Richard Snyder
Founder, Fae Intelligence LLC (Oregon)
Roughly 30 years in quality engineering and operations, most of it hands-on in FDA-regulated medical-device manufacturing. Not just quality: Richard has been the manufacturing engineering manager, the operations manager, and the quality manager. Working across all three is the point.
Quality and continuous improvement leadership of a department of about 60 engineers and technicians with a $4M annual budget. Operations organizations of up to 200 people reporting up to me. Plant management of a $65M operation with more than 120 employees.
Today I run operations and fix quality systems for manufacturers that need senior help and cannot keep a senior manager on staff full time. Fractional when the work is ongoing, interim when a seat is empty. AI comes in where it earns its place, inside the operations and inside the QMS, and the AI Control Plan keeps it under control.
What has Richard run?
- Plant manager of a $65M operation with more than 120 employees
- Operations manager, with up to 200 people reporting up to me
- Senior manager of quality assurance and continuous improvement: about 60 engineers and technicians, two shifts, seven days a week, and a $4M annual budget
- Quality assurance manager in an FDA regulated, ISO 13485 certified company, and management representative for FDA inspections and ISO audits
- Manufacturing engineering manager
What do the numbers say?
Running a $65M contract manufacturing plant, on an automated line that had never hit its rated output:
- Equipment availability from 40% to 85%
- On-time delivery from 91% to 99.8%, carried by the throughput that freed
- A $100,000 monthly loss turned into $450,000 a month in gross profit. The controller's numbers, not my estimates.
What else has Richard moved?
- Nonconformance rate from 10% to 2.5%, measured per lot, working with Operations
- Total defect rates down 46%, by restructuring the cross functional quality review
- Labor efficiency up 27%, measured as output per labor hour
- Scrap from $1.00 to $0.35 per SKU in the first year, and tooling cost down $140K, by coaching team leads through Kata improvement cycles
- Operations employee satisfaction from 76% to 82% in the first full year
- More than 75 Kaizen events across manufacturing and business processes, and more than 15 product launches supported
Who is Richard, on paper?
- BS Mechanical Engineering, Oregon State University
- MBA, University of Oregon
- ASQ Certified Manager of Quality / Organizational Excellence (CMQ/OE), held 2011–2020. I let it lapse when my work moved into operations.
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