The problem
Infinitum's motors replace the heavy copper windings of a conventional electric machine with a printed-circuit-board stator — lighter, smaller, and quieter, but manufactured nothing like a traditional motor. That means the production process can't be inherited from the industry; large parts of it have to be invented and proven.
I lead manufacturing for that build — the team, the NPI program, and the process. The core of the work is developing and stabilizing new assembly and process steps: taking build methods that work at the bench and turning them into a repeatable, documented, inspectable flow that a team of operators can run with consistent results.
What I did
Team & program leadership
Built and led the manufacturing team for the line and owned the NPI program across engineering, quality, and supply — turning a bench-proven build into a staffed, documented operation, and coordinating the contract-manufacturing and supplier partners the ramp depends on.
Statistical process control
Put critical process steps under SPC — defining what to measure, building control charts and capability (Cp/Cpk) studies, and pairing each monitored characteristic with a clear reaction plan so the line catches drift before it turns into scrap, not after.
The same math is on this site as free calculators — Cp/Cpk, control limits, and Gage R&R — and the defect decision tree we work from is the PCB / SMT defect debugger.
An end-to-end MES, built and deployed in production
Designed, built, and deployed a full manufacturing execution system that now runs the factory day to day — live in production across two plants (US and Mexico) on one shared database. It covers the whole flow: production orders and line release, shop-floor execution at every station, serial-level genealogy and quality records, SPC with reaction plans, label printing, and controlled documents — fully bilingual (English/Spanish) so the same system serves both floors.
The MES captures measurements directly from test, inspection, and process equipment, tagging every reading with its part, station, and recipe for full traceability — and it integrates with the ERP so work orders, completions, and inventory stay in sync instead of living in spreadsheets. The factory reports its own state in real time.
Process development & bring-up
Defined and qualified assembly processes for the PCB-stator architecture — sequencing operations, specifying fixtures and tooling, and setting the process windows that keep critical steps in control.
Yield & root-cause
Ran structured root-cause analysis on assembly and electrical defects, using the data system to isolate contributing variables and drive corrective actions back into the process so the same failure wouldn't recur. First-pass yield improved on every line I've owned, and the method doesn't change: stratify the loss, isolate the variable, fix the process, then lock it with a control that still holds after the project closes.
Taking operations out, not adding them
The cheapest operation is the one that isn't there. Three steps came out of the motor build — an adhesive operation, a thermal dispense under the inductors, and an in-process electrical test — each removed only after the data showed the build didn't need it. Removing a step is harder than tuning one: it means carrying a quality argument to sign-off rather than adding another check to be safe.
The takeaway
A genuinely new product needs a genuinely new process — but the engineering discipline behind it doesn't change. The win was making an unfamiliar build method observable and controllable, so it could scale without depending on the person who first figured it out.