The Future of Quality
Concurrent Session
Chris Colaw
QA Engineering Senior Manager
Lockheed Martin Corporation
Fort Worth, Texas
Tracy Owens, CQE
Chair
ASQ Innovation Division
Dublin, Ohio
Level: Intermediate
The mindset of focus placed better quality training, corrective actions, and inspection devices is not sufficient for meeting the projected demands in the affordability based environment of the future, especially with such large competition in the marketplace. Such capabilities are becoming available across all industries and the traditional quality focused products and services are becoming rather commoditized and highly efficiently produced. It is interesting to wonder how being a better quality professional isn’t impacting the quality organization’s affordability. In fact, this abruptly highlights that a cost saving strategy based on corrective action, continuous improvement, and even learning curve isn’t an overall effective approach to mitigate cost. This reality makes the case for a focus based on disruption and innovation, and we as quality professionals have to ask ourselves “what do we do now?” To effectively disrupt this trend for our customers the quality organization will be required to place greater emphasis on intelligence and automation, data enabled connectivity across value streams, and improved mission success across transactions. Why? Because, besides the cost of raw material, these are the elements that most significantly impact quality labor cost, and therefore should be the major focus areas for your future quality strategy.
This session is sponsored by Lockheed Martin