History:

During the beginning of the Dot Com Boom, Michael Spindelman, founder and CEO of Eventronics, was a systems integrator helping manufacturing companies improve productivity through emerging computer-aided engineering technologies. Merging desktop computing, high- end graphics, manufacturing machine tools, engineering design and wide area networking he helped shave dramatic amounts of time from the concept to product cycle-time. His marketplace was the Northeast Rust belt region of New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. Client after client would be purchased from some outside organization, have its technology stripped, and the facility shuttered. While other parts of the country were experiencing unprecedented growth, this region saw massive decline. The first question of Eventronics™ was "Why is this happening?"

A degreed Electrical Engineer, Spindelman applied the teachings of business he received while growing up in a family-owned retail business. After graduation he spent several years working for Hewlett-Packard as a field sales engineers when desktop computing was just emerging (pre-PC era). During a slight change in direction he was offered a position in test engineering at Motorola. At that time in the Quality arena, he was introduced to concepts that launched the Continuous Improvement Movement. Motorola led the way in that movement, which was initiated to reclaim a competitive advantage over the Japanese.

While in test engineering Spindelman developed an intuitive feel for systems theory. He designed complex production test systems from standardized components and emerging interconnections protocols. The most important lesson, however, came from the line workers. During a development project, he interviewed the production people who would be using the new system he was creating. From their input he applied ergonomic functionality to the system. When the system was brought on line, it dramatically reduced worker strain, reduced cycle-time, increased throughput, and significantly increased quality. The golden rule of Eventronics™ is "Base your concept on people who will use it!"

As the '90's were coming to a close, Spindelman began to formulate a model of organizational behavior. All modeling tools used up to that point were two-dimensional representations of a six-dimensional reality, these dimensions being X, Y, Z, Time, Frequency and Amplitude. The only environment where this wasn't universally true was in engineering design.

Organizational problems are difficult to solve in two dimensions. In order to introduce real world modeling, multi-dimensional tools would have to be employed. But the adoption, even in engineering environments, of real multi-dimensional systems was highly resisted. By analogy, even though in 1492 Columbus established that the world is round, over 500 years later almost everybody was (and still is) viewing the analytical world as being flat.
Six Sigma, the “Next Big Thing” in corporate productivity that began at Motorola in the late '80's, and Spindelman’s reference point for his own work, employed a toolset methodology that applied a grouping of 2D tools to get at the root cause of many problems in manufacturing. This limitation proved to be its downfall.

Spindelman began to observe areas where clients were gaining advances in productivity. Through this work he was able to formulate a model to explain why some companies failed to realize the benefits that competitors had so easily achieved. He also noticed that, as companies began to mature in their Six Sigma programs, they began to experience a drop-off in the rate of gains. Spindelman set out to explain and rectify this problem.