Chris (G.C.) Heyde was born in 1914 and after leaving school, worked as an office clerk, a factory production worker, an industrial chemist, a production worker and a research officer. He became "Chief of Management Services" for Unilever Australia and for 19 years led a team of management specialists working on "improvement". It was in the latter part of these 19 years, in 1965 that work on MODAPTS started formally in response to major difficulties with work study systems available at the time.

Chris Heyde founded AAPTSAR, the Australian Association for Predetermined Time Standards and Research and became chairman and research leader. In 1970 he resigned from his positon at Unilever to work full-time on completing the MODAPTS work study system. This work continued until 1983 when the second and enlarged edition of MODAPTS PLUS was published. In the process of investigating factors that influenced work, Chris wrote The Sensible Taskmaster, a book covering such topics as quality, task times, error rates, energy use, rest allowances and the use of yardsticks. He also wrote MODAPTS software, lectured and ran training courses around the world.

Apart from his work on MODAPTS, Chris was a leading Australian numismatist, president at various times of the Australian Numismatic Society and author of books on coins. He assembled the biggest collection of Australian coins and tokens in its day, notable for its comprehensiveness and diversity. He was also a large-scale gardener, planting over 2000 trees on his country property. He died in the year 2000.