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 leadership of teams ranging from 10 to 23 people, and plant management of a $65M operation with more than 120 employees.
The most recent chapter: Richard built the Root Cause Analyzer, an investigation tool built on AI, and refused to call it done until it survived the same discipline he'd apply to any new process. Challenge round after challenge round, new defects kept surfacing deep into testing: invented specifics, confident wrong conclusions, flattery where there should have been challenge. Each one got a control. That work is the basis of the AI Control Plan.
"It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory." (W. Edwards Deming)
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
What do the numbers say?
Two years 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 in January 2020 to $450,000 a month in gross profit by February 2021. The controller's numbers, not my estimates.
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What the tool is, and what it isn't
The tool is a decision support aid, not the investigator of record. It enforces the steps and structure an experienced quality engineer would insist on. The conclusions are only as good as the information you provide. A qualified person in your organization reviews and approves every output before use.