When Angelica Gonzalez Gomez needed to train maintenance teams across multiple HEXPOL Compounding manufacturing sites on a new CMMS system, she stepped back and listened to her team.
"I realized that when maintenance managers were raising concerns about the adoption of the system, it was because I needed to understand them," says Gonzalez Gomez, now a Maintenance Systems Engineer at HEXPOL Compounding coordinating reliability efforts across 16 sites. "When you have people with 20 years of experience and a young lady comes in telling them to change how they work, you have to understand their fear about why."
Putting herself in others’ shoes—and building trust before driving change—has defined Gonzalez Gomez’s rise in maintenance leadership. In less than a decade, she has gone from maintenance technician to building the reliability infrastructure for a multi-site manufacturing operation, developing AI-powered troubleshooting tools, and automating systems that save countless hours of manual reporting.
But perhaps more impressive than her technical innovations is her talent for getting people on the same page. It’s a skill that's increasingly valuable as manufacturers struggle to standardize practices across distributed operations.
Saying “Yes”
Growing up in a small town in Aguascalientes, Mexico, Gonzalez Gomez was always the one raising her hand. She regarded every school contest and every opportunity to travel to another city as a gateway to something bigger.
"Even to travel to another city that was 40 minutes away, I saw a huge opportunity to start learning from others and getting other mentalities," she recalls. "I was always the one that would say 'me, me' to everything, no matter what."
That drive showed up in her grades: she maintained an average above 9.5 out of 10 throughout high school—high enough to earn a 100 % scholarship to the Universidad Politécnica de Aguascalientes for engineering.
But it was during her 15th birthday —a significant cultural milestone in Mexico traditionally celebrated with an elaborate quinceañera—that Gonzalez Gomez revealed just how differently she thought about her future. When her parents asked what she wanted, she didn't ask for a celebration.
She asked for a computer.
"Everyone wanted a party. To me, I was like, I don't want a party," she says. "Now I think about it, and I love the traditions, but at that time it was like, no, I want a computer."
Her practical instincts proved valuable during a research internship in Puerto Rico, where she worked on two projects: developing a commercial-scale oven for heat-treating materials for university use and finding ways to repurpose obsolete parts for training and industrial use.
But the technical work wasn't what changed her trajectory.
"When I went to Puerto Rico, I saw a breadth of opportunities. It gave me the confidence that there is a world out there,” she explained. “We are different because we grow in different contexts and cultures, but we are people. You can relate to them."
The genuine human connection would become the foundation of her approach to maintenance leadership.
From Technician to Scaling Systems
Just a few months after joining HEXPOL as a maintenance technician, Gonzalez Gomez was promoted to maintenance planner. Within a few years, she was training teams across multiple sites on CMMS implementation, serving as a maintenance coordinator.
"My positions have been created," she notes. "It's not that the position was there and I applied. They saw a need and gave me the opportunity."
In 2022, she completed her master's degree in data analytics and digital marketing while working full-time. Shortly after, she transitioned to working with John Sedgwick, who was taking over maintenance and engineering responsibilities and needed systems-level support.
She said, "Corporate was here in the USA, not in Mexico. I wanted to be part of the strategic side." That same year, Sedgwick offered her the opportunity to relocate to the United States, and she accepted.
Now, from her base in Cleveland, Ohio, Gonzalez Gomez coordinates reliability systems across HEXPOL's North American manufacturing footprint. She works every day to standardize practices, automate reporting, and build the digital infrastructure that modern maintenance depends on.
Building Tools That Think
When Gonzalez Gomez completed training in AI and Microsoft's environment, she saw an opportunity and built something.
"We have all this data from the CMMS, we have manuals, and we have the technology that is AI," she explains. "So, I started creating this agent that is an expert on our system."
The AI agent she developed functions as an on-demand troubleshooting assistant. Maintenance technicians can describe an issue like a ram not moving, and the agent, trained on equipment manuals, historical work orders, and rubber industry specifications, provides guidance on where to start.
"It will always prioritize safety," Gonzalez Gomez emphasizes. "It will tell them about lockout-tagout procedures. And if they don't know how to do something, it will tell them to get their supervisor. But it will give them, based on our history, possible causes. Maybe check the position sensors, maybe check this."
The agent can also pull up equipment drawings, help with root cause analysis, and even search the centralized inventory across all sites to locate parts or identify whether similar issues have occurred elsewhere. HEXPOL now leads AI implementation efforts internally, with Gonzalez Gomez’s agent serving as proof of concept for what's possible.
Beyond AI, she's automated the monthly reliability reports that maintenance managers previously assembled manually in PowerPoint, creating forms that populate and distribute data automatically. The time saved is significant. More importantly, the information is now centralized creating an institutional knowledge base that survives turnover.
The TPM Foundation
For all her enthusiasm about AI and automation, Gonzalez Gomez is adamant that Total Predictive Maintenance (TPM) remains the foundation of everything else.
"TPM gives you a structured approach to start implementing and standardizing things and having everyone on the same page," she says. "It's the basics of our strategy."
But rolling out TPM across multiple sites isn't about rigid compliance. "Standard doesn't mean rigid," Gonzalez Gomez explains. "Standard means having a common goal, not the same way to do it. Give teams the freedom to do it in their own ways. Just standardize the goal."
That philosophy extends to her advice for any organization considering TPM implementation: start with leadership alignment.
"Get buy-in from the executive team first," she recommends. "Develop your vision for the implementation in high level. Get the support from leadership above you. If you don't have that support, you will not get anything."
It's advice that reflects her own path; always building the case, always showing the value, always working within the constraints of reality rather than against them.
Her Take on Leadership
When asked about her approach to getting teams across sites aligned, Gonzalez Gomez returns to the same principle that guided her CMMS training years earlier: understand the individual situations.
"You need to communicate improvement mindset, not punishment," she says. "You need to show the benefits and work closely with people. Understand their fear about why they're pushing back."
She credits the leaders above her, first her previous manager, and now Sedgwick, with giving her the autonomy to try new things and the support when those experiments become initiatives.
For someone who traded a quinceañera for a computer at age 15, it's a fitting trajectory. That computer was never about the technology itself. It was about access to information, to opportunity, to a future she could build herself.
When she's not developing reliability systems or training teams, Gonzalez Gomez explores parks around Cleveland. Whenever she visits home she indulges in her mother's carne con chile —a spicy dish she refuses to replicate herself, because "the taste is not the same, even if I follow her recipe."
Angelica Gonzalez Gomez is a Maintenance Systems Engineer at HEXPOL, where she coordinates reliability efforts across 16 manufacturing sites in North America. She holds a degree in Mechatronics Engineering from Universidad Politécnica de Aguascalientes and a master's degree in Data Analytics and Digital Marketing. You can connect with Angelica on LinkedIn.
