Chet Haibel
Chet Haibel has been in New Product Development all his professional life. His first 18 years were spent "learning by doing" as an R&D Engineer, Project Leader, and Program Manager on a wide variety of products at three different divisions of Hewlett-Packard Company, and at a start-up company.As Reliability Engineering Manager of Disk Drives at Hewlett-Packard, Chet was instrumental in surpassing the 10X improvement goal in disk reliability. When the challenge moved to accelerating product development to cut Break Even Time by 50% without any loss in quality and reliability, Chet learned what the irreducible few things were that make reliable products.Applying this background in project management and reliability to medical devices, Chet gained a real appreciation for the challenges of this highly regulated industry. He considers himself fortunate to have been selected to help develop Design Excellence, the J&J version of Design for Six Sigma.After fifteen years in the medical device field, working for IVAC, Johnson & Johnson, and Medtronic, Chet has been a full-time, independent consultant in Reliability, Risk Management, and Quality for three and a half years.Chet has Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering and Master of Engineering degrees, both from Cornell University. He is a senior member of the American Society for Quality and is certified by ASQ as a Reliability Engineer, Quality Engineer, Software Quality Engineer, Quality Auditor, Biomedical Auditor, and Manager of Quality / Organizational Excellence.