Tonight I had the privilege of having dinner and catching up with a co-worker from Intel days: Rich Poliak. Rich spent numerous years at Intel in manufacturing and IT, among other roles, before switching careers to launch a restaurant. He now wants to share his quality expertise (see his site at http://solutionelements.com/).
I knew Rich mostly during my time running Intel’s Y2K program. While it ended going out with a wimper, Y2K could have gone out with a bang. From the beginning we knew our highly automated factories would not transition smoothly. We had equipment that even after the program rolled out was coming in with issues that would have stopped our factories.
As the technical assistant (TA) for Mike Splinter, then head of the manufacturing group at Intel and now CEO of Applied Materials, Rich was instrumental in making sure that the factories fixed all of their issues. After Y2K Rich moved on to data quality and other roles at Intel.
Having dinner with Rich makes me want to run a project with Rich and others who I’ve worked with throughout the years who I know can do an excellent job. Do you have such a team? I do and it’s not just Rich but a number of other people. Hope we have the opportunity to work in a project together again but, in the meantime, if you need help with quality efforts, let Rich know. He’ll do an outstanding job for you.