Education

Biography

The president of Assured Quality since 1993, C. Martin Hinckley, is an internationally recognized quality leader. In March of 2006 he received the Westgard Quality Award in Antwerp, Belgium for his contribution to Clinical Chemistry. He has provided training in quality for IBM, Texas Instruments, Bullen Ultrasonics, Applied Materials, General Motors, GE Aircraft Engines, Fairchild Semiconductor, and Caterpillar, among others. Dr. Hinckley has also made numerous presentations at a wide variety of conferences sponsored by organizations such as ASME, AT&T, SPIE, and SPE, and has been a popular guest lecturer at the University of New Mexico and Stanford University.

While most quality improvement efforts, like Six Sigma, require major investments and often deliver disappointing results, relatively modest efforts using Dr. Hinckley’s methods have reduced defect rates more than tenfold. These concepts were first successfully demonstrated at Sandia National Laboratories, where prototype assembly times were cut as much as 86 percent compared to existing products and traditional rework was virtually eliminated, demonstrating the effective integration of design, development and manufacturing. At Sandia, Dr. Hinckley was a manager and Distinguished Member of the Technical Staff, providing the corporate technical leadership for major national projects including the X-Ray Laser.

Dr. Hinckley is the author of the Productivity Press book, Make No Mistake, which presents a systematic method for reducing complexity, controlling mistakes, and controlling variation with settings. Technical papers have been published in Manufacturing Review, the Journal of Quality Technology, and Quality and Reliability Engineering. Martin’s received a Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1994. This research on the link between design concept and product quality involved the participation of major automotive manufacturers.