Eric Maass

Recently retired as Senior Director at Medtronic, Eric Maass helped lead and accelerate the DFSS / DRM program for Medtronic, and was recognized with Medtronic's Star of Excellence Award and as a Technical Fellow. Dr. Maass has more than forty years of experience, ranging from research and development through manufacturing, to director of operations for a $160 million business and director of design and systems engineering for Motorola's RF Products Division. Dr.Maass was a co-founder of the Six Sigma methods at Motorola, and was a key advocate for the focus on variance reduction; his article on a "Strategy to Reduce Variance" was published in 1987, the year that Motorola announced Six Sigma. He co-developed YSM(TM), a patented method for multiple response optimization that has resulted in over 60 first-pass successful new products. The teams he led twice set records for product development, first with a family of logic products and again when he led the HiPerComm operation to develop high data rate fiber optic and wireless Products. He was the Lead Master Black Belt for Design for Six Sigma at Motorola. He coauthored the Handbook of Fiber Optic Data Communication and a variety of chapters in books and articles ranging from concept selection to augmentation of design of experiments to multiple response optimization to advanced decision-making methods to DFSS for Software. Dr. Maass's other accomplishments include driving the turnaround of the Logic Division from "virtual chapter 11" to second-most profitable division (of 22 divisions) in two years, and he also won the contract for Freescale Semiconductor's largest customer, Qualcomm. Dr. Maass has a rather diverse educational background, with a B.A. in biological sciences, an M.S. in chemical and biomedical engineering, a Ph.D. in industrial and systems engineering, and decades of experience in electrical engineering.