a distinct capability to BSC's technical bench. A University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee graduate in Computer Science and an honors college alumnus, Chris spent more than five years at Blue Yonder developing and maintaining enterprise supply chain software, working across legacy modernization, security-critical deployments, and real-time client issue resolution in production environments where failure had immediate operational consequences. That experience instilled a discipline around code quality, cross-functional collaboration, and systematic debugging that translates directly to the precision demands of controls work.
What Chris contributes at BSC is the perspective of an engineer who understands how software behaves at scale, under pressure, and in the hands of clients who cannot afford downtime. His background in REST APIs, microservice architecture, CI/CD pipelines, and multi-language development across Java, C, Python, and C++ gives BSC expanded capability at the intersection of traditional controls and the increasingly software-defined systems its clients deploy. He is drawn, by his own account, to problems that require genuine problem-solving rather than pattern-matching, which makes him a natural fit for the kind of work BSC takes on.
Andrew Hullin joined Blue System Control in 2024 as an Engineering Technician, and has quickly become integral to some of the firm's most technically diverse work. His day-to-day spans additive manufacturing and design, machinery construction, vision system development and validation, and direct customer support in the field, a range that reflects both BSC's cross-disciplinary approach and Andrew's own appetite for problems that don't have obvious solutions. What drives him is the opportunity that comes with working at the edge of what's been done before: the chance to keep learning by necessity.
That orientation didn't start at BSC. Andrew's personal projects reveal the same instincts: he has built multiple custom PCs and designed and constructed his own 3D printer from scratch, the kind of hands-on, figure-it-out engagement that translates directly to the work BSC takes on. Outside the shop, he pursues landscape and portrait photography with the same eye for precision and composition that shows up in his technical work.
Engineering Technician