Qimpro Convention 2012 – Welcome Address

25^th September 2012, Mumbai

Welcome Address

This is Qimpro’s Silver Jubilee year. It is also the 24th cycle for Qimpro Convention. As you will note, it has been a long but satisfying journey for Qimpro. Amongst other satisfactions, a journey for building a recognition platform, Qimpro Convention, dedicated to excellence in team performance.

The Process

The focus of Qimpro Convention is teams working on improvement and innovation projects, in the manufacturing and service sectors. Teams consisting of middle-level executives. Middle-level executives being the “unsung” back bone of any organization. The underlying processes leading to Qimpro Convention are competitions for the QualTech Prize and BestPrax Prize. We, at Qimpro, appreciate the determined participation by teams from a wide cross-section of industries and geographies, aspiring to win the two trophies in each of the manufacturing and service sectors.

Our Examiners are our strength. These quality professionals are spread all over the country, and are committed to evaluating project submissions on a set of criteria defined by Qimpro. Each Examiner evaluates three to five submissions. Their meticulous work serves as a filter for Qimpro, to short-list the finalist teams. On behalf of Qimpro, I wish to record our appreciation of the professional outputs of Examiners, and their spirit of voluntary effort.

The panel of judges has their work cut out for assessing improvement and innovation project presentations made by the enthusiastic finalists. The judges will follow a structured evaluation process, recommended by Qimpro. Since most of them don’t know one another, we hope to deliver results with professional objectivity and integrity.

There is much debate about what is the difference between improvement and innovation? At Qimpro, we believe it is all about left and right brain thinking, respectively. Left brain logical incremental thinking; and right brain creative disruptive thinking. We also believe that in normal course, we tend to use only a small fraction of our thinking potential. But this does not apply to our teams! They have ignited many dormant brain cells to effective use. Results abound.

Improvement

As an observation, there appears an aggressive positive trend in the BFSI sector embracing left-brain quality improvement; followed by the ITES sector and healthcare. This is a finding of immense significance. It lends itself to formation of clusters for exchange of best practices.

I wish to add that the large manufacturing sector has always led absorption of quality improvement practices, country by country. It is now time that this large manufacturing sector in India takes ownership for quality improvement of vendors in the medium and small sectors. This will not only improve product quality but also reduce their Cost Of Poor Quality (COPQ) and improve customer satisfaction.

Innovation

Further, if India wishes to transform into a global power, it needs to unlock the right-brain entrepreneurial spirit of the business community – manufacturing and services. Our energy should be directed at right-brain solutions for our products, services, systems, processes, and practices.

Learning from other successful nations, we simply cannot afford to be content with doing things better, faster and cheaper – a pure left-brain approach. Continuing on this path, we will be doomed to remaining followers. On the other hand, to become global leaders, we must do things better, faster, cheaper, and different!

What should we be different about? Answer: Our managerial practices that are admired by our employees and customers! The problem is that we are seldom as aware about these best practices as is our competition about us!! So the first step is to harvest these best practices, through a structured process. Once harvested, one should turn paranoid, because competition will be benchmarking us, to nullify / commoditize our best practices. RIP.

Finally, I believe that the way to be continually different is to proactively graduate our best practices to next practices, through active, structured, right-brain creativity tools that facilitate innovation of our best practices. That will assure our best practices have wings.

In conclusion, my best wishes to all the teams competing for the left-brain QualTech Prize and right-brain BestPrax Prize.

Remember: India can make it; and make it better!

Good luck.

I am part of ASQ’s Influential Voices and this post is in response to ASQ’s Blog: A View from the Q.