Over a career that spans 40 years, Steve Gruler has struggled with the fact that quality seems to be a soft term. “Companies often say, ‘We’ve got great quality. We’ve got the best quality,’ and they’re looking at customer complaints and certification systems as their primary metrics,” he attests. “Then you look at their results: recalls, illnesses, and death due to poor product performance.” Clearly, they’re doing something wrong.
As the president and CEO of Global Quality Consulting, Gruler has helped companies around the world achieve real quality improvements by understanding and optimizing product performance data. In addition, as the global head of quality for two organizations (the first, an international consumer products company, and the second, a food company), he transformed their quality systems, moving them from cultures of “inspect and reject” to “predict and prevent.”