Gary Hinkle is a Senior Consultant with DRM Associates, a consulting and training firm focusing on helping companies improve their new product development process. His experience includes 20+ years in a broad variety of management and staff assignments with small, medium, and large companies involved in the development and manufacturing of high-tech products. His primary mission as a consultant is to help product development companies achieve well-rounded, world-class excellence in their engineering operations. His core competencies include engineering functional management, leadership, project management, technical teambuilding, product development project planning, and interpersonal skills development. He has helped many businesses become more productive and collaborative. His design and management experience spans the electronics, mechanical and software engineering disciplines.
Gary led several high-profile projects including:
- Project manager and lead engineer for ScottCare medical ECG telemetry system.
- Managed a $30 million project to improve U.S. Army vehicle maintenance worldwide (CTS-ICE program)
- Directed research and development of mission-critical telecom products at Cassidian Communications. He directed the development of embedded systems used in the majority of Public Safety Answering Points for 9-1-1 call processing. There he led initiatives to improve manufacturing processes and improved response time for resolving escalated customer issues. Directed cost reduction program resulting in FY01 savings in excess of $1 million.
- Directed research and development for test and measurement product line with $170M annual revenue at Tektronix. He led the hardware development for the world’s best selling oscilloscope product line at Tektronix, the Tektronix TDS1000/2000, TPS2000, TDS3000B, DPO4000 and TDS5000 oscilloscopes.
- Led the successful turn-around of a consumer electronics company’s product development organization responsible for home entertainment and home control/automation products.
- Managed contracts for engineering services.
- Directed R&D for leading manufacturer of industrial radio control products, Remtron. There he was project manager for medical ECG telemetry system, a 900 MHz radio control system for material handling and construction, and a low-cost RF control system for concrete pumping applications.
- Assisted with business strategy development and creation of product and technology roadmaps in several organizations.
- Led teams responsible for product data standardization at FEI Company.
- Conducted workshops and trained personnel in a wide variety of areas including:
- Business skills training for 200+ technical employees at The Boeing Company.
- Project planning and leadership training for entire engineering staff at Yamaha Motor Corp. America.
- Leadership development and teambuilding for engineering and customer service teams at Sage Software.
- Leadership development for Escalation Engineering staff at Microsoft.
- Interpersonal skills development for technical staff at Texas Instruments.
- Leadership development for entire engineering staff at CyberOptics Semiconductor.
- Leadership development for engineering staff at Intel Corp.
- Leadership development for IT and engineering staff at Opsware, Inc.
- Leadership development for engineering management staff at LSI Corp.
- Leadership development for management team at DealerTrack, Inc.
- R&D performance measurement and leadership training for multi-national corporations with operations in China.
- Led critical design validation and cost reduction programs at Serveron Corp.
- He developed system architectures, designed products, and developed firmware for products such as telephony applications, RF control and telemetry products, a data acquisition subsystem, a SAE J1708 interface for military vehicles, portable military computer systems, and circuit boards for a military aircraft.
Gary is active in professional organizations such as IEEE and he currently, Gary serves as Chairman for the IEEE Oregon Section and on the Program Management Forum board of directors. He is a regular contributor of articles focused on R&D productivity and R&D leadership for IEEE-USA and the International Society for Optical Engineering (SPIE), and the bi-weekly e-zine, “Engineering Momentum.”. Gary has spoken at conferences and meetings on a number of topics related to engineering management and R&D productivity.