Project Description

Willy Vandenbrande is the founder and President of QS Consult, a European consulting agency that assists organizations in various aspects of Quality Management. His client list includes a wide variety of manufacturing companies as well as service and non-profit organizations. He has delivered presentations at many international conferences and has written numerous articles on Quality Management.

Willy holds a Masters degree in Civil Engineering Metallurgy and a Masters Degree in Total Quality Management. He holds a Six Sigma Black Belt Certification from the American Society for Quality (ASQ). Willy is an ASQ Fellow and an Academician to the International Academy for Quality (IAQ) where he is the vice-chair of the Quality in Planet Earth Concerns Think Tank.

Mr. Vandenbrande is the recipient of the 2019 Jack E. Lancaster Medal (ASQ) for outstanding leadership in promoting quality worldwide.

Recent international presentations

2019 – “A second life for SPC: from quality to control” and “How companies can apply quality in tackling Planet Earth Concerns” – 63rd EOQ – Lisbon, Portugal, October 2019.

2019 – “Quality on Steroids: Leading Disruptive Change” – 73rd  WCQI, Fort Worth, TX, USA, May 2019

2018 – “Quality of the Future: Managing the Digital Disruption to Improve the Analog World” – 2nd Quality 4.0 Summit, Dallas, TX, USA, November 2018.

2018 – “Quality for a Sustainable Future” – 1st Excellence Summit Sweden, Gothenburg, Sweden, September 2018

 

Agile Quality: A Change in Mindset

The company of the future will have to satisfy customers and be profitable, innovative and sustainable. The difference with the company of today, is that these challenges will need to be tackled in an environment with rapidly changing requirements from all stakeholders. Digital technology will help us with this but it will also require a new way of working.

One new way of working is Agile that has become very popular especially in software development. But not all applications are successful and there are often conflicts with compliance requirements, leading to conflicts between development teams and the quality department. The key to handling this challenge is integration of knowledge and change in mindset.

In this presentation both aspects will be dealt with. Integration means working together in a parallel process, leading to a much faster and better development than the current serial processing can achieve. The change in mindset focusses on “agility” as a human characteristic beyond any system or method. Creating an agile mindset is the biggest challenge for the quality professional of the future.