ONEIL Names Eli Ervin Employee Owner of the Quarter for Q4 2025

CEO Hernan Olivas presenting Eli Ervin with the Employee of the Quarter award. (Click to Enlarge)

For the fourth quarter of 2025, ONEIL proudly recognizes Eli Ervin as our Employee Owner of the Quarter.

Eli’s career with ONEIL started February 2015 in the Parts and Provisioning Support group, but in many ways, he has been part of the ONEIL family his entire life. As the son of Paul Ervin, who retired in 2018, Eli grew up hearing stories about the company and its people long before beginning his own career here.

Within weeks of joining the team, Eli demonstrated a keen ability to identify inefficiencies and design smarter, more sustainable solutions. By applying his programming expertise, he streamlined manual processes and enhanced team productivity through automation. He also played a key role in debugging and improving a suite of custom VB.Net and C# applications that automated critical tasks for the group.

Eli collaborated with operations leaders to develop a prototype tracking system that modeled how work packages moved through ONEIL’s various work zones. The success of this concept laid the groundwork for a more robust internal solution that significantly enhanced operational visibility, improved workflow management, and strengthened cross-functional coordination across the organization.

“Eli is one of those rare people who can both see the big picture and also is quite comfortable getting into the weeds technically. He’s always looking for ways to make us more efficient and cut manually intensive processes. He really cares about the company and those we serve. I look forward to his continued growth here at ONEIL.” ~ Jason Miller | IT Business Systems and Compliance Manager (Eli’s Manager)

From 2017 through 2025, Eli transitioned into increasingly impactful roles within the IT organization, where he played a pivotal part in modernizing and strengthening ONEIL’s internal systems. He contributed to the development of critical business applications supporting financial operations, reporting, and workflow management, while leading efforts to replace, retire, and streamline legacy custom and vendor platforms. These initiatives improved efficiency, scalability, and user experience across the organization. In Q4 2025, he achieved a significant milestone by completing the modernization of long-standing intranet applications and delivering enhanced reporting capabilities, which received overwhelmingly positive feedback. Eli continues to drive forward-looking initiatives that position ONEIL for sustained operational excellence.

Eli’s technical expertise, forward-thinking mindset, and commitment to continuous improvement exemplify what it means to be an employee owner at ONEIL.

Congratulations, Eli, on a well-deserved recognition.

Q&A with Eli Ervin

What does being named Employee Owner of the Quarter mean to you?
It brings a feeling of pride, accomplishment, and a desire to continue to go above and beyond. This award is recognition from my fellow Employee Owners of the efficiency and forward-thinking vision I’ve helped bring to our internal tooling during my time here.

You have been connected to ONEIL for most of your life. How has that influenced your career here?
Prior to working for ONEIL, what my dad did as a career was a bit of a “black box” to me. Even back when I was a parts provisioner, I started to connect the dots more and understand the big picture regarding what ONEIL does and some of the connections that could be made within the data thanks to our conversations. Having someone to bounce ideas off and get feedback from has helped hone my ability to design applications that better fit our internal workflows. I also saw how loyal ONEIL was to my dad over his tenure here, and it helped show me that ONEIL was a company I wanted to work for long-term.

What motivated you to focus on improving and modernizing internal systems?
Going back to the prototype workflow tracking system I built early on, I saw a need to help connect the data ONEIL works on day-to-day and attempt to bring more efficiency to our processes. Digitalizing workflows helps improve automation, identify bottlenecks, and provides more visibility to all stakeholders. As an ESOP company, improving our efficiency improves our bottom-line, which benefits all Employee Owners.

Of the many systems you have helped develop or improve, is there one that stands out most to you? Why?
The system and integrated reporting that we use to track the financial health of projects and provide rollups and high-level overviews for project managers, SBU managers, and c-suite executives stands out the most. This is because it allows ONEIL to shift resources around during the project lifecycle and help keep our projects profitable and running smoothly.

What excites you most about the future of ONEIL’s internal applications and technology roadmap?
ONEIL embracing the ever-growing “AI revolution” happening in the tech world is very exciting to me. A lot of the data involved in technical documentation development is highly structured data and thus is ripe for AI innovation to help bring even more insight, automation, and efficiency to our processes. Our experimental efforts around augmented and virtual reality are also very interesting to me, as I think AR/VR platforms are the long-term future of technical documentation consumption and computing in general.

What advice would you give to fellow employee owners who want to make a similar impact?
I would say that all Employee Owners should strive to ask questions in order to better understand the big picture, and try to get involved in as many aspects of what ONEIL does on a day-to-day basis as possible. The individuals who do the best here at ONEIL go above and beyond what their immediate job responsibilities are and attempt to learn more about all aspects of technical documentation development. As an ESOP company, anything you can do to help the company helps ALL of us over the long-term.