About Terotech Knowledge

Meet the Creator

Nicole Harnden

Director of Operations · Six Sigma Black Belt · 25+ Years in Manufacturing

Nicole Harnden has spent over 25 years on the front lines of manufacturing and operations. As a certified Six Sigma Black Belt, she has led process improvement initiatives across multiple facilities and companies — always chasing the same goal: eliminate waste, reduce downtime, and keep machines running at peak performance.

Her career began at Amcor in 2002, where she spent over two decades rising through the ranks. She started as a Supervisor, learning the realities of the production floor and the relentless pressure of keeping lines running. She moved into the role of Quality Manager, where she developed a deep understanding of what happens when processes fail — and how a single machine breakdown can cascade into days of lost production. She was then promoted to Regional Quality Assurance Manager from 2012 to 2014, overseeing quality standards across multiple sites and seeing the same preventable failures repeat themselves at every facility she touched.

She stepped into the role of Plant Manager from 2014 to 2017, managing day-to-day operations and seeing firsthand how machine breakdowns ripple through an entire production line. That experience drove her to seek broader impact. At Amcor, she was promoted to Multi-Site Director, a role she held from 2017 to 2023. Overseeing multiple facilities gave her a clear view of the same costly pattern repeating everywhere: a machine would go down without warning — sometimes a minor fix, sometimes a catastrophic failure that halted production for days. The root cause was almost always the same: preventative maintenance that was generic, outdated, or simply not built for the specific machine it was supposed to protect. The result was expensive capital expenditures to replace equipment that could have been saved, and thousands of hours of lost production that could have been avoided entirely.

She took that knowledge to Priority Plastics Inc., where she served as Vice President of Manufacturing from 2023 to 2026. In that role, she oversaw manufacturing strategy across the organization and continued to see the same problem at every level — no matter how strong the team or how good the processes, preventable breakdowns kept costing money.

Now, as Director of Operations at Logoplaste since April 2026, Nicole continues to lead operations in the Washington DC-Baltimore area. But she decided it was time to stop waiting for someone else to solve the problem she had seen for over two decades. When artificial intelligence began to mature, she saw the opportunity she had been waiting for. What if AI could read the manual for every machine on the floor, understand the existing maintenance procedures, and generate truly individualized preventative maintenance plans? What if it could classify machines into a tier system and build the optimal schedule? What if it could identify the right part and guide the team through the repair — step by step?

She partnered with Miller Optimization and Compliance LLC to build the product to her exact specifications — translating 25 years of hard-won operational knowledge into an AI-driven system that knows your machines the way she knows them. Miller Optimization and Compliance LLC engineered the platform to Nicole's vision, merging her procedures, her standards, and her lessons learned with cutting-edge AI to create something that had never existed before: a maintenance program that actually knows your machines. That system is Terotech Knowledge.