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STOIntelligence

About

Assurance built by someone who’s run the reviews.
Benchmarks built on ground truth, not guesswork.

The story

Tom Mankowski, Founder and Principal of STO Intelligence
Tom Mankowski · Founder & Principal

STO Intelligence is a founder-led assurance and analytics company. Founder Tom Mankowski has spent 25 years in shutdowns, turnarounds, and outages across refining, chemicals and petrochemicals, industrial gas, LNG, and power and utility.

Before his industrial career, Tom served seven years as a U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter pilot, reaching the rank of Captain, leading crews and missions where preparation and judgment decided the outcome. He started on the owner’s side in 2001 as a reliability engineer at Sunoco and worked up to group general manager for turnarounds and maintenance at a global chemical company, accountable for the process and the results, not just advising on them. That run also included nearly a decade of direct STO and capital-projects consulting. The work has been the same throughout: assessing readiness, interviewing teams, scoring schedules, and watching where the gap between the plan and the field actually opens up. He’s as comfortable with the planning and operations team in the field as he is advising leadership in the boardroom, having spent real time on both sides of the table.

The pattern is consistent: the information that would have changed the outcome was usually knowable in advance. It just wasn’t surfaced in time, or wasn’t measured against an honest standard. STOAR exists to close that gap, and the method and the standard hold the same whatever the unit or the industry.

STO Intelligence brings rigorous assessment and real analytics to turnaround teams, and does it as a guide who has sat in the same seat, not a checklist auditor.

What we hold to

01

The read is honest

An assurance review only helps if it tells the team where they actually are, not where it's comfortable to say they are. Serving a client and pleasing one aren't the same thing: we'd rather give you the read that makes the next event better than the one that's easy to hear in the room. The standard holds steady.

02

Best practice is built in

The standard you're measured against isn't one consultant's opinion. The management system and work process behind every review are built deliberately on public frameworks (DCMA, GAO, AACE, PMI), with a defined expectation for each gate. So a review scores you against where a well-run event should be at that stage, not a target that shifts to fit the answer.

03

Capability stays behind

The best outcome isn't a thicker report. It's a team that runs the next event better because of the last one. The method is open, a method you can see into and adopt, not a black box you rent. What stays behind is capability, not dependence.

Where it’s going

Today, assurance happens at fixed points: a review at a gate, a look after the event. The direction for STO Intelligence is a read you can get whenever you need one, not only when the calendar allows.

Three capabilities point that way: assurance on demand, forward-looking analytics that anticipate labor, duration, and cost, and an independent benchmark grounded in real events rather than rules of thumb.

That’s a build, not a brochure promise. It rests on a real data foundation and disciplined development, but it’s the direction every service here is pointed toward.

Read the full vision and how to contribute→

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