Wali Alam

President, Quality Institute of America, Inc, Houston, TX, USA

WALl U. ALAM, CFPIM (past), CQE, CQA, Regd. Lead AuditorWali Alam has a BS and a MS in Engineering, and has been working continuously for more than four decades. He has run Manufacturing Engineering, Manufacturing, Supply Chain Management, and Quality Systems. For the last 28 years, Wali has been running the Quality Institute of America (QIA). QIA is headquartered in Houston and has a presence in three other locations on two continents.

QIA offers consulting, Training, Auditing, and Management System Software, and has helped more than 500 clients.

Wali takes a lot of interest in the ISO 9000 family of standards, and other related ones. He has been conducting certification audits, training, and consulting on different industry standards as well as the base ISO 9001. He was one of the first registered lead auditors in the USA.

Wali has been very active in professional societies, starting with AIIE, and the APICS where he had leadership roles from 1983 till 1989. He has had leadership roles in ASQ since 1992, and has been section Chair of Houston, as well as the Conference Chair.

He was the Conference Chair of the Quality Management Division. Some of his notable achievements at the Houston section was to start having large regional conferences and the Sponsorship function.

Wali has received several recognitions from ASQ, has written numerous articles, co-authored a book, and spoken at numerous events including international conferences. Wali has traveled extensively both in North America and overseas, with several international assignments.

He started the movement on Quality Management Systems in South Asia in 1994, and left a rich legacy of clients and systems. He worked for a large international Registrar that started the first civilian QMS standard: BS 5750 in 1983, which was upgraded to ISO 9001, 9002, 9003 in 1987.

Quality 4.0: Quality Then, Now, and the Future

Quality of product and service has been an intuitively crucial factor in the success of an organization. This has been true ever since man created tools from stones, and later for last 5 thousand years or more in small and large group of people producing product and services.

The methods of production and accompanying methods of Quality Planning and Control have seen only very gradual rates of improvement up until about 150 years ago.

Military enterprises and Royalty and large landowners provided resources for a majority of the production activities. Commercial activities were very limited.A century ago, the field of Quality and Quality Management experienced dramatic new technologies, which have been steadily improved, and then exponentially so over the last four decades. This affected not only the methods of production, but also the scale of production. This facilitated the expansion of production enterprises in a rapid transformation.

The overall evolution contained some troubling spots too, which the USA successfully overcame. These were of a management nature, not technological. The last 40 years has seen a host of new Quality related technologies. Notably: Six Sigma, MRP, Balanced Scorecard, Computerized workflows, Customer Satisfaction, Kano Model, Risk Management, LAB method, Data modeling and Analytics, Forecasting Critical Events—and a few others.Today, with Quality 4.0, we are at the threshold of a steeper upward curve of technology development.

This needs to be managed carefully by expanding how our QMS is designed and operated. This presentation will discuss historical evolutionary currents, synthesize them, and develop a method to enable companies to get a competitive edge for their QMS. This will mimic the Central Nervous System (CNS) of a human. “CNS for the QMS”This presentation will engage, intrigue, inspire Quality professionals with a very broad range of interests.